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The Venice Film Festival has recently launched three of Hollywood's most thought-out films on space travel, including last year's feature film Arrival and Gravity. This year, it's Ad Astra's turn, written and directed by James Gray, starring Brad Pitt as Major Roy McBride, extraordinary astronaut. Ad Astra is almost as clever as these other movies, but he shares too much of their footage to look entirely original. And, like them, he is moving towards issues of parenthood and loss, a trajectory that is starting to become irritating. Can no one travel to the last frontier without being strangled by members of his family?
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Personal issues are treated less elegantly in Ad Astra than in other films. In theory, the character of Pitt is similar to Neil Armstrong, as described by Ryan Gosling in First Man, in that his driving abilities depend on the irreproachable control of his feelings. The difference is that Gosling conveyed this stoicism by being good, stoic, as Pitt says by constantly evoking his stoicism, both in the recurrent comments and in the reports of psychological evaluation that he recites in his eyes. computer whenever he is about to leave for another mission. Meanwhile, Liv Tyler appears in a tiny cameo cliché under the name of the angelic woman that Roy has neglected. The parameter may be the near future, but roles such as this one are out of date.
The following is essentially a Buck Rogers type wire, with forced landing and shootings
If you forget some of these psycho-skeletal trinkets, Ad Astra is a rewarding combination of pulpy B-movie and disturbing atmospheric drama. It all starts when Roy is ejected from a multi-kilometer antenna by a surge. According to senior Nasa officials, this is one of the many surges caused by cosmic rays that drag us to the other end of the solar system. And the origin of these cosmic rays is a space station once occupied by Roy's father (Tommy Lee Jones).
To our knowledge, McBride Sr died 13 years earlier. But if he had not done it? And if he's still there, turning around Neptune, like an interstellar descendant of Colonel Kurtz or Ben Gunn? Roy does not ask his superiors why, in their opinion, the old man may still be alive, and no one blames him for it – Gunn's scenario is extremely vague in this regard – but he is sent into the room. unknown, just in case, to try to contact his father long lost.
The following is essentially a Buck Rogers style wire, with forced landing, shootings, weightless fights, a wild predator hidden in a seemingly abandoned gear, and a car chase on the moon (and you do not see those very often) . It's very annoying, but Gray keeps the atmosphere dark and the science almost plausible. There is no hyperdrive or teleportation, for example. Therefore, if you want to travel a billion miles, it will take a lot of time. Recalling both 2001's Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky's Solaris, the film is particularly captivating when it shows how life can be dark and desolate as you move away from the sun. Once in space, you are in a truly alien environment, even if you do not meet any extraterrestrials.
Then, alas, Roy's apocative voice comes back and brings everything back to earth. Ad Astra is a two-fist action movie and a hard science-fiction rumination. But, weighed down by an emotional baggage, it does not really reach the stars.
★★★ ☆☆
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