In his first interview with the press promoting his new movie ‘Ad Astra’ director James Grey described it as a combination of ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. I’m quite certain that’s exactly how he sold his concept to the studio heads that funded ‘Ad Astra’. Not a bad idea when you consider that both movies are considered to be classics. The problem is that in that in ‘Ad Astra’ the combining is clumsily executed and quite frankly, unimaginative.
Let’s begin with ‘Apocalypse Now’ which was itself a adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ to fit the War in Vietnam. In ‘Apocalypse Now’ a U.S. Army Captain named Willard is sent into the deep jungle along the Vietnam / Cambodian border to make contact with a Colonel Kurtz. According to the Army Kurtz has gone rogue, fighting the Vietnamese Communists with native troops his own way, in other words just slaughtering them without regard for the rules of war.
Once Captain Willard finds Kurtz his orders are to terminate Kurtz’s command, ‘Terminate with extreme prejudice’, in other words the Captain has been ordered to assassinate the Colonel. The majority of the movie however concerns Willard’s journey to Kurtz’s location and is composed of a series of scenes depicting the insanity of war but which have no real connection to the actual plot.
The plot of ‘Ad Astra’ is quite similar. At the beginning we learn about an astronaut named Clifford McBride (Played by actor Tommy Lee Jones). McBride is the commander of the Leto Mission to the outer Solar System in a search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The Leto mission we are told was assumed lost some 12 years ago.
We also learn that McBride murdered the other members of the Leto’s crew and is actually still alive around the planet Neptune where he is now using his spaceship’s anti-matter to cause power surges that are threatening all life in the solar system. I suppose by now you’ve guessed that McBride is the Kurtz character.
The Captain Willard character in ‘Ad Astra’ is named Roy McBride (Played by Brad Pitt). Now if you happened to notice that the two main characters have the same last name you’re right, they’re father and son which adds a lot of psycho-drama to the movie without making it any more interesting. As in ‘Apocalypse Now’ Roy McBride’s journey to his father is punctuated with such meaningless scenes as an attack by Moon pirates and a Mayday from another spaceship. So much for the resemblance to ‘Apocalypse Now’.
As far as I’m concerned the resemblance to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ consists mainly in the production values, that is the sets and special effects which look pretty good. Not as good as 2001’s or The Martian’s, but pretty good. It’s apparent that someone has paid a lot of attention to such things as the spacesuits, the look of the spaceship’s and the scenery such as the Moon, Mars and finally Neptune.
The problem is that the attention to detail only extends as far as the look of the movie. You remember I mentioned that the senior McBride is doing something with anti-matter around Neptune that is causing ‘power surges’ back here on Earth. Well that’s about all you ever learn about those surges, you never even get to find out if the older McBride is causing them deliberatly or not.
There are in fact a large number of physically unrealistic events in ‘Ad Astra’ the most egregious of which is when the younger McBride uses a special laser on Mars to send a message to his father around Neptune. Now Neptune at its closest is more than four light hours from Mars so a round trip message has to take nearly nine hours minimum. Well that Martian laser must be real special because the reply comes back in about two minutes. Such a cavalier attitude toward the laws of physics and science in general is not a good thing for a movie that is trying to promote itself as hard Sci-fi.
In the end the two McBride’s finally meet and we discover that the search for alien intelligence has driven the old man mad. He’s lost all of his humanity in the emptiness of space.
I think that’s the moral the creators of ‘Ad Astra’ were trying to portray. If you want to find intelligence you should look right here on good old Earth.
Just don’t look for it in the movie ‘Ad Astra’!