Like a lot of depressing movies, Ad Astra’s strong dose of melancholia may well aim at indirectly endorsing a reinvigorated engagement with life. Having administered its nihilistic fix, the film can nudge its audience back out onto the streets grateful at least that if the universe really is as empty as it suggests, it is often impractical to think too much about it.
The story follows near-future astronaut Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) on his assignment to stop the mysterious antimatter surges now threatening life on earth and originating somewhere near Neptune. His mission is to get a message to the space station there, specifically to his father (Tommy Lee Jones), a celebrated space explorer long presumed dead in his search for extraterrestrial life.
To do so, Major McBride must journey as deep into space as into his own psyche, preparing for an encounter he both deeply desires and dreads.
Thematically and tonally the film is similar to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness: Ad Astra’s outward voyage through danger-ridden alien territory parallels a sombre inward exploration of McBride’s unresolved father wounds. As he ventures farther from earth, a regimen of mandatory audio-recorded psychological evaluations keeps us abreast of his increasing solitude and intensifying approach to the borderlands of madness.
In this regard, the film does well in explicitly correlating these exterior and interior journeys. While it is sometimes less than subtle – regular voiceovers articulate McBride’s inner monologues, like, “I’ve been trained to compartmentalize. It seems to be that’s how I approach life” – the film certainly does not fail in signalling to viewers the existential significance of the quest.
Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the film is its exploration of similarities between McBride and his father. As he seeks to definitively confront this figure from his past who, in his professional pursuits, effectively orphaned McBride and widowed his mother, McBride must also face the same tendencies in himself.
Less laudable, though, are the conclusions suggested by this climactic encounter.
Having finally found his father at the farthest reaches of the human-explored heliosphere, McBride discovers (spoiler alert) that the older man has been unsuccessful in his attempt to discover any extra-human life. “We’re all we’ve got,” McBride concludes – an utterance whose import, by its weightiness, would seem to deliberately dismiss the existence of anything supernatural.
Having heroically plumbed the extreme depths of the human psyche and knowable universe, in other words, our protagonist has found no reason to believe in any intelligent life other than humanity. God, apparently, is neither in here nor out there.
Impressively, though, the film does not end on a note of total despondency. It pushes on, or rather pushes back, with McBride resolving not to succumb to the freezing darkness of an utterly empty universe. He chooses, instead – albeit for some uncharacteristically unarticulated reason – to return to earth and throw in his lot with human relationships.
This modestly heart-warming conclusion is not enough to dispel the chill of the film’s first principles, however. Because we are ultimately alone and there is nothing else “out there” beyond ourselves, this suggests, we should cherish whatever human connections we manage to muster.
A Christian might question, though, whether this functional equivalent of the second greatest commandment might stand without the first. Love of neighbour, in Jesus Christ’s cosmos, is the natural consequence of the supernatural love of God, not its replacement.
So, even though Ad Astra might do well to remind us of the penultimate importance of human relationships, by disavowing this other, more fundamental, fact, its voyage to the stars will turn out to be for many viewers a long and ultimately dissatisfying dead end.
(Originally published in The B.C. Catholic)