Control Review: Ad Astra
Ad Astra tells the story of an astronaut whose dad went to the edge of the solar system many years ago — and he is sent to deliver a message from Mars to his father to find out why someone from that area of the solar system is sending pulses that are wrecking the planet. What follows is part hard sci-fi, part action flick, part thoughtful drama, and a weird and interesting film.
Brad Pitt’s character, in the opening scene, faces a space station in crisis, and afterwards we don’t see that scene referenced. There are a bunch of little vignette type scenes that don’t have anything to do with the plot — a chase on Mars, a space ship in distress. These scenes play out as a surreal set of scenes showing a mentally ill man trying to keep together and not freak out too much. He constantly does mental health checks with the government, and the viewer can tell that he’s forcing himself to pretend to be normal and sane as he degrades further into mental illness.
The wife character is one of the wife characters who doesn’t do a whole hell of a lot — she pines for her husband but doesn’t seem to know him at all. A lot of people stop by for a bit and try to develop characters but don’t all stay around for very long. The character played by Pitt is really the central character, and this shows how a man can have many people in his life, some staying, some leaving.
This is also a story about meeting and dealing with one’s father and trying to avoid making the mistakes of the father. In this the story excels, showing a father-son relationship in which both feel alone in the solar system, far away from anyone else who can care for them. Pitt’s character goes to the far reaches of nowhere for answers like his father. They are looking for aliens — I won’t say if they succeed. I will only say that they deal with unresolved issues, rules are broken, and the son needs to face the same problems as the father.
I know that I want to write hard sci-fi some of the time, and this is a more romanticized, lyrical, otherworldly version of that — as opposed to Gravity or The Martian. It still qualifies as hard sci-fi because it feels like something that could happen. I think that learning from this movie can teach us to write more effective and intelligent stories. It doesn’t all have to add up — real life doesn’t always add up, either. Sometimes a story about a son and his father can be shown in an outer-space allegory. Well told. Thanks, and take care, friends.
