More than half a century has passed and, though Hollywood has taught us never to completely rule out unpleasant surprises, it seems rather unlikely that any of its grandees would get it into their heads to remake 2001: A Space Odyssey. The main reason lies in the title itself, or rather the year that was a bright future of space exploration for Clarke and Kubrick, but an ever more distant and down‑to‑earth past for us. That, of course, doesn’t mean that every now and then some ambitious filmmaker doesn’t appear and try to make the best science‑fiction film that even more ambitious critics ought to call “the odyssey of our time”. The last time this happened was in 2014 when Christopher Nolan attempted to repeat Clarke’s and Kubrick’s magic with Interstellar – a very good achievement that, however, could not reach such a high bar. In 2019 a similar endeavour was taken up by James Gray with his science‑fiction epic Ad Astra, which has received a string of critical accolades and enjoyed the status of one of the most‑talked‑about Hollywood productions of its time.
Gray, who began his career exactly a quarter of a century earlier with the dark and, compared to this film, rather chamber‑like gangster flick Little Odessa, did not want to repeat Clarke’s and Kubrick’s mistake and explicitly tie the plot to a specific year. Instead, he mentions only an unspecified “near future” which, as things stand, and especially if one listens to the suggestions of Greta Thunberg, could in fact turn out to be quite distant. Right at the outset we see how technologically advanced the future world is compared to ours when the protagonist Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), a major in the US Space Command, thinks it perfectly normal to be carrying out maintenance work in orbit on a research station accessed not by rockets but by a space elevator. However, for unknown reasons a catastrophe occurs and McBride is forced to return to Earth by parachute. McBride is not too shaken by his experience because he is a consummate professional who not only keeps a cool head in the worst situation, but regularly monitors his psychological state with the help of special psycho‑tests. Because of this, his superiors select him for an extremely confidential, delicate and dangerous mission that is meant to take him to the very edge of the Solar System. Indeed, the incident that led to the catastrophe was triggered by an energy discharge whose source lies in the orbit of Neptune, and coincidentally at the very spot where McBride’s father H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a top astronaut and commander of Project Lima whose aim was the discovery of extraterrestrial life, disappeared sixteen years earlier. The top brass of Space Command have reason to believe that the elder McBride is alive and may be connected with the discharges which, if not stopped, could destroy all life in the Solar System. His son is tasked with travelling to a base on Mars from where he will send a personal message to his father with the aim of dissuading him from whatever he is doing.
Anyone who has seen Odyssey will have no trouble spotting the similarities with Ad Astra, largely because the basic plot of this film essentially boils down to what was identified as the main plot of Odyssey – a confidential, delicate and rather dangerous mission to the edge of space in order to find the sender of a mysterious signal. Similarities can also be found in certain scenes that are more‑or‑less borrowed from Kubrick’s classic, and concern the seemingly routine journey from Earth to the Moon. However, it was clear to Gray that something was needed to set his film apart from the half‑century‑old classic, and he found his solution in using motifs from a four‑decade‑old classic, namely the film Apocalypse Now. Just as Coppola transplanted Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness from the 19th‑century Congo to Indochina during the Vietnam War, so Gray transplants Coppola’s film into space. And in doing so he uses not only the same plot, but also the same style, including a voice‑over narration by the main character similar to that used by Captain Willard in Apocalypse.
The idea of combining those two great films was not in itself a bad one, but its execution turned out to be a disastrous disappointment. The problem is that Gray and his co‑screenwriter Ethan Gross not only were not clear about which of the two main ingredients to lean on, but they added another one to Ad Astra, in the form of a routine Hollywood commercial product that has little real connection with true classics of the sci‑fi genre. This is best seen in several action scenes that feel violently plastered into a film that in its essence ought to be a serious, contemplative “hard science fiction” drama, not some fluffy space opera. The greatest disappointment, however, comes at the end, when the character of McBride’s wife Eve, simply by being played by Liv Tyler, stirs uncomfortable associations with Michael Bay’s Armageddon, a film that may belong to the same genre but represents the antithesis of everything that a “proverbial really good science fiction film” as Clarke used to describe Odyssey, ought to be.
That does not mean that Ad Astra is in itself a bad film. Brad Pitt carries out his role superbly, though one might say, much as with Ryan Gosling in First Man, that playing a “stone cold” astronaut was not such a difficult task. Tommy Lee Jones is proverbially reliable in the emotional finale, and the rest of the cast cope well with sometimes rather thankless roles. Exceptional effort and budget have been invested in the film, and special mention should be made of Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which makes the film visually attractive, especially in scenes set on Mars and in Neptune’s orbit. Max Richter’s music, on the other hand, is a disappointment and one of the main reasons why this film immediately loses the race with its great predecessors. Although it cannot be called unwatchable, Ad Astra represents yet another ambitious Hollywood project whose quality lies closer to thorns than to stars.
RATING: 4/10 (+)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here.)
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