Experienced astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) stands out from the crowd.

Not just for his good looks (I’ll come back to them) and famed father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) who was considered one of the finest in the field of space exploration before he went missing in action, presumed dead.

But more so because of his incredible ability to keep calm when the going gets tough. As demonstrated by the fact that his pulse has never peaked above 80.

I say incredible, for he has had multiple brushes with death and witnessed the obliteration of scores of colleges. Not to mention over 40,000 members of the public who lost their lives due to a recent surge of electrical storms from outer space which show no sign of abating.

However – and it’s a big however – the problem with four-time Palme d’Or-nominated director James Gray and his co-writer Ethan Gross’s cinematic voyage to reach Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars) is that they fall several planets short of Neptune where both Clifford and the source of the electrical storms are thought to reside.

As a result, the pulse of the audience never peaks above 80 either.

Like Brad Pitt, it looks good – but too good, too clean cut. The cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar) is more sound stage than alien. The score by Max Richter (Arrival) is too prominent and far from ethereal. And though the dialogue plumbs the depths of existential angst – the nub of which is: we are alone forever, lost in space, both as a species and as individuals, or are we? – due to a combination of the above, it doesn’t make us think and feel as deeply as Gray and Gross would wish.

Donald Sutherland makes a rare, fleeting and memorable appearance as Clifford’s former associate Colonel Pruitt as both he and Roy embark on a secret mission to make contact with Neptune. Tommy Lee Jones is similarly underused but convincing. And though Brad Pitt nails his character’s journey from numb and compartmentalised to feeling and expressive – in short, from disconnect to connect – at the end of the day… It’s. Brad. Pitt.

About whom the audience shares his opening self-reflection of being “focused on the essential to the exclusion of all else.”

Director: James Gray
Writers: James Gray, Ethan Gross
Stars: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga
Peter Callaghan
Latest posts by Peter Callaghan (see all)