Ad Astra

While it may be true that sons inherit the sins of their fathers, Ad Astra, a beautiful, worth-watching film, sidesteps an opportunity to interrogate the patriarchal trope and chooses instead, to play-out Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Coppola’s Apocalypse Now) at the frontier of our cosmos – the ocean-blue rings of Neptune. Because the concept is so fun and admirable – father and son, tethered together at the edge of the known universe, one wanting to venture further into the unknown, the other pulling back toward earth, toward home – and because the film is as beautiful as other recent sci-fi films – Interstellar et al. – hating too much on the clunky, surface-level inspections of hyper-masculinity would be unfair. There is much to love.

That the film tried, albeit without much space for non-masculine voices, to illuminate the destructive consequences of macho, hetero-normative ambition, suggests an opportunity to freshen the air in sci-fi film, a place desperately needing voices from below. Amanda DeMarco would rightly say similar things about this film as she did The Three Body Problem trilogy. Ad Astra – Latin: ‘to the stars’ – is re-watchable not because of achievements in the field of gender studies, but because of cool concepts, homages to other really good movies, cleverly placed action sequences (high-speed shoot-out with pirates on the moon!), and most of all, no surprise, because of Brad Pitt. Supposedly Brad Pitt was the first actor to sign-on to the film. We’re alighted to how compelling Pitt found the pitch in just the first few moments of footage.

Brad shares with the digital psychologist that his pulse is 47 beats per minute, he slept 8.2 hours, and he finds no reason for why he will not be able to complete his mission. The computer therapist gives him the go-ahead thus allowing Pitt to fill the role he was made for: a contemplative, nostalgic, moral absolutist, futuristic Jesus Christ. As he literally falls from the sky [heaven] – he was working on the space station antennae beaming-out the hopes and message of those talented and privileged enough to study engineering at MIT – in what we are told is the not-so-distant future, and then awakened by nervous foot-soldiers as it becomes apparent that the world needs saving. This is not all that James Gray, the writer-producer-director, borrows from the New Testament. For Pitt – Major McBride – is being asked to travel to Mars to send a message to his father; he is being asked to go sit at the right hand of his father.

Where the film leaves the New Testament behind and picks up where Copolla and Conrad left off, is that McBride’s father (Tommy Lee Jones being Tommy Lee Jones – curmudgeon, pontificator, conceptual, perfunctory), the patriarch of all modern astronauts and dreamers, has gone rogue. He has killed all of his crew and is now sending electrical anti-matter pulses from Neptune that are wreaking havoc on capitalism’s foundations. Pitt has to go stop Tommy Lee Jones. He has to save the world. He is only prepared to save the world because he followed the guidance of his hyper-masculine father that abandoned him to search for intelligent life. Only in patriarchal systems do adopted, destructive patriarchal norms pay-out.

Does he stop him? It is worth seeing so I will not spoil it. What you can expect is some riffing on masculinity, father-son tropes, and how suffocating yet powerful neoliberalism is. I was left wanting to have a conversation with Brad about how he feels the cis gender male individual fits within a post #metoo, Trumpian landscape. If he believes that men should actively be surrendering power – one of the final admonitions of the film (there are many) calls for the powerful to submit to more primal compulsion – then most likely this script doesn’t go far enough.

Primal compulsions in this movie are marked by the contrast between primitive, ape-like rage and the even more powerful, when nurtured, embrace of a partner. ‘Good’ compulsions are shown to be counter-cultural, as the men of Conrad and Coppola and the 20^th century profited by leaning towards rage. While Pitt’s pursuit of his father and longing for a lost lover (a silent yet effective Liv Tyler) reveals the primitive response to what the patriarchy has shown us to be normal is just that, primitive. And the power of the film emerges out of this rumination: is it not better to submit to the beautiful connections with others we have right here in front us? Is this not better than the loneliness of outer space? Because these questions get teased-out near the outer-cosmos in exceptionally believable spacecraft, James Gray would get respect from Cixin Liu. But the questions remain.

Wendell Berry believes that spending money on space exploration is wasteful. Trump believes that we should have a space-based military presence. Ad Astra gives the viewer the opportunity to consider each perspective. That the visuals and score create such a pleasant, compelling space for considering as much, is reason enough to check it out. That Brad Pitt may or may not save the world is more than enough of a reason. Ad Astra gets a ‘worth watching’.

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