‘Ad Astra’ or — Non-Event Horizon?
I’m so glad other people are talking about the fact that James Gray’s ‘Ad Astra’ (2019) is, essentially, ‘Event Horizon’ (1997) under general anesthetic — i.e. a spaceship with experimental technology in orbit around Neptune is sending back garbled but chilling messages suggesting something has gone wrong, possibly to do with the infinite terror of the Universe and now threatens the Earth. “Surely that’s not the plot?” I thought when I saw the trailer, but it turns out it pretty much is.
But whereas ‘Event Horizon’ starts from the narratively logical (and satisfying) point of actually arriving at Neptune, ‘Ad Astra’ is all about experienced astronaut Brad Pitt simply getting there making the film feel less like an adventure and more like a inconvenient commute. This is accompanied by a voice-over from Pitt telling us how he never gets excited about anything as we sit there wondering if we’re ever going to feel excited at any point watching this film. Turns out the answer is definitely not.
It’s not just that the film is dull but, much like a punctured lunar module, it’s massively compromised and something, possibly our attention, is escaping into space. To patch these leaks Gray, seemingly randomly, throws in moments of action to spice things up but these are so out-of-place that they were obviously inserted because Gray knew nothing was happening or that someone else had told him nothing was happening. The bit with the monkeys was when I threw my hands up and would happily of left this movie floating forever in outer-space.
Yet the biggest problem came not long after when Pitt, via his vacuum-sealed voice-over, informs us that his father, the guy that this seems to be all about as well as the motivating factor driving Pitt all the way out to Neptune, well that he never really knew his father at all. Ever. If that’s the case then why, in God’s name, should Pitt or any of the audience even care? In just one sentence the entire film ceases to matter. One of the characters might lament the lack of reason in the universe but even a cold, lifeless universe contains more reason for being than this film.
‘Ad Astra’ also suffers with a misplaced excess of fidelity. In the act of achieving realism the movie saddles itself with the problem that a lot of stuff involving space-flight is slow and cumbersome. This is fine when there are moments where the film can take its time but when it, inevitably, reaches moments where events need to kick into gear there at sequences where everything feels oddly rushed (I had no idea a man wearing a heavy space-suit could make his way through an underwater system on Mars and board a space-ship all in a matter of minutes).
There are too many stupid moments too, the most unforgivable being the point where Brad Pitt tells a group of people he means them no harm… but still manages to kill them all anyway by accident. I might have mumbled “Fuck off” under my breath at that point.
‘Ad Astra’ is not very good. Technically it is well made but with no real sense of what is going on in the wider-world it portrays it feels inconsequential, air-tight and small. It is also illustrative of why I am wary of some modern filmmakers — Nolan, Villeneuve, Gray etc — and their slavish adherence to a sort of faux-reality (heaven forbid any sense of escapism should blunder into these films!). Yes, it provides an increased sense of fidelity but it very much comes at the cost of enjoyment.
