Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, Kimberly Elise, Loren Dean, Donnie Keshawarz, Sean Blackmore, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, John Finn, John Ortiz, Freda Foh Shen, Kayla Adams, Ravi Kapoor, Liv Tyler, Elisa Perry, Daniel Sauli, Kimmy Shields, Kunal Dudheker, Greg Bryk, Alyson Reed, Sasha Compere, Justin Dray, Alex Luna, Natasha Lyonne, Zoro Saro Manuel Daghlian, Jacob Sandler, Elizabeth Willaman, Natasha Lyon.

We believe that we know so much that our knowledge has become that on par with the gods of old, it is to our downfall that our pursuit of destroying myths, legends, to dispel the awareness of over reaching our capability and our destiny, that we can eventually control the stars.

To the stars, it is in our D.N.A. to explore the region beyond our own atmosphere, and yet we cannot accurately map our own oceans, and we certainly don’t  remotely understand the power and capability of our mind, what we are thinking and how much distress and pain it can through before it overloads, before it breaks.

Brad Pitt dominates the idea of eternal punishment in a space quest Ad Astra that primarily centres on the feelings of estrangement, alienation, pride and abandonment, and whilst it is a vehicle that offers much in the motion of driving philosophical debate, of asking the audience to understand how neglect and rejection can cause reactions in the Universe, it somehow manages instead to become a narrative of undue confession, of passionless broad strokes that in the end leave, surprisingly, the viewer bored, of knowing there was no big revelation in which to come except for resolution.

That is not to say that the film doesn’t deserve credit where it is due, and on the effects, the sense of being once with the great beyond and part of the void, Ad Astra excels beautifully, it is just in the inner monologue, the sense of the self-determination, that the film betrays itself to the point of dismissing solitude as nothing more than superiority, as egoism caught up in destructive conceit.

You feel for Brad Pitt, but not in the way you might have expected, to carry such a film on your own, regardless of the two heavy weight actors beside him, Donald Sutherland and Tommy Lee Jones, is an enormous task, and whilst Brad Pitt can certainly hold his own and the audience’s attention superbly well, the dominance of the grand idea makes the impact less than suitable, less than ideal.

To push the boundaries of any art is the true exploration of knowledge, but without a definite point, without a specific aim, it becomes a vanity project to look back on without modesty; a premise that Ad Astra is in danger of becoming in future visits.

Ian D. Hall