Ad Astra review: Brad Pitt's star quality shines in an existential sci-fi spectacular

Dir: James Gray; Starring: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga, John Ortiz, Donnie Keshawarz. Cert 12A, 124 mins.

Without wanting to downplay the one-small-step-for-man moment, the myth of the American astronaut was made by the movies. It’s most thoroughly codified in Philip Kaufman’s rousing 1983 Project Mercury epic The Right Stuff – an adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s history of the US spaceflight programme, in which a band of square-jawed space cowboys ride out with grit and pluck towards the heavenly frontier.

Ad Astra, James Gray’s astonishing new science-fiction epic, takes its title from a Latin epigraph Kaufman’s heroes would have doubtless appreciated. Per aspera ad astra, it runs: through hardships to the stars.

Yet through an elegantly told, often staggeringly visualised classical adventure narrative, Gray’s film deconstructs the dogged ‘great man’ alpha-heroism glorified in Kaufman’s, as well as countless space blockbusters like it. Could that particular strain of masculinity be a horrible cosmic mistake? Has the right stuff been the wrong stuff all along?

The man with the answer – though he has to travel far to find it – is Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut who is overseeing the construction of an enormous radio mast on an acutely plausible near-future Earth. This sky-scraping antenna has been designed to communicate with as-yet-undiscovered alien civilisations – but in a vertiginously thrilling action sequence, it is hit by the latest in a series of mysterious radiation blasts, which the space travel agency SpaceCom believe are uncannily linked to Roy himself.

Classified data suggests that the source of the blast is the Lima Project, a mobile research station that vanished 16 years ago during its voyage to the far end of the solar system, where it too hoped to make contact with extraterrestrial life. The leader of its crew was Roy’s father Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a much-admired astronaut and distant, demanding father whose formidable shadow lingered long after he departed on his mission in Roy’s mid-teens.

SpaceCom’s plan is this: send Roy to their long-range communications base on Mars, where he can broadcast a personal message towards the Lima Project’s last known location, in the hope that McBride Sr – should he still be out there, and connected in some way to the blasts – will be moved to respond.

Ad Astra tells the story of Roy’s odyssey to Mars and beyond – a journey that in some ways traces a similar course to Martin Sheen’s trek upriver towards the mad king Brando in Apocalypse Now, against a backdrop as desolate and vast as Coppola’s was feverish and tangled.

It also serves as a dark inversion of Gray’s tremendous Amazonian epic The Lost City of Z, his 2016 film that charted Percy Fawcett’s lifelong search for a lost South American civilisation.

For Fawcett, a mission that began as a means of bringing honour to his lowly bloodline became a path towards spiritual transcendence. Here the perspectives are reversed: Roy is the child whose father slipped off into the infinite, and is left to weigh what it means to have been left behind.

There is an abundance of tension and spectacle here: a Mad Max-like buggy chase across the Moon’s lawless mineral fields; a heart-in-mouth mayday rescue that recalls Danny Boyle’s Sunshine in all the best ways. But having tried all his life to mirror his father’s gruffly professional fixity of purpose, despite it leading to the breakdown of his marriage to Liv Tyler’s Eve, Roy grows increasingly uneasy at the thought of what kind of reckoning awaits him at the end of his trip.

In other words, the journey is his and his alone to make – and the terrifically rich supporting cast (Donald Sutherland as a wolfish space veteran, Ruth Negga as a troubled Mars native) are sparingly, even minimally used.

Emotionally, the film operates in a classic Gray area, with barely perceptible eddies that build to a mighty existential wrench. All of which, it should be said, rests on Pitt’s shoulders – which feel like very different shoulders, somehow, to the ones that slouched so appealingly through Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. His performance here is as grippingly inward and tamped down as his work for Tarantino was witty and expansive – it’s true movie stardom, and it fills a star-system-sized canvas.

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