It’s not often you get to watch a sci-fi space movie with an astronaut. That was the unique experience I got courtesy of the Columbia Space Initiative and Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut, who attended my film screening of Ad Astra. Massimino opened my screening sharing how he judges sci-fi movies: by how “cool” they make the astronaut character look. By that standard, Ad Astra hits the bar with its main character Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), an astronaut who undergoes the impossible on his journey through the solar system. Roy is seemingly perpetually calm and level-headed, able to carry out whatever daring deed his mission calls for - once even ramming through an asteroid field using a piece of spacecraft as a shield. But his professional veneer belies a complex inner character struggling with the relationships in his life. Roy belongs to a storied heritage in space exploration, with his father Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) being a Neil Armstrong-like figure and the first human to explore the outer solar system. Roy’s quest is not only one to the outer reaches of the Solar System, but also a personal one to find his father, who has been missing since his childhood after embarking on an ill-fated mission, the Lima Project, to search for extraterrestrial life in the farthest star systems. Besides his father, Roy also has a tumultuous relationship with his estranged wife, which we glimpse through brief flashbacks. Where Ad Astra is truly profound is in how it connects Roy’s quest for his father with humanity’s search for life in the universe. In one elegant stroke, Ad Astra shows how our quest for the stars is driven by our longing for connection as human beings.
Ad Astra’s depiction of space exploration is groundbreaking, and feels as realistically fresh as space travel depicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like 2001, space travel is depicted to the outer reaches of the solar system, but this time the voyage continues further to our most distant planet Neptune. Instead of an evil HAL 9000, Roy has routine check-ups with an AI that constantly assesses his psychological state. The film depicts commercial spaceflight, shuttling Roy from Earth to the Moon just like a stress-inducing airport trip today. Once on the moon, Roy hobbles along a lunar highway (road signs and all) in an Apollo-like lunar buggy. Unlike the typical use of a lunar buggy, Roy gets tangled in a high-speed buggy chase, with a group of moon pirates in hot pursuit. As part of this realism, space in Ad Astra is worn and grungy. Roy is an officer in Space Command, a more militaristic version of NASA - perhaps more like Trump’s proposed Space Force. When we first see Roy, the astronaut suit he dons looks used. Instead of the glitz of an astronaut, he is essentially a space mechanic, repairing an antenna at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Nevertheless, through its scenes of space, Ad Astra is visually exquisite. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, who last journeyed into space with Interstellar, even more masterfully uses space as his canvas. In Ad Astra, the stark white figures of astronauts tumble in the blackness of space, like a ballet in zero gravity. As Roy approaches Neptune, we see a sublime view of the dark blue planet’s grandeur.
The film pays particular attention to scientific details and technical accuracy. When Roy’s lunar buggy runs off the cliff of a crater, it follows physics accurately to fall at 1/6 Earth gravity, thus surviving its landing in the crater’s pit a hundred feet below with just a thud. The lunar base is located on the far side of the Moon, and is used as a staging area for missions to deep space (such as Mars), similar to what NASA’s proposed Lunar Gateway concept calls for. On Mars, comfort rooms with walls of LED screens play scenes of nature, used to alleviate the psychological effects of space travel. The Lima Project resembles a futuristic version of NASA’s Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) missions, which are currently hunting for habitable planets through imaging distant star systems.
Ad Astra paints a portrait of astronauts devoted to their mission, to the point of being willing to sacrifice everything. In the individuals reaching out in the vastness of space, the film paints a portrait of all humankind. Like Roy’s search for his father, humankind desperately seeks our origins and our “father” in the stars. That explains the appeal of one of the fundamental questions of our existence — are we alone? By the end of the film, Roy finds a new answer to that question. Ad Astra comes to an optimistic conclusion, though in a different way than humanity meeting real extraterrestrials like Close Encounters of the Third Kind or Contact. As one of 20th Century Fox’s releases, Ad Astra is a strong entry for Disney’s latest acquisition. Although it may not have the blockbuster potential as Disney’s other entries, Ad Astra certainly has earned its place in the echelon of classic space films.
James Gong is a 2019 graduate of Columbia College.