Month: September 2019

I just want to start by saying I didn’t want to watch this film. It’s not that the film looked bad, cheesy, or uninteresting, but I don’t exactly have an affinity for a typical-seeming space adventure. Gravity was cool to see on the big screen, but not on a television. Life was all nihilism and no hope. Ad Astra seemed like somewhere in-between Deep Impact and Space Cowboys. It’s time to admit that I was wrong to doubt this film. Overview James Gray‘s newest film thrusts Brad Pitt into the eternal void from which there is no escape except a good ol’ fashioned cathartic father-son relationship. Roy McBride (Pitt) is an accomplished astronaut living in the somewhere near future, where commercial flights to the moon and Mars are no longer atypical (thanks, Richard Branson). Following a fatal accident where he was one of the only survivors, McBride is brought in by Space Command (ahem, *The Space Force*) to take part in a super secret mission. In this futuristic world, electrical charges bombard Earth from somewhere in the solar system. The worst part is that the US government believe Roy’s father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), is responsible. Roy makes the inevitable hard decision, despite not believing that his father is still alive after almost 30 years in space, and heads to Mars to begin the mission. It’s basically Apocalypse Now, but in space! Cool Space Stuff! (Minor spoilers incoming!) It would make sense that in the future travel to the