AD ASTRA : Tuesday 24th September 2019.

'AD ASTRA' is an M-Rated American Sci-Fi adventure offering that has so far received universal acclaim following its World Premier screening at the Venice International Film Festival on the 29th August, and which I saw at my local independent movie theatre earlier this week. Directed, Written and Co-Produced by James Gray whose previous film making credits include his 1994 debut 'Little Odessa' and then 'The Yards', 'We Own the Night', 'Two Lovers', 'The Immigrant' and 'The Lost City of Z' most recently, the meaning of the title when interpreted from its Latin phrase means 'to the stars'. To that end, Gray described his desire for the film to be 'the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie', and whether or not he has succeeded in that aim, only you can decide. The movie cost in the region of US$100M to make and has so far grossed US$51M since its worldwide release last week.

Set sometime in the not too distant future, Earth’s solar system is struck by random yet repeated mysterious power surges, potentially threatening all of human life. After surviving an incident caused by once such surge, which sees Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), plummet uncontrollably from miles above the Earth's surface, the son of famed astronaut Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), is advised by U.S. Space Command that the surges have been traced to the 'Lima Project'. The Project was launched to search the far reaches of our Solar System for intelligent life forms, under Clifford's leadership – from whom nothing has been heard of for sixteen years since reaching Neptune.

Informed that Clifford may still be alive, Roy accepts a mission to travel to Mars to try and establish communication with him, joined by his father’s old associate Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland). Roy McBride and Pruitt board a commercial flight bound for the Moon, and upon arrival are escorted by US military personnel to the Space Command base. 

En route in three lunar rovers, accompanied by security officers for their safe passage to another remote base on the dark side of the Moon, they are ambushed by scavenging pirates, who kill most of the group, except for McBride and Pruitt. However, upon reaching the base, a dying Pruitt is placed into intensive care, but not before handing over a Top Secret and highly classified memory stick to McBride which will shed further light on his mission. McBride now has to go it alone onto Mars.

He transfers to the ship 'Cepheus' on a highly confidential nineteen day flight to Mars. En route, the ship receives a May Day signal from a Norwegian biomedical research space station obviously in distress. Despite protests from McBride to maintain their course for Mars, the captain overrules McBride and goes to the aid of the alleged stricken vessel. Initially it seems abandoned as no one is responding to the radio communications, but a rogue baboon test subject has escaped, smashing through the captain's helmet visor and chewing off his hand down to a bloody stump before McBride is able to neutralise it. A second baboon attacks, but Roy locks the door frantically behind him and depressurises the chamber, killing it instantly. He attempts to save the captain and tapes up his badly damaged helmet before carrying him back to the Cepheus but he is declared dead on arrival. A brief service is held where the dead captain's body is ejected into space. The Cepheus lands on Mars just as another surge strikes, forcing manual intervention. The interim captain is overcome by nerves and is unable to fly or take commands, so leaving McBride to land the ship.

McBride is escorted to the underground Space Command base on Mars which is secure from the impacts of the power surges where he meets facility Director Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga). There he is tasked with recording voice messages read from a pre-written script to send to the Lima Project, in the hope of connecting with Clifford, and upon hearing his sons voice will trigger a response. After several seemingly failed attempts, McBride goes off-script during a recording session with an emotional appeal to his father. He is almost instantly removed from the mission, and is led to assume that a response had been forthcoming, but his personal connection now presents a risk to himself and the overall success of the mission.

Whilst being temporarily held in a 'comfort room' awaiting his transportation back to the Moon and then home to Earth, he is visited by Lantos, who advises him that she was born on Mars, has been to Earth only once in her life as a young child, and is the daughter of crew-members aboard the Lima Project. She hands McBride classified footage showing that Clifford's crew mutinied by attempting to return to Earth, resulting in him turning off their life-support systems, and that her parents were among the crew killed. She tells McBride that the crew that brought him to Mars are leaving to destroy the Lima Project base with a nuclear device on board their ship.

The two decide between them that McBride should confront his father himself, and so Lantos sneaks McBride to an underground lake beneath the rocket launch site to give him access to the ship, although the clock is ticking on the countdown. McBride climbs aboard as the rocket takes off, and is discovered by a surprised and startled crew soon afterwards. The crew are instructed to dispense with McBride despite his best attempts to forewarn them all that he is non-hostile. A fight breaks out, and the crew of three all die, leaving McBride to his own devices in complete solitude for the long journey onto Neptune - some two billion miles away. 

The isolation and stress of the mission without any mental or physical stimulation takes its toll as McBride has memories of his relationships with his father and his estranged wife, Eve (Liv Tyler). After several weeks he arrives at the Lima Project. While approaching the Lima Project ship in a small module, another surge damages the module making it impossible to dock securely, forcing McBride to enter the ship via a space-walk. Finding the ship abandoned and its dead crew floating in zero gravity, he lays down the nuclear payload. His father is looking down on him from above as the ship's only survivor. Clifford explains that the surges originate from the ship's malfunctioning anti-matter power source, damaged during a mutiny. Clifford has continued to work alone on the project throughout all the passing years, refusing to lose faith in the possibility of discovering non-human intelligent life.

McBride tries to convince his father to return home with him to Earth, but Clifford dismisses the notion saying that he is already at home, and has been for the past twenty years, and that his relationship with his young son and wife were only ever going to be temporary. Despite his father's protests, McBride arms the nuclear payload with a three hour detonation time, and prepares to return to his ship with Clifford. Once outside the Lima Project ship Clifford uses his spacesuit thrusters to launch himself into deep space, unwilling to return to Earth. Still tethered onto his son, the pair struggle, with Clifford pleading to his son to let him go. Reluctantly, McBride releases his father who drifts off into deep space.

McBride is able to propel himself back onto his own ship, using a dismantled piece of the Lima Project ship's hull the size of a door to shield himself through Neptune's rocky ring. Without enough fuel to return, he uses the shockwave from the nuclear explosion to propel the ship home. Before the Lima Project ship was destroyed McBride downloaded as much data as he could from his fathers findings from all those years of space travel. The data retrieved suggests that humans are the only intelligent life in the universe, inspiring McBride to reconnect with those closest to him, and he returns to Earth with a whole new found positive outlook on life.

I have to say that I was somewhat underwhelmed by 'Ad Astra'. Sure Brad Pitt gives another great performance as the stoic, completely focused, deeply committed, utterly dependable and infinitely reliable astronaut treading in his fathers footsteps, and proving himself worthy to his peers, the US Government, the world ultimately and to his own Dad to be called Clifford McBride's son. At its core, this is a film about the impacts of an absentee father, and the lengths one man must go to in order to reconcile that fact and lay that ghost of the past finally to rest. Visually, the film looks great too from the opening sequence, to the Moon Space Command Base, the rover chase scene, and the passing of McBride's ship as it cruises past Saturn, Jupiter and finally reaches Neptune. But for all that visual splendour, it's nothing more than we have come to expect in this day and age of cutting edge technologically advanced CGI that we have seen before in the likes of 'Interstellar', 'Gravity', 'First Man', 'The Martian' and even '2001 : A Space Odyssey'. In the final analysis its a film about a man with daddy issues who has lost his way in the world and who catches a ride from Earth, to the Moon, to Mars and onto Neptune and back again to prove that humans are the only intelligent life form in the infinite universe and finally to say farewell to his old man, interspersed with a few action set pieces to maintain the interest. And there you have it! Also starring LisaGay Hamilton and John Ortiz.

'Ad Astra' merits three claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard from a possible five.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-