James Gray (2019)
Ad Astra is set in ‘the near future’. It’s a time ‘of hope and conflict’. Humanity is on a quest for signs of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe as a means to salvation. So what else is new? Not Max Richter’s portentous, vaguely sacred score. Not the occasional, admittedly expressive images of astronaut figures tiny and alone in the dark immensity of the heavens. And yet James Gray’s latest venture into genre film-making – this sci-fi drama follows his earnest reworking of the terrestrial exploration adventure movie in The Lost City of Z (2016) – is a curious piece of work. It really is a space oddity.
Gray sets out clearly and economically the converging personal and planetary crises that drive his story, co-written with Ethan Gross. Astronaut Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) can’t connect with people, his wife Eve (Liv Tyler) included. She walks out without their exchanging a word. A series of unexplained power surges throughout the solar system is threatening life on Earth. One of these surges kills Roy’s colleague while they’re doing mechanical work on the outside of an international space antenna and Roy only just survives. He freefalls a long way, all the way to terra firma, his parachute opening in the nick of time. US Space Command then summons Roy to inform him that the source of the power surges has been located, in the region of Neptune, and why he might be the man to solve the problem.
Neptune is where the first manned expedition to find intelligent life in the solar system, known as the Lima Project, went missing several years previously. Lima’s commanding officer, seen on video record of the expedition, was the celebrated spaceman H Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s father. Space Command top brass believes that McBride senior is still alive and Roy accepts a mission to travel to Mars, establish communication with his father from there, and dissuade him from continuing the potentially cataclysmic power surges he seems to be generating. From the moment you first see Tommy Lee Jones’s rough-hewn face on a screen within the screen, and hear his invincibly witty voice, you want more of him – and for Jones and Brad Pitt to get a scene or two together. It’s quite a trip for Pitt before they do, and not just in miles.
Accompanied by his father’s former colleague Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), Roy takes a commercial flight to the moon, where the arrivals lounge doesn’t look so different from an airport one. The false sense of normality is short-lived. The group Roy and Pruitt are part of is ambushed by pirates who kill everyone except them. Pruitt, in a bad way, is taken to intensive care at the Space Com lunar base and that’s the last we see of him. Roy transfers to a Mars-bound craft, the Cepheus, which stops to investigate a distress signal received from a biological research space station. Roy and the Cepheus captain look round the station, abandoned except for a baboon that Roy soon finds dining on the captain’s body. Roy wins an extended set-to with the creature before returning to the Cepheus. A power surge hits the craft just as it prepares to land on Mars; with the new captain too frightened to cope, Roy takes over the controls and completes the landing. At the Martian Space Com base, he meets facility director Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga) and records voice messages to send to the Lima Project.
Brad Pitt gives a facially magnetic and sensitive performance. That it’s also a vocally monotonous one is hardly his fault: Roy’s glum voiceover, of which there’s plenty, is designed to tell us how shut off he is from his feelings. The upside of his blocked emotions is a steady nerve (reflected in an enviably low heart rate) and rational clarity that serve Roy well in the psychological evaluations he repeatedly undergoes, and passes, at different stages of his journey. Recording a message intended for his father changes all that. Roy goes off-script, sheds a tear and fails the evaluation that follows. He’s informed that he’ll play no further part in the project: his personal connection with Clifford places Roy and the mission at risk. This only increases his determination to pursue it – so does what he learns from Helen Lantos.
Born on Mars, Helen was the child of Lima Project crew members. The classified footage she shows Roy reveals that the crew mutinied (out of a kind of extreme homesickness, as I understood it); Clifford, hellbent on continuing the Project’s work, turned off his crew’s life-support systems and they died. Helen also tells Roy that a craft will shortly be leaving Mars to destroy the Lima Project station with nuclear explosives. With her help, Roy sneaks on board the craft just before take-off. Space Command instructs the crew to neutralise Roy. In the struggle that follows, he kills them all and continues on his way to Neptune. Left alone with his thoughts, he has plenty of time to mull over his failed marriage – and, even more, his father issues.
At this stage, Ad Astra also is well on its way – to defying expectations. It’s not the only recent high-profile science fiction movie to give personal relationships and tragedies back home their due: the Sandra Bullock character’s bereavement and isolation in space worked in synergy in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013). A difference between that film and James Gray’s, however, is that an appetite for human connection seemed to fuel Bullock’s resourceful fight to survive and, against all odds, return to Earth. Brad Pitt’s motivation for battling his way to Neptune has a somewhat different human dimension. Ryan Gilbey puts it amusingly well in his New Statesman review: ‘Ad Astra is only really interested in reaching the planet Closure’. Yet Gray’s thesis also seems – in the context of sci-fi cinema – more thoroughly regressive than Gilbey suggests.
After spacewalking his way into the Lima Project station, Roy, once he’s planted the nuclear payload, wanders around the place for some time before encountering Clifford, the sole survivor there. In the voice message he recorded on Mars, Roy recalled his father’s love of old movie musicals. In the space station, he comes upon a screen playing the ‘I Got a Girl in Kalamazoo’ number in Orchestra Wives (1942). (It calls to mind the Hello, Dolly! (‘Put on Your Sunday Clothes’) interlude in WALL-E.) Roy also notices a glass-framed copy of a National Geographic cover asking the question ‘Is There Anybody Out There?’ The answer ‘YES YES YES’ is scrawled across the glass in big black letters that look a bit mad. And that’s pretty well how James Gray presents H Clifford McBride, a man so intent on continuing the search for non-human life that he ended the lives of his dissenting crew.
When Roy eventually tracks his father down, Tommy Lee Jones doesn’t disappoint. He has a look of the Ancient of Days; Clifford, in response to Roy’s insisting it’s time to go home, protests that he has ‘infinite work to do’. Whether he has delusions of godhead or just a lust for alien life, he’s the incarnation of a formidable father figure it would be easy to have a hang-up about. Even though James Gray doesn’t describe Roy’s unresolved feelings about Clifford in any detail, Ryan Gilbey rightly implies that, by now, they’ve taken emotional centre stage. When Clifford explains the surges are coming from the space station’s damaged anti-matter power source, it no longer seems to matter much. Even when the station finally explodes, you don’t experience this as good news for the solar system. More important is that the shock waves generated by the explosion help propel Roy, who’s short of fuel, safely homewards. He’s alone. Clifford, after reluctantly agreeing to return to Earth, soon changes his mind. Roy yields to his father’s desperate plea to be allowed to float off into infinity.
Their brief, unsatisfactory encounter was evidently enough to get the father out of his son’s head. Once he gets home, Roy also prepares to re-start his marriage: he and Eve smile at each other (though Liv Tyler still doesn’t get any lines). The emotional resolution and reconciliation are banally unconvincing. What stops Ad Astra‘s ending from being laughably weak is the supposed reason for Roy’s change of heart. Data retrieved from the Lima Project answers the National Geographic question in the negative. I didn’t get whether this answer applied to just our solar system or further out in space (and, if the latter, how the Lima Project could have found that out). Whatever, it’s enough for Roy to decide that, if humans are the sole intelligent life around, then we’d better make the best of each other. He journeys billions of miles to come to terms with his father and appreciate his wife. It’s hard to resist the thought that a few hours in psychotherapy would have done just as well.
There’s a correspondence between the hero’s prodigious yet prodigal efforts and the film that describes them. As major studio sci-fi pictures go, this one wasn’t that expensive. The budget of $80m-$100m was around half that of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), for example (according to Wikipedia figures for both movies). Even so, Ad Astra verges on being a high-budget project: it goes almost without saying that it needs the appearance of money well spent. It doesn’t disappoint in that respect – it’s a work of visual ambition and distinction. (The DP is Hoyte van Hoytema, who also shot Interstellar.) Yet it not only crystallises into a familiar story of a son’s struggle with the legacy of a dominating – and, to make matters worse, famous – father. It also suggests that travel into deep space, to try and achieve what the Lima Project set out to achieve, is a waste of time and resources, and bound to end in tears. If this is what James Gray is suggesting, he’s taking a harsh view of what’s essentially an expression of humankind’s ineradicable, unsatisfied need to discover meaning in the Universe. He’s right, though, that it’s an expression of this need that comes at a high price. Like Hollywood movie-making. Gray invests his budget in making an interplanetary wild goose chase look good.
Roy McBride’s demented father could be seen as the representative of an older generation obsessed with the search for extraterrestrial life. Perhaps the representative of our generation: this is, after all, ‘the near future’. But what does Ad Astra‘s no-place-like-home message mean for the future of big-screen sci-fi? Though this isn’t a question of urgent importance to those of us who prefer cinema that deals with human rather than ET relationships, it does make you wonder what a science fiction aficionado will make of Gray’s film. It looks, it sounds and, for a time, it behaves like a sci-fi movie yet it amounts to something approaching an anti-sci-fi manifesto. The title suggests onwards and upwards. The moral of its story brings Ad Astra down to Earth.
26 September 2019
