Ad Astra

James Gray's space mission film Ad Astra (Latin for "to the stars") is intriguing because it successfully navigates on two planes -- the planetary exploration plane and the personal, existential plane. And Brad Pitt, in an exceptionally contemplative role, is the agent at the center of both of those stories. Gray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ethan Gross, has set the action in the "near future," after the moon has been colonized by earthlings and turned into a bit of the Wild West with marauding bands of pirates robbing anyone who happens to wander away from the safe zone. From the moon, Pitt's Maj. Roy McBride hitches a ride to Mars to send a message to his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who captained an exploration to Neptune in search of life. Something has gone wrong with that party, and its cargo of anti-matter is fueling power surges that threaten all life in the solar system. During all of this doom and catastrophe, Pitt's McBride reflects on his interior life, his relationship, actually lack of one, with his father, and anyone else, for that matter. This has left him a highly functional clutch player for the space program but not much else. In this way, the film, which will no doubt remind some viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is less in the mold of Kubrick's space masterpiece and more like last year's First Man, the story of a stony Neil Armstrong's personal quest to set foot on the moon and the human cost required for such a feat.