Cosmos Heart of Darkness

Ad Astra – 2019

Ad Astra, Latin “to the stars” foreshadows the celestial ambitions of a film aiming for the stars but in celluloid reality, is locked into our gravity-bound solar system, destination Neptune. Brad Pitt, suiting up as stoic (wooden), impassive (dull), invincible astronaut, Major Roy McBride, ditched his charm and traded in his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood charisma for monotone utterances and blank, vacant stares in this sci fi version of Apocalypse Now. Roy is a troubled, solitary man on a perilous interplanetary journey to eradicate a madman, Captain Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), Roy’s estranged father. Earth is edging dangerously close to doomsday and the senior McBride, who disappeared into deep space years before on the Lima Project, a mission seeking intelligent life, is identified as the mad mastermind. Cue the son to undertake a classified bounty hunter journey from Earth to the Moon to Mars to Neptune to find his father and save the planet.  Captain McBride goes from fallen hero to celestial villain. We the audience hitch a ride on this laborious journey where we witness crowded shopping moon malls, space punk pirates, a catapulting lunar rover chase, a deranged attack baboon, gaudy interstellar “Comfort Rooms,” meteorite dodge ball and a Neptune nuclear tsunami. Choose your thrill. Strapped in between the malls and meteorites is a tedious storyline stab at deconstructing the psychological baggage Roy is packing from planet to planet. Oh, ok, got it. It’s about father-son stuff. Oh, wait. It’s about husband-wife stuff. No, no. It’s about self and soul and spirit stuff. It’s about love. It’s about life. Oh, good grief! Stop already! Can we just rewind to the killer baboon? For a sci fi space thriller, it’s stodgy and slow. For a relational drama, it’s thin on insights and thick on “stuff.” For an inspirational message about human transformation, it’s not. It is meandering, dry, dreary and dark. The film tried too hard to be a monumental, profound, psychological, sensory odyssey through time, space and self.  But, instead it spiraled out of control, coming off as so dense and opaque, that it dimmed any hope I had to engage. Consequently, I was neither disturbed nor inspired. I didn’t care. Myself, I suggest skipping Ad Astra and renting Apocalypse Now. 

Author: Rev. Peggy Bryan

I was ordained an Episcopal Priest in 2009. View all posts by Rev. Peggy Bryan