Brad Pitt’s attempt to reap Gravity’s fortunes stalled at the box office. Five years later, it still stands as one of the best modern sci-fi movies.
You think you know your home planet. Then Brad Pitt makes a ravishing Hollywood space odyssey with car chases on the moon, perilous zero-gravity encounters, and rampaging baboons, and no one shows up for it! OK, that’s an exaggeration: Some people did show up to James Gray’s galaxy-spanning melodrama Ad Astra, which more or less broke even when it hit theaters five years ago today. But the public reaction was awfully quiet (like, vacuum of space quiet) for a movie of this genre with this star. What on Earth could have kept so many away?
Some of the blame certainly lies with the suits at Disney, who acquired Ad Astra in the Fox merger and promptly threw its release strategy into disarray. Originally poised to hit theaters in January of 2019, the movie was pushed back to September — theoretically not a bad place for an astronomical object of its gravity (and potential awards appeal) to land. But the Mouse House exhibited little apparent faith in the project’s box office prospects, and launched it without a big marketing push. In as much as it’s possible for a $100-million Brad Pitt science-fiction vehicle to float into multiplexes undetected, Ad Astra did.
To be fair, Gravity numbers were probably always out of reach for Gray’s particular addition to the cosmic-voyage canon. Ad Astra has some of the eye-candy spectacle audiences have come to expect from space blockbusters, along with the splashy attractions teased above, the vehicular and simian mayhem. But it’s a fairly intimate epic — not a 2001-style head trip or a George Lucas-indebted space opera, but the tender story of one emotionally constipated man who crosses the cosmos in search of the father who abandoned him in childhood. You could say, in fact, that Gray is more interested in inner- than outer space, and uses a long trek into the latter as a roundabout wormhole into the former.
The plot is a play on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which of course also makes it a genre-bending riff on Apocalypse Now. (Gray, whose We Own the Night was basically The Godfather with cops instead of criminals, is a Coppola acolyte.) After a series of deadly power surges ripple across space and devastatingly hit Earth, decorated astronaut Roy McBride (Pitt) is called in to help stop the phenomenon. It’s his family name that lands him the assignment: Turns out the rays may be coming from Neptune, where Roy’s famed astronaut father (Tommy Lee Jones) disappeared decades earlier while searching for intelligent life beyond the stars.
