I'm pretty thoroughly committed to the idea (you'd expect someone who writes science fiction to say so) that metaphor can be more eloquent than mimesis, fantastical extrapolation more penetrating than drab realist recitation. Still, there are times I wonder. So, to pick an example: let's say you want to tell a story about an emotionally-repressed adult man coming to terms with his distant and abscondant father. Is the best way to do that a story in which the father has removed himself to the planet Neptune from where he beams gigantic beams of mysterious destructive energy back at the Earth? Might that strategy run the risk of coming across as a bit ... silly?
So, yes, I'm honestly not sure what to make of Ad Astra. It's a very handsomely mounted piece of film-making, and contains a great many striking and even beautiful visual images. It's also daft raised to the power of daft. The increasingly muppet-faced Brad Pitt (‘Brad Astra’) falls off a Babel-tall tower and parachutes to Earth. It's unclear to me what this has to do with the rest of the movie. Brad had thought his father dead these thirty years, but now he discovers Dad is still alive, albeit alive, as Tim Curry might say .... in spa-a-a-ace! So Brad flies to the moon, aboard a conventional chemical rocket replete with various old-fashioned, Apollo-era stylings (‘Trad Astra’). He travels round to the dark-side of the moon in a swanky subterranean metro-tunnel (‘Mind-the-Gapstra’) but this tunnel, unaccountably, stops before it reaches the dark-side spaceport, which means Brad must essay a risky drive across the lunar surface for the last bit of his journey, which in turn tangles him in a vacuum-desert car-chase fleeing lunar pirates (‘Mad-Maxtra’). Surviving this, he rockets off towards Mars stopping on the way to battle some feral space-monkeys (I'm torn here between ‘Ad Astr-ape’ and ‘Ad Macaquestra’).
On Mars Brad beams messages to his father from a subterranean Martian recording studio (‘Dad Astra’—why did he have to go all the way to Mars to do this? One of the exposition side-characters earlier said something about this being the only such facility left after the ravages of the Death Beams From Neptune, which strains credulity somewhat. What, every single set-up capable of beaming a radio signal had been destroyed on Earth? Even though it's further from the Magic Beams of Destruct-o than Mars? How do all the pilots on the various space-ships communicate with base etc?). Anyway: after recording this message the powers that be relieve him of all duties (‘Ad Sacked-stra’), but he decides to go visit his Dad in person anyway, which he can only do by stowing away on a spaceship that's headed that way, afterwards inadvertently killing its three-person crew (‘Ad Slaughta’). On arriving at Neptune he discovers his father has gone insane, Kurtz-in-Heart-of-Darkness-style, and slaughtered his crew (‘Mad Astra’). This discovery grieves Brad P., although the whole movie is so dominated by his dolorous mope it's a little hard to tell (‘Sad Astra’). All in all it is, I am sorry to say, Bad Astra.
Rather than lean into the pulp daftness of the plotting, Gray forces his movie in quite the opposite direction, with many Terence Malick-esque ponderous and grave voice-overs, long lingering pans and zooms, lots of smell-the-fart acting from Pitt in close-up and much mood-work with stark colour palates: yellow, grey, green, red and finally a deep cyan blue. It is, as I say, very often beautiful to look at, and the special effects are impressive throughout. But though it aims visually for the grace and profundity of 2001: a Space Opera crossed with Apocalypse Now, it is consistently undercut by a plot that is more Saturn 3 crossed with It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Per ardua ad astra, sure; but this movie is perhaps too much arduousness and too little asterism. Plus nobody in the movie actually reaches any stars, and the obsession that drove Dad mad, to find alien life, is revealed to have been fruitless all along. Subtract Astra.
Maybe I'll watch it again. Maybe it's better second time round.
Egad astra!
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