#we are shaping AND shaped and there is no existential truth beyond the breathtaking beauty that means we exist

[cat-with-a-keyboard]

i am........... not well

[mouazkhaled]

                  Per Aspera ad Astra

Fatherhood, solitude, longitude for salvation, the dream of eternity, humanity’s basic savage bestiality, and our eternal struggle to understand and be understood, all these themes are brilliantly explored by James Gray, Brad Pitt, and Tommy Lee Jones’s last project, Ad Astra. The abstract is a world advanced and capable of exploring and populating our closest neighbors, our sole moon and our red neighbor, Mars, with efforts to explore what is beyond the borders of our solar system. Thirty years prior to the protagonist’s timeline, Tommy Lee Jones who played Brad Pitt’s father, lead “the Lima project”, the most ambitious and dangerous of human expeditions, a trip towards Neptune, the farthest humanity had ever reached, in a desperate yet an optimistic mission to search, find, and connect with the inevitable extraterrestrial intelligence. The crew of Lima project and their mission have been lost in the void of space and time and all that is left of it is a monumental shadow that resembles humanity’s hardships to reach the stars. What is also left from the mission is Brad Pitt’s convoluted and deformed relationship of a father figure so enlarged and so vague, that it covered his own qualities with loneliness, darkness, and anger. These qualities had shaped him to be a great pioneer, pragmatic, effortless, yet cursed him with a concrete soul that distanced him from any meaningful or sustained human connection. With time, the failed project had turned to be a destructive source of “anti-matter” that raged and started to threat all life. The movie starts with the necessary mission of Brad Pitt to explore his father’s past and find his lost base to undo this existentially catastrophic mistake.

Ad Astra is made as a visual poem told by masterful minimalistic cinematography and poignant performances of its few actors. The movie is full of allegories that are explored through two major parts. The first, acts as a rough journey to reach the father, an odyssey that starts with a mockery of humanity’s occupation of the moon, which should have been a land that unifies all, only to turn into a small pathetic reproduction of capitalism, greed, and our same old eternal conflicts to control and acquire more resources. The moon has different and distant bases that are separated by “no man” lands that had drown by piracy and war defined as “a wild west out there”.

The journey continues to another void between existences, the path between Moon and Mars, with further wilderness and lonesomeness, portrayed by a Mayday signal sent from a Norwegian ship that the crew of Pitt’s ship responds to. This side journey ends with catastrophe when the captain dies by wild apes that killed and devoured the original Norwegian crew after breaking free from their cages inside the ship. The apes were angry and terrifying, attacking with no mercy or boundaries, something that Pitt’s character identified with as a “rage that I can understand”. We reach Mars, stepping further away from beauty and life. Mars’s base is as barren as its planet. Lifeless, red, dusty, devoid of soul, and utterly depressing. The base is controlled by a ruthless military leadership that used the protagonist to communicate with his father without informing him of the true purpose nor the real response. Piece by piece, our protagonist touches the reasons for his hatred of humanity’s lies and deceit. What follows is the shock that Pitt had sensed all his life, his father’s legacy as the greatest pioneer in human history is but of a murderer who slew the other crew members of the Lima project after they were defeated by their fright of solitude and intended to go back to earth, something that the father disdains and halts with absolute brutality. And thus ends the first long part of this odyssey.

The second part starts with a cruel action of the protagonist that affirms the fact that he is as ruthless and “mission-focused” as his father was. He attempts to control the ship heading towards Neptune and “accidentally” kills all the other crew members. He acknowledges his acts and takes responsibility for them in a failed attempt to distinguish himself from his father. His long and dreary final journey towards his father’s base starts. He achieves the absolute solitude away from any human touch, something he sought for decades. But the experience wasn’t as he had craved, the abyss was utterly dark, entirely emotionless which drove him to the brink of insanity. The eternal silence of space had forced him to see his true self, lonely and selfish; He repeated these words, “ I am alone, I am alone, I am alone” “I am so selfish, I am so selfish, I am a selfish person” again and again, things he truly were but never really understood. Solitude turned to be dangerous rather than intimate, insane and torturous rather than safe. Through this eternal void, he was going through an unimaginable agony, slowly and unknowingly stepping further towards salvation. He reaches his father’s base, enters the old forgotten dungeon of the mad man, sees the bodies that his father murdered decades ago as shrines of his achievements, and breathes the toxic air that Pitt’s legacy was.

Then starts my favorite part of the movie, “Roy?” shouts the father, Brad Pitt looks up to find him standing on a ladder above him, a perspective that resembles the father shape that he worshiped for so long. The father quickly and without an ounce of shame affirms his true self, “I never cared about you or your mother’s or any of your small ideas”. The confrontation shifts from intimidation towards pity, beautifully captured by the ascendance of the protagonist to stand face to face against his dad, and powerfully depicted by the actors’ full engagement of these tender state of minds. The son pressures his father towards abandoning the idea and the ship, the father escapes into a dark corner away from his son’s touch but eventually surrenders. Pity turns into intimacy, the son helps the father to wear the suit, and reassures him that he didn’t fail his mission in finding alien intelligence, because he had discovered the ultimate truth, “we are all that we got”. Still, the father lived in insanity for too long and had lost all his attachments to life. He craved intimacy through the void and forgot what was in front of him, so this father-son short intimacy breaks into conflict and leads to the final stage of this brilliant confrontation, which is to let go. The son manages to break from his father’s ideal, and the father finally escapes into the death that he danced aside for so long. The journey ends with the rebirth of the protagonist as he reaches home to seek the love that he had lost in the past.

Ad Astra digs deep into really big ideas, and my main criticism of the movie is that its too big for its own medium. I think what really stood short in here is the timing, as an extra hour would have transcended this piece into an unforgettable masterpiece, but imprisonment by the need of commercial success is a dream killer as it does to most projects of art. There are two different stories in Ad Astra, both would have needed more details and an even slower pace. A series would have been the ultimate triumph that sadly we did not get.

Yet, Ad Astra is magical and deep, portrayed through tender emotions and shot with breathtaking cinematography. Its heavily affected by Kubrick’s space odyssey , Ridley Scott’s blade runner, and Frances Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, by drawing several examples from the general dreary atmosphere of the journey towards meaning; the connection with artificial intelligence as “Hal” in the odyssey; the steely psychological analysis of the replicas in the Blade Runner; and the long trip towards the insane in Apocalypse Now. But the movie manages to take its own beautiful course of exploration of fatherhood and attachments to the past and through that dissects our instinct in craving connection and love, to reach the final conclusion of this picture, which is that the answers we seek, and the meaning we need, are mere inches from us, right here, within the intimate touch of our fellow beings, who are our true stars and our so beloved Astra.