Another one of those movies that has incredible (#paid!?) hype by most of the world's critics!
It's hard to write why this movie is wrong and not spoiler. However, I will do my best to evoke the insincerity of the authors, who have ruined even one rather viable idea.
So Brad is a famous astronaut who has an even more famous father-astronaut missing in the ancient mission of finding alien civilizations. Our Brad, because of his ultra-ambitious-capable father, never really had one, since he kept everything under his control, and on the said mission he disappeared when our hero was still a teenager.
Now, however, Earth is being swept by terrible electrical storms from outer space, and the heads of the space exploration service think it is the fault of Brad's estranged father whose spacecraft is signaling from the edge of the solar system. That's why Brad embarks on the mission of getting in touch with his long-lost father, though it's actually the real purpose of a mission he doesn't even know - "find and destroy"!
To some extent, all this could be a joke for an interesting elaboration, if that elaboration had not been done so badly. The authors were executed halfway somewhere, so one does not know what Ad Astra really is - a psychological thriller in space, a psycho-drama about the life of an astronaut, an action SF ?
A combination of Gravity and The Martian, with the ambition to reach Interstellar or even 2001: A Space Odyssey ?
Well, it doesn't go that way ...
There are also chases in munroverts with unnamed pirates, nuclear-powered spacecraft rides, but the "winner of the day" is a deft Brad's jumping into a space rocket at launch !?
And all of that filtered with introspective flashbacks, which, I suppose, should emphasize the inner moral dilemmas of the protagonist ?
I have not seen so many superfluous people in a movie that has received such good reviews from many world critics.
If Tommy Lee Jones in the role of disappointed astronaut bard were just a disappointed partisan, he would say - "Did we fight for this?".
Director James Gray has had some mediocre-interesting films so far in his career, such as The Immigrant, Two Lovers, We Own the Night, The Yards or Little Odessa. It could be said that this is his first high-budget project, but as far as I'm concerned, he better stick to what lies with him. The universe is, however, for the braver ...