Ad Astra

Ad Astra (Latin for "To The Stars") is a thoughtful sci-fi film that owes much of its plot to Heart of Darkness. The wrinkle is that the Marlow of this story is the son of the Colonel Kurtz.

Brad Pitt plays an astronaut some years into the future. He is emotionally distant, his pulse rate never going higher than 57. Because of this his wife has left him, and he has no children. He is devoted to his work.

His father (Tommy Lee Jones) was a pioneering astronaut, who went farther than anyone else--to the orbit of Neptune. He was part of a project searching for intelligent life in the universe, but went missing several years in, presumed dead. Except that Pitt is informed that recent blasts of cosmic energy, which threaten life on Earth, may be caused by Jones, still alive up there by Neptune.

So Pitt goes after him, with a few adventures along the way, including pirates on the Moon and savage baboons in a space station. All through the film the notions of duty, fathers and sons, and are we alone echo through the film, with a fairly intelligent script by director James Gray and Ethan Gross.

Pitt is terrific here, subdued and contemplative. At times this does not make for thrilling viewing--I watched this on Blu-Ray, and could stop and start it at will. Watching in a theater may have been a more trying experience. Also, while Ad Astra is very good on much of the science, it takes incredible liberties elsewhere, particularly on distances. At one point Pitt, using a metal, door goes through a ring of Neptune in just a few minutes, when the thinnest ring of Neptune is about thirty miles wide. Also, how did Jones have that many years of food and oxygen? A line here or there would have helped.