James Gray's science-fiction epic 'Ad Astra' is somber, stirring, ridiculous and just shy of sublime.
Somber, stirring, ridiculous and just shy of sublime, James Gray’s speculative fiction “Ad Astra” opens with a vision of a man falling to Earth. He’s an astronaut named Roy McBride, and he’s perched on an International Space Antenna — basically a very, very high-altitude ladder, with the world spreading out like a vast blue-green carpet beneath him.
It’s richly ironic that Roy may have been placed in a life-or-death situation by the same father who gave him the skills necessary to survive it. As Roy tells us, in thick streams of voice-over that suggest a Zen philosopher by way of a film-noir private eye, it is Clifford to whom he owes his strong work ethic and his love for space travel.
Still, it is hard not to wish that these visceral scares were more sustained and purposeful, and that they were tethered to a more coherent and rigorous vision of the future. This is less a matter of scientific accuracy — though I eagerly await Neil deGrasse Tyson’s debunking of the asteroid-surfing scene — than of imaginative detail.
There is something both absurd and heartbreaking about the idea of a man saving the universe by traveling billions of miles to be reunited with the father who abandoned him and his mother three decades ago, and it is more to this movie’s credit than its detriment that it proves willing to risk our ridicule.
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