Ad Astra review: Brad Pitt delivers finest performance in moving sci-fi melodrama

What starts off stubbornly slow becomes mesmerising as you get used to its rhythm

Dir: James Gray; Starring: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, Ruth Negga. Cert tbc, 124 mins.

James Gray’s Ad Astra plays like a sombre, space set version of Apocalypse Now. The film is a brooding, atmospheric affair that features one of Brad Pitt’s finest and most restrained performances. He plays Roy McBride, the Captain Willard-like astronaut on a secret mission to stop a series of catastrophic power surges wreaking havoc on planet earth.

The surges are linked to the Lima Project, an ill-fated expedition commanded by McBride’s father, the revered astronaut Dr Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). Sixteen years later, neither Roy’s father nor any of his crew have returned.

McBride is heard in voice-over, describing his voyage in a terse, matter of fact fashion which can’t help but evoke memories of Captain Kirk’s log in Star Trek. The difference is that he is on a solo mission. The further he ventures across the galaxy, the closer (inevitably) he comes to the heart of darkness. He is destined for a reunion with his long lost father but doesn’t know what kind of man his father has become.

As played by Pitt, McBride is an aloof and inscrutable figure. He struggles to show emotion or form friendships. Liv Tyler is seen fleetingly in oblique flashbacks as his ex-partner. It’s a testament to Pitt’s screen craft and charisma that he makes such an emotionally distant character so sympathetic and intriguing. Audiences will share his suspicion about everybody he encounters, whether the superficially genial old-timer, Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), one of his father’s oldest friends, or the close-cropped, Sigourney Weaver-like space officer played by Ruth Negga, who has as vexed a family connection to the Lima Project as McBride himself.

If you are prone to vertigo, Ad Astra will make you very queasy. Early on, a character loses his footing and falls thousands of feet. Watching the film, you feel you are taking the plunge with him.

Astronauts’ physical and mental capacity for their job are continually tested. McBride always passes. He is calm, steady, sleeps well and never has bad dreams, even when confronted with events that would drive less placid types to the verge of insanity. His mission will eventually take him to the further edges of the solar system but he has to stop off on the moon first. To maintain secrecy, he travels there on a commercial flight.

Gray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ethan Gross, has a barbed and satirical view of what a human outpost on the moon might look like. It’s a tourist trap. Lunar visitors can take selfies and buy cheap merchandise. There is even a branch of DHL to deliver parcels. The place is strangely tatty, a bit like a modern day airport or city centre gone to seed. The moon has attracted its share of outlaws and vagrants. Gray includes one scene in which space buggies are chased and attacked by some desperadoes. We may be in outer space but the scene is choreographed like a stagecoach chase in a John Ford movie.

Ad Astra also has clear overlaps with its director’s previous feature, The Lost City of Z, in which a British explorer is looking for a lost civilisation in the Amazon jungle, but really trying to exorcise his own demons by doing so.

Early on, the pacing is stubbornly slow but once you become used to its rhythm, this is mesmerising fare. Max Richter’s minimalist score has a hypnotic effect. The music and the sound editing are interwoven in seamless fashion. The film is shot in awe-inspiring fashion by Hoyte van Hoytema, also the cinematographer on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar and Dunkirk. Intermittently the special effects are as spectacular as you might expect. We have the familiar scenes of astronauts clinging on to each other in outer space, conscious that if one lets go, the other will float off into oblivion. There are eye-popping explosions and the usual eerie images of earth seen from space.

Occasionally, in its lesser moments, the film is like a more earnest version of one of those B-movies in which the harassed and heroic humans fight to save the world. Such lines as “ultimate catastrophe is a very real possibility” sound a little corny.

Like Marlon Brando’s Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, Tommy Lee Jones’ McBride senior refuses to accept the constraints his commanding officers have tried to put on him. “I am free of your moral boundaries,” he declares belligerently at one stage. It becomes apparent, though, that this is as much an Oedipal story as it is a piece of dystopian science fiction. Director Gray’s inspiration is as much the mystical Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, as it is Kubrick or Coppola, Gravity or Interstellar. The real drama here is not whether or not apocalypse can be avoided but whether Brad Pitt’s character can reconcile himself with his father and overcome his own extreme emotional repression. In other words, in spite of all the jargon and the hardware, this is an intimate family melodrama at heart. Thanks to Pitt’s performance and Gray’s delicate direction, it turns into a very moving one.