Scott Allin

Ad Astra aims for the stars, but falls woefully short. Aiming to be an intellectual sci-fi piece based around all-too earthbound human emotional issues, it's navel gazing on a cosmic scale. The visuals are spectacular but are undercut by a poor script and a central character that isn't particularly fascinating or likeable. They say in movies the art is to show, not tell and unfortunately this movie has too many moments of exposition delivered directly to camera from passing underwarmed characters or, most often through the relentless soporific voiceover from the lead character. Pacing wise it seems to have been going for stately but hit glacial instead. Much of the plot is very far fetched and the climactic scene both in terms of the plot and the emotional heart of the movie is a damp squib. It's not all bad, there are some interesting ideas about mankind's future colonization of space, a wonderful hypnotic score, arresting visual effects and Pitt wrestles gamely to breathe life into a cold character, but ultimately these are not enough to compensate for a clunky story and script and turgid self-indulgent direction. Taughter editing may have mitigated some of the flaws, but alas everything is allowed to run just a little too long and nice looking shots that add nothing to the story are retained to further drain the movie's already slovenly momentum.