Ad Astra

 About Ad Astra, film by James Gray, 2019, starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones...

Soundtrack: Max Richter

This film fascinated me and I never tire of watching it again...

It's an introspective, cerebral, melancholy space opera centered around two characters: Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) and his father, Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones).

The film could be described as an “Apocalypse Now” in deep space, on the edge of solar system.

The film tells the story of two quests, Clifford McBride's search for traces of intelligent life at the very edge of the solar system: the obsessive quest of an astronaut, a scientist, to unravel the mystery of life and intelligence: are we alone in the universe?

And Roy McBride's quest to find his father, lost in deep space and on the bangs of reason, the solar system and madness.

This film fascinated me by the beauty of the shots... By the vision of what space travel could be, from Earth to the Moon, from the Moon to Mars, from Mars to Neptune, with its logistics, its hubs, its stopover personnel...

But it was above all the sequence of the meeting, and then the heart-rending farewell between the son and father, that really stood out for me... Tragic, moving scenes....

I'm thinking of Clifford Bride's willingness to die in an infinite drift around Neptune, all ties severed with his son, with the promise of inescapable asphyxiation, but, deep down, the fulfillment of his destiny...

I loved the sober, haunted, inhabited acting of the two protagonists... of the two actors who played them...

And this existential confrontation between a son and his father touched me deeply, for personal reasons.

For me, “Ad Astra” is one of those “intelligent” science fiction films that ask questions, give food for thought, and put the human in the foreground. Christopher Nolan's “Interstellar” would be in the same category - and I'll be talking about it soon, no doubt...

A final word to say that Max Richter's soundtrack seems to me to reflect the introspective and dramatic dimension of the film, at the antipodes of John Williams' fanfare for Star Wars, which are not without their qualities, but that's something else...