Ad Astra Reviews

A movie directed by James Gray and starring Brad Pitt did sound really promising and, on top of that, I always had a weak spot for movies dealing with outer space so I was definitely eager to check the damned thing. Well, even though this movie had been fairly well received, as usual with James Gray’s movies, even though I did admire the work done, I can’t say I was really blown away though. The timing for making this movie was also rather unfortunate as there had been recently so many similar movies released such as ‘Gravity’, ‘Interstellar’, ‘The Martian’ and ‘First Man’. As a result, even though the movie was visually pretty neat, I had already seen by then a couple of movies managing to be visually just as impressive as this movie was. Eventually, without this competition, there is a fair chance that this movie would have impressed more in this area. To make things worse, they couldn’t have chosen a more generic story with this astronaut joining a seemingly impossible mission to save the world from impending doom. However, what was left and what made this movie still interesting to behold was a rather fascinating main character played by a pitch-perfect Brad Pitt. Indeed, if you would remove all the futuristic outer-space stuff, what remains is a close-up on a seemingly talented man crippled by the legacy and absence of his father. As a result, what could have been a huge bombastic space blockbuster had become a rather intimate one-man-show. The interesting thing is that even though you spend so much time with the guy, even though there is this recurring voice-over talking to us, his thoughts and feelings remained still somewhat unclear but it made the character even more interesting to behold. Anyway, to conclude, even if I wasn’t completely sold, thanks to a really rock-solid Brad Pitt, it was still a decent watch and it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.