“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice”- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”- Col. Saito, Bridge Over the River Kwai
“If they can send one man to the moon, why can’t they send them all”- T-shirt slogan
Per aspera ad astra, through hardship to the stars. This is a fitting summation of the hero, Roy McBride, played by Brad Pitt in James Gray’s Ad Astra. His quest to be the consummate astronaut is compounded by being the son of the world’s most revered spaceman, Cliff McBride, played by Tommy Lee Jones. The father vs. son battle is twinned with the motifs of the zealot plagued by doubt and the leader consumed by mission. All this is presented in the guise of a space action-adventure drama. The result isn’t a launch pad failure but a mission desperately in need of course correction. Rather than entering a clear dark sky of dazzling stars, everything is overcast. We are trapped in the space between “Houston, we have a problem” and “Houston, you are the problem.” It is an odd problem as Gray has a proven record of producing strong, focused, decisive genre films. Little Odessa, his breakthrough feature, is a heartbreaking, innovative, mafia saga. Two Lovers is a moving romantic tragedy set not far from the upheavals of the actual little Odessa. Ad Astra leaves the confines of this world and is, despite the flash, a step backward. It is encouraging that his next project, I Am Pilgrim, will return to the terra firma of New York City.
Before detailing the myriad shortcomings some accolades are in order for the teams behind the the escape and chase sequences. Soon into the opening minutes we see astronauts cascading off a “sky elevator” that stretches from earth’s surface to the stratosphere. The dangling bodies mingled with crashing infrastructure brought to mind Cuaron’s wonderful meteor pummeling of a space station at the beginning of Gravity. The Mad Max inspired moon buggy battle will also keep audiences appropriately tense. In addition there is the gruesome rescue sequence where no one would have suspected the monster hiding behind the pulsating astronaut’s back. It is also impossible not be rooting for our hero as he battles 4 advesaries in zero gravity after crawling through a rocket ship during lift off. The audience is swept up into the visceral hardships. Unfortunately the reflective moments have a monotonous fixed orbit.
The denouement of the father/son reunion is particularly awkward, in all the wrong ways. To paraphrase father-Cliff: “thanks for coming out here.” I’m surprised he didn’t follow up with: “was it a rough trip?” It is as if the filmmakers took all the emotional heft of a pulp romance novel and grafted it on to a torturous family encounter. No doubt this is a family with issues. No doubt they would never utter any of this dialogue. This moment is the most stilted in a parade of encounters Roy has with fellow travelers, pilots and officials. His steely, coldness seems contrived. Unfortunately this creates questions about the action. One begins wondering if certain scenes were scripted to illustrate his bravado, rather than being simply part of the narrative. Space Command’s only option in transporting the key man in a “save the world” mission is to ride him on a moon buggy through bands of terrorists? There was no way to avoid the, nearly deadly, SOS rescue? These plot anomalies would play if there wasn’t an opaqueness about our hero. Roy, unfortunately, has a dissonant quality that wears badly on an action hero. As an example: no one questions whether James Bond is trying to kill himself when he jumps from a building, helicopter, train…. If Gray wants an ambiguously motivated protagonist, he should have not have made an action movie.
The younger McBride finds solace in reflecting on the sole emotional connection he has made on earth’s surface which brings to mind a Joni Mitchell song. Joni’s male partner says, “I am as constant as a Northern Star”. Her retort sums up the experience of being Mrs. McBride of either generation: “Constantly in the darkness. Where’s that at?”. Adding to his emotional misery is the specter of the dead hero dad, who turns out not to be dead or a hero. Strangely whether the father is dead or a hero is more ambiguous than one might assume. Herein lies the heart of this strange amalgamation of plot lines: What is it that makes people good? To whom does one owe allegiance? The director appears to be heading in one direction, then, akin to many plot points in the narrative, we are whip-lashed back to earth. In every sense, not just emotionally, this script is nothing, if not peripatetic.
After the title sequence, we see Kubrick’s HAL, the monster in 2001. We note the military uniforms of the NASA-like institution have black shirts over black jackets evoking the SS or other fascist armies. The dystopia also has a 1984-like master computer system that does mandatory psych evaluations. It is all give and no take. The astronauts are plumbed to their deepest fears and given a pass/fail at the end of the session. It isn’t therapy but rather the Facebook/Google scheme of personal information disclosure being mandatory for gateway access. Strangely the human bleakness of the earth is no match for the dingy creepiness of the moon and Mars. The latter is a dressed up truck stop and the former is akin to a worn-down Mall of America. At one point McBride confesses that if his father had seen what they’d done to the lunar landscape he’d have wanted it destroyed. This is one of the rare moments that the younger McBride, or others, disclose personal details about the older astronaut.
The father’s opaqueness mirrors his son’s. These are dedicated career men who are at the top of their game. They are also brimming with hopelessness. The young McBride’s psych profile exhibits clinical depression. He is careful never to express his general rage at the system. He wants to continue his mission as a “good soldier”. Even during the darkest moment of mutiny, he has allegiance to “the system”. The director’s vision of earth “sometime in the near future” is familiar. The technology and information gathering is appropriately futuristic but certainly tied to the trajectory of the present. The Ad Astra world has stopped asking big questions in favor of the convenience of technology. There is nary a mention of religion, politics or philosophy. It is mere factional fighting over resources and information set amidst brutal controlling authorities. Our hero’s American-like regime is peopled with loyalists who never ask too many questions. The McBrides are absolutely perfect soldiers, until they aren’t. The father/son spacemen are strangely united in a sense of duty to a system they love so much that they feel they, alone, can dictate the rules. It is on odd contradiction cradled in the psychosis of wanting to preserve the system by completely destroying it.
The junior McBride knows that there is discord between himself and the space fleet. Once he realizes he has been betrayed, he seeks, not vengeance, but a path to righting what he sees as the wrong path to neutralizing his father. This involves murdering those who go against him. Meanwhile his father has gone mad and liquidates those who appose his “pure” view of loyalty. Ironically that mission involved making contact with those with the ultimate outsider point of view, aliens. It is almost as if the elder McBride realizes humans have become morbidly self-involved. His messianic obsession with making contact is admission that he cannot abide by humanity in its present condition. Perhaps this is the seed for his desire to destroy the earth. Ad Astra’s humans certainly give credence to the idea of exiting to the stars. Unfortunately there is no respite. They need an escape from themselves.
There is a dreariness to the depiction of space life. Rather than expanding conceptions of humanity all the grand engineering seems to have knocked mankind off the tower of babel, metaphorically depicted in the opening sequence. Everyone is a cog in a technological web. Roy’s peers seem happy enough with the drugs and comfort rooms, where images of nature are projected on the walls. Perhaps Donald Sutherland, who plays an elder mentor can shed light on the father’s sense of purpose. He is the perfect character to illuminate the son as he was an intimate of his father. In fact he jokes about his father’s single-mindedness in thinking that Sutherland lacked patriotism. This is an odd notion as the elder officer has been specially chosen to represent the government in supervising the son. This puts distance in their fast friendship. Is Sutherland a true friend or merely an extension of the every present “psych evaluation”? In the end Sutherland is as indecipherable as everyone else. Rather than illuminating Cliff McBride he breaks the cult of worship with evidence of the father’s psychotic crimes.
The Space Force took the path chosen by all states who discover their idols have clay feet: they masked the betrayal and doubled down on the motif of “national hero”. Roy is merely bait to lure the grand prize, Cliff, to his death at the hands of a government wanting to keep up appearances. Roy’s realization of his pawn status sparks a curious reaction. He turns out to be every bit his father’s son. Roy has every reason to loath papa. He was a cruel, negligent father. He is also a deranged murderer. Did I also mention he has killed scores in an effort to destroy planet earth? Yet Roy manages to hatch a redemptive plan that attempts to “save” the father in addition to the home planet. He is completely devoid of any anger towards the space force that has treated him with contempt. The logistical absurdity of his mission is an equal match for the utter lunacy of his state of mind. In the end our hero saves planet earth, but not the father. He returns a hero, despite defying orders and killing four colleagues. He is now ready to find the meaning of life by cuddling with his sweetheart. It sounds as unsatisfying and unrealistic as it plays. All the grandness of the film is overrun by the movie ending equivalent of Hallmark greeting cards. What are we to make of all the interstellar Strum und Drang?
Most villains are self-serving monsters who wish to bend the world to their own egotistical ends. The senior McBride’s evil, like Heart of Darkness’ Kurtz or Bridge Over the River Kwai’s Col. Nicholson, is cloaked in extreme dedication to a cause, seemingly outside of themselves. The quest to be uber-heroes creates the human equivalent of emotional black holes. Their madness is rooted in spending too much time in the vastness of the outer reaches of “civilization”. The human mind breaks when confronted with constant exposure to the metaphysical voids of outer space or unmapped continents. The writer Borges wrote, “here is a concept that corrupts and upsets all others, I refer not to evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite”. The hardship of isolation brought them to the darkness of their imaginary worlds. This is fertile ground for artistic reflection. Unfortunately our hero, McBride Jr., is bereft of any real introspection. He is mired in the relentless drumbeat of despair coupled with idealized domesticity. This is the stuff of soap opera rather than myth.
There is a film that squares the circle of combining the low art of the chase, with the high aspirations of sketching the complicated duality of monster/heroes. Not Ad Astra but rather a relatively obscure film Sunshine. It is the paradigm Heart of Darkness space thriller. The two films share crews on “save the earth” missions complete with nuclear bombs. They also encounter a fellow traveler who has gone mad in by gazing into infinity. Cliff McBride faces the darkness of space whereas his doppelgänger gazes directly at the sun. Sunshine, however,has a taut plot and simple motivation. The heroes save the planet. Roy’s story drifts into the dangerous territory of asking “who is a hero? What is worth saving?” It is valid to raise the questions. Unfortunately it is unsatisfying to hide answers with spectacle.
Stripped of the dazzle of big name performers and excellent special effects, Ad Astra’s hero is the benevolent version of the deranged dad. The film SUGGESTS a journey of emotional growth. Unfortunately the stasis is masked with the dazzle that only a big budget feature can provide. The movie twists, turns and explodes but its hero remains embedded in his father’s repellent isolation. Roy obviously fails his father, but more significantly, he fails himself. How long will the reunion with his partner last before he exits in an escape pod? It is easy to imagine him back on the space elevator or the moon or mars or just in space. No doubt he will “constantly be in the darkness”. This film wallows in hardship. It is all pain without the escape of the heavens. Duris in laboribus, through hardship to hardship.
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