In Ad Astra  Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride an astronaut whose father, Clifford McBride also a revered astronaut, vanished on a mission beyond Neptune in the outer solar system to survey extra-solar planets for signs of intelligent life. Sudden intense burst of gamma radiation from outer solar system now threaten human on Earth, the Moon, and Mars, burst of radiation that appear to be coming from Clifford’s list mission. Roy is dispatched to send a message to his father and hopefully end the threat the humanity.

Sharing some thematic elements with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness  this film is a slow mediation on the shadows they live within the human spirit and the dangerous of isolation and disconnection that can happen even when we are surrounded by people. However while those are the themes of the screenplay, and the film is filled with talented veteran actors Ad Astra  fails to fully engage on a character level leaving the audience to experience repeated long sequences of Brad Pitt stealing Ryan Gosling’s thunder of staring expressionless in the middle distance.

Now, I love good slow cinema. The Remains of the Day  a film about one man’s repressed emotions set in the sedate world of less English nobility is one of my favorites but Ad Astra  fails to find the character at the center of the story and never forces the character to engage in a meaningful choice. A much better science-fiction film on these same themes and also with a careful slow pacing is the US version of Solaris. These films are possible but ad Astra  simply isn’t it.

The science in Ad Astra  is bad, but I have come to expect that from Hollywood science-fiction but without a good character story to catch the viewer that allows the bad science to become that much more noticeable.

The film is tonally inconsistent. It tries to balance quiet character contemplation with scenes of intense action and fails at both. There are two major set pieces of action that simply have no story reason for existing: a sequence with lunar pirates and an unmotivated attack on Roy McBride as he transits between lunar locales and a rescue mission to space station that apparently orbits between Earth and Mars solely for animal research.

All in all Ad Astra  was a dull plodding affair that thought is had much more profound things to say than it really did.