In the Flesh: Ad Astra

Imagine if Terrence Malick had exactly the same level of ambition but no imagination whatsoever and you've got a pretty good idea what to expect from James Gray's Ad Astra, a movie about a grown-up boy learning that sometimes it's important to have exactly one feeling. Brad Pitt stars as Roy McBride, a misanthropic astronaut whose equally misanthropic father disappeared two decades ago on a deep space mission to discover intelligent life outside the solar system. McBride is considerate enough to tell us exactly how he thinks and feels at all times via voiceover but not considerate enough to keep his wife Eve (Liv Tyler) from leaving him. 

The voiceover is the film's most glaring flaw, standing in as it does for literally any and all characterization. Since Roy is the only character with whom we spend protracted time it's a bizarre choice to communicate his personality and thoughts solely through a handful of tenuously connected monologues about disliking people and then, once he's seen where that gets you, liking them. That some innocent people die at Roy's hands never to be brought up again in order for him to learn this lesson feels somewhat puzzling, but it fits with the film's overall laziness and disinterest in actual human connection. Why depict a whole relationship with conversations and body language when you can shoot Liv Tyler standing outside a restaurant and Brad Pitt sitting inside it and call it a day?

Ad Astra is also an inexcusably ugly movie from its sterile spaceship interiors to its blandly pacific CGI shots of Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune. It has one shot of note -- a brief sequence in which two astronauts open a derelict research ship's hatch and the dark aperture, reflected in their mirrored golden faceplates, dilates like a pair of pupils -- and two additional hours of flatly futuristic militarism that wouldn't look out of place in a Mass Effect video game. Why set a movie in deep space if your only aim is faithful reproductions of satellite photographs published in National Geographic? Why reach farther into the solar system than human beings have ever traveled if you have no interest in the cold, bright wonder of the stars and the dark sea that separates them? 

The movie's best material is its uncomfortable relationship with Christianity, which crops up in starkly earnest prayers offered by stellar naval personnel and in the person of Roy's father, Cliff, whose lonely madness at the end of the solar system is positioned as equivalent to God's abandonment of humankind. It doesn't amount to much but that the film is willing to touch something difficult is a point in its favor, even if the only Big Idea it posits as an alternative to the distant, heartless self-aggrandizement of the world Christian theology has given us is... being nice and valuing others. Ad Astra is a ten-gallon movie with an ounce of story sloshing around inside it.