Despite the many rave reviews it received, Tushna Commissariat remains unconvinced by Ad Astra, the latest blockbuster film set in space
Poignant, haunting, deep, poetic, existential, intimate – I have read a combination of some or all of those words in a number of reviews, fawning over the latest blockbuster science-fiction film, Ad Astra. Featuring seasoned Hollywood star Brad Pitt as an astronaut, the film tells the tale of his epic quest across the solar system, to save our planet from a deadly physical force, while also trying to solve the mystery surrounding his long-lost father. But despite being the prime audience for such a film, I sadly found it lacking in almost every sense.
From towering space platforms (“antennae”) that extend into the outer atmosphere of Earth, to a Moon-buggy chase on the lunar surface, all wrapped up in a slightly ominous space-thriller veneer, the film trailer promised everything and more. But as the first 20 minutes or so of Ad Astra played out, I was filled with an ever-growing sense of dread, that this was not the film to follow in the footsteps of recent fantastic offerings such as The Martian, Interstellar, Arrival and First Man. To properly explain the issues I had with the film, I must reveal most of the plot, so if you haven’t already watched it, major spoilers ahead.
Set simply in the “near future”, cool, calm and always-composed Major Roy McBride (Pitt) is an astronaut, and son of renowned astronaut Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), leader of the “Lima Project”. Launched some 26 years prior, the mission’s aim was to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, and was deployed to orbit around Neptune. Unfortunately, all contact with the mission was lost 16 years ago. In the present, McBride junior works on one of the lofty antennae many dizzying miles above the planet. Within the first few minutes of the film, an unexplained, immense “energy surge” knocks Roy and others off the tower. An injured Roy wakes in hospital to discover that these deadly surges have swept across the planet, somehow knocking planes out of the sky and killing thousands.
Voyager 2 spacecraft goes interstellar as it leaves the solar bubble
Our hero is invited to a top-secret meeting where it is revealed that his father may still be alive and somehow responsible for said surges, which are due to “cosmic ray bursts” via “antimatter”. Roy’s mission, should he choose to accept it, is to travel to a military base on Mars to try and establish contact with his father.
Roy must take a commercial flight to the Moon, and then travel onwards to Mars via a ship, Cepheus, located at a base on the far side of the Moon, across a war zone, complete with gun-toting space pirates. The journey to the Red Planet itself is not without drama, thanks to an absurd encounter with an abandoned biomedical research vessel overrun with angry, man-eating primates.
Once on Mars, Roy reads out a prepared message for his father. While his first stoic message, penned by top brass at the US Space Command goes unanswered, Roy suddenly goes off-script and makes an emotional appeal to his father – and seemingly gets a response. Unfortunately for Roy, his few moments of emotional exposition see him banned from the rest of the mission.
At this point, Roy is shown some classified footage, which reveals that Clifford’s crew, keen to return to Earth, staged a mutiny, causing him to turn off their life-support systems and kill them. Roy also finds out that the Cepheus crew has now been tasked with travelling to Pluto to destroy whatever remains of the Lima Project station with a nuclear payload (because you can blow up anything, including antimatter). Deciding that this burden must be his own, Roy reaches the ship just as it is about to take off, scales the outside as it fires up, opens a hatch and climbs into this now-aloft rocket – easy. A fight ensues and Roy is the sole survivor. He then makes the decision to single-handedly fly the ship to Neptune.
Once at Neptune, Roy parks Cepheus, hops into a shuttle and zips through Neptune’s rings to get to the Lima space station. Once inside, Roy plants the nuclear bomb before finally meeting his lonesome father, who explains that the surges are a result of the station’s malfunctioning antimatter power source.
It’s at this point that one of the film’s more meaningful scenes plays out, as Roy attempts to reconnect with Clifford, who is shown to be colder and more disassociated than ever, following his long isolation. Roy tries to convince father dearest that they must destroy the station and return to Earth. Initially successful, the tethered pair leave the space station, only for them to have a rather awkward, slow-motion tussle in space. A reluctant Roy unclips his father at his request, and watches him float away. He then uses a piece from the station as a shield and boogie-board, and pretty much surfs his way back up through Neptune’s rings, using his spacesuit’s thrusters to jettison himself back to his ship (which hasn’t floated away). Without enough fuel to return to Earth, he relies on the “shock wave” from the nuclear bomb, which destroys the station (antimatter and all), to make it all the way back to Earth. Roy has managed to snag all of the Project Lima data, which supposedly shows that we are alone in the universe (“We’re all that we’ve got,” he dreamily muses), inspiring him to reconnect with his fellow humans and his estranged wife. Phew.
As the beginning of the film revealed, Project Lima was situated by Neptune to get beyond the Sun’s heliosphere, which apparently inhibits our ability to detect alien life. In reality, the heliosphere extends far beyond Pluto, before the effects of solar wind are no longer felt. More importantly, our techniques for detecting far-flung exoplanets, and any possible signatures of life on them, do not involve visually imaging them – instead, we look for markers such as wobble in a parent star to detect a planet. We also look for certain biomarkers in a planet’s spectra for signs of life. The Lima Project just doesn’t make sense right from the start, so its eventual “failure” does not have the impact it should.
A billion pixels, a billion stars
Another major scientific issue for me is the travel to Neptune. First, the ship Cepheus is mainly used to travel from the Moon to Mars, but is magically capable of making the much more distant journey to Neptune – and back. But the main issue is that of distance. The film makes a point of mentioning that it takes Roy 19 days to travel from the Moon to Mars, but only 79 days from Mars to Neptune. Even assuming that in this near future we have managed to build “antimatter engines” (a very far-off scientific feat), if it takes Roy 19 days to travel the 54.6 million kilometres from Earth to Mars, it ought to take him 1531 days (about four years) to travel the 4.4 billion kilometres that lie between Mars and Neptune. But somehow that return journey takes him a mere five and half months.
I could have forgiven all of these massive blunders, though, if the heart of the story – the fractured relationship between a father and son – was properly fleshed out. “I do what I do because of my dad,” says Roy at one point, but his words seem hollow. In the end, I think Ad Astra’s problems lie in the fact that director, producer and writer James Gray does not like the idea of intelligent aliens and meeting them someday, as he revealed in an interview with Digital Spy. His message is that humans only have one another to fall back on – but his science-fearing cosmic quest was unnecessary to put forth that simple idea.
Despite its many faults, Ad Astra does have some positives, mainly in the fantastic cinematography and special effects. The feel of the film is simultaneously futuristic and bleak, a perfect setting for a dystopia. The various locations of the Moon, Mars and Neptune all look stunning, especially as the film is shot in 35 mm, making it perfect for the big screen. Go watch Ad Astra if you fancy two hours and 20 minutes of a beautifully shot but confusing perfume commercial – after all, it’s in space, where no-one can hear you scream.
- Directed co-produced and written by James Gray and Ethan Gross 2019 20th Century Fox 124 minutes
