The final frontier: an unfathomable expanse of icy blackness that we call “outer space”. It’s the cosmic cradle that makes the conditions for life on Earth possible, yet space itself kills it in a matter of seconds. The scale of the solar system, let alone the universe, boggles the mind, paradoxically compelling us to venture further inward into “inner space”– the frontier of our minds. Many films have used the setting of space to plumb the uncharted depths of the human psyche, but few have done so as soulfully as James Gray’s 2019 feature, AD ASTRA.
A Latin phrase meaning “to the stars” (1), AD ASTRA marks a dramatic development in the trajectory of Gray’s filmmaking career. Deriving inspiration from Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness” novella and its cinematic counterpart, Francis Ford Coppola’s APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), the story of a man venturing out to Neptune to find his missing father and avoid earthly calamity is one that can’t be told on the cheap. It would require the resources – and the attendant commercial expectations – of a major studio; in this case, Twentieth Century Fox. This was a new frontier in and of itself for the indie stalwart, who had made his name off a series of relatively low-budget dramas set in New York. There was no track record to go off of; no promise that he could capably handle a $90 million budget and the grueling demands of a special effects extravaganza. All he could offer beyond the integrity of his earlier work was his passion, fueled by an early love for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) and the great science fiction films of the past.
It helps that he had a strong script to work from, which he had co-written with writer Ethan Gross. A classmate of Gray’s at the University of Southern California in the late 1980’s – and a self-described onetime rival consumed by petty jealousy over the young Gray’s seemingly-effortless talent – Gross had contacted his old film school chum in 2007 with a pitch for a science fiction story in the vein of Kubrick’s towering space opus. Gray agreed to write it along with Gross, but rather than write it on spec, they were able to persuade RT Pictures to finance the development (3). Gray further leaned on his relationship with actor and producer Brad Pitt, who he’d been looking for the right project to collaborate on since they struck up a friendship in the late 90’s. The project was subsequently set up at Pitt’s shingle, Plan B Pictures, with producers Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner working alongside Gray’s regular producing partner Anthony Katagas and the billionaire mogul Arnon Milchan.
Even with a pedigree like this, with a mega-bankable star enthusiastically attached, Gray and company struggled for years to get AD ASTRA made. The journey to a greenlight was an arduous one, with no shortage of conflict between the artist and Twentieth Century Fox Studios, resulting in compromises like a changed ending (1). In the end, Gray’s vision won out relatively unscathed. In retrospect, it was an artistic “last chopper out of Vietnam” moment, being one of the last films to go into production before Fox was acquired by Disney, released in the uncertain wake of their industry-shaking merger. Simply put, it was a hell of an environment in which to make one’s major studio debut, but Gray pulls it off in high-style with an ambitious sci-fi epic into the frontier of a man’s soul.
Set one hundred years into the future, AD ASTRA presents a fairly grounded evolution of our spacefaring capabilities. We’ve successfully colonized the moon, but the outer reaches of our solar system remain inhospitable and elusive; a terrifying wild west where few dare to venture. We meet Pitt’s Roy McBride atop the Earth, engaged in a daring spacewalk on the towering columns of a futuristic space station just as a mysterious energy burst from deep space unexpectedly erupts and sends him hurtling back towards terra firma. Shortly thereafter, he’s pulled in by the military for a secretive assignment that only he can carry out. The bursts, which continue to blast out waves of destruction that threaten Earth itself, have been found to originate from Neptune – the product of a human being. Said human is Roy’s father, the highly-decorated astronaut Commander H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), sent to the outer reaches of space to search for alien life when Roy was only a child. Long thought dead, the Commander has emerged as the source of these antimatter “surges”, consumed by a spaceborne psychosis that threatens life throughout the solar system. Now, Roy must travel to Neptune himself in a last-ditch bid to stop his father and save Earth.
As epic and expansive as AD ASTRA’s storyline sounds, Grays’ executed vision is concerned very much with interiority and emotional isolation. Pitt’s voiceover, which was not originally in the script and added into the film after enlisting the help of writer Charlie Kaufman in post (1), combs over his past to find the clues that will save the future. All the while, he dwells on his mistakes and the isolation he feels as both an astronaut and a man – particularly the breakup with his wife (a severely underutilized Liv Tyler, also shoehorned into the film during the post process after disappointing test screening feedback). Pitt’s performance is an interesting one, marked by a machinelike control of his emotions but unable to break free of an all-consuming melancholy. Indeed, the voiceover does the vast majority of the heavy lifting when it comes to his character’s emotional expression. Jones is similarly subdued, albeit shifted towards a psychotic register. When he’s finally found in Neptune’s orbit, he’s broken-down, tired, and the last surviving member of his crew… having single-handedly killed them all. His trajectory very much resembles that of APOCALYPSE NOW’s Colonel Kurtz: a deluded madman left to his own devices in the wilderness. He makes for a satisfying antagonist, his willful rejection of humanity standing as a compelling foil to Roy’s cosmic quest for intimate connection, even as he senses the same creeping tendency for emotional withdrawal that claimed his father. That the fate of the solar system boils down to a simple confrontation between a son and his father is AD ASTRA’s most effective conceit, producing a simple – but profound and universal – resonance that reaches across the cold vacuum of space.
Though the story is laser-focused on this fateful encounter between Roy and his father, the plot’s various waystations provide ample opportunity for other compelling characters. Of these, Ruth Negga’s Helen Lantos and Donald Sutherland’s Thomas Pruitt are particular standouts. Lantos is the Director of Operations on Mars, which in the film is humanity’s most remote settlement– established enough that she was born there. Lantos has a personal connection to Roy despite having never met him before, as her father was one of those killed by Commander McBride as his Lima Project went off the rails. Negga is the conflicted face of those whose lives Roy’s father destroyed, while Sutherland is evidence of the good and honorable man he was – and could still be again. Warm and paternalistic in a way that Commander McBride could never be, Sutherland’s Thomas Pruitt initially accompanies Roy on his mission, only for his frail condition and a surprise attack from space pirates to prevent him from venturing past Earth’s influence. John Ortiz and Natasha Lyonne also make brief cameos; Ortiz as the Lieutenant General that gives Roy his mission assignment at the beginning, and Lyonne as an eccentric greeter once Roy arrives at the Mars outpost.
Gray had achieved stunning results on his previous two films with cinematographer Darius Khondji, but with Khondji off in South Korea shooting Bong Joon-Ho’s OKJA, he needed someone more immediately available for the complicated technical challenges that needed to be worked out in early prep (2). He subsequently turned to Hoyte van Hoytema, whose work on films like LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008) and TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (2011) had impressed him. However, it was Christopher Nolan’s INTERSTELLAR (2014) that convinced Gray to approach Hoytema, convinced of the cinematographer’s ability to navigate the particular visual language of science fiction and space travel. With AD ASTRA, Hoyte differentiates his work from Nolan’s space drama by developing a look that draws parallels between the vast scale of the solar system and Roy’s interior state. As such, our Sun becomes the key aesthetic anchor– specifically, the evolution of its color and intensity. The further out that Roy ventures, the dimmer and less pure it becomes. Hard flares of white light define Earth and the Moon, giving way to a dirty orange on the surface of Mars, and finally to a tiny pinprick easily overpowered by the shadowy cobalt glow of Neptune.
While Hoyte and Nolan had shot INTERSTELLAR on 35mm and 65mm IMAX film, the unique challenges of AD ASTRA’s 60-day shoot compelled the production to supplement their own 35mm photography with digital capture on a significant number of visual effects shots. With the exception of Aaton’s Super 35mm Penelope camera, Gray and Hoyte stay entirely within the Arri camera system, deploying the Arricam LT, ST, and Arriflex 435 Advance for shots captured on film, and the black and white version of the Arrix Alexa XT for shots designed to make inspired use of its infrared capabilities (more on that later). A set of Zeiss Master Primes and a 2.39:1 aspect ratio unify the look across this collection of cameras, resulting in a crisp & elegant look with a fine grain structure imprinting a subtle, earthy veneer.
Hoyte brings an expected push for high-quality cinematic imagery, but his desire to innovate and experiment proves a major value add. He shares Gray’s inclination to avoid the easy route of rendering all effects work within the computer; instead, they deploy every tool available to them, from CGI to practical models and real NASA imagery. They also invent new workflows to enhance the realism, evidenced in their unique approach to a moonbuggy chase sequence where Roy is ambushed by pirates on the moon’s surface. There were plenty of landscapes on Earth that could stand in for the Moon (albeit with a few major digital tweaks), but nowhere could accurately replicate the correct contrast ratio of unfiltered sunlight over such a large space. Most wouldn’t notice, of course, but these are the kind of nuances that push the art of visual effects steadily forward.
To solve this problem, Hoyte turned to infrared capture, achieved using special filters on an Arri Alexa XT camera and rigging it up to achieve an identical image with the primary film camera (2). Iain Marck’s American Cinematographer article on AD ASTRA, “Terra Incognita”, goes into much greater detail about Hoyte’s approach, but the general idea involved the rig capturing contrast metadata while the infrared lens turns the sky black and the desert landscape of their shooting location a stark lunar white. These innovations were subsequently used to similar effect on the day-for-night sequences in Jordan Peele’s NOPE (2022), and while having multiple cameras aligned on a single mount might seem cumbersome, the idea continues to hold significant promise for unique lighting challenges to come.
Gray’s prior experience on THE LOST CITY OF Z – and to a lesser extent, THE IMMIGRANT (2014) – makes for an effortless handling of AD ASTRA’s epic scope. This is a film of landscapes, be it awe-inspiring compositions of spacecraft dwarfed by gas giants or close-ups that study the crags of Pitt’s face and capture the all-too-human vulnerability of the otherwise ageless movie star. Gray crafts several standout action sequences, like the aforementioned pirate raid on the moon’s surface or the crazed zero-gravity monkey attack in a derelict craft; each crafted with precision, care and the kind of focus on nuanced character that’s developed over years outside a commercial studio environment. Returning editors John Axelrad and Lee Haugen are instrumental in this regard, deftly bringing out the soul of the story via its connective tissue while leveraging their prior knowledge of Gray’s instincts to assist in further expanding his storytelling.
AD ASTRA unfolds over the billions of miles between here and Neptune – an unfathomable distance that Gray and company are able to capture in a locale much closer to home: the city of Santa Clarita, CA and its surrounding areas. Its cosmic immersiveness is a testament to the work of production designer Kevin Thompson. Each stop on Roy’s journey gets its own distinct look via color, light, and architecture. Rather than build sets to fit a certain design aesthetic or afford themselves complete control, the filmmakers would choose to shoot much of the film in practical locations, like the Los Angeles Hall of Records or downtown’s Union Station (2), or my personal favorite: the former Sunkist headquarters, an eccentric Brutalist building plopped down in the middle of Sherman Oaks five minutes from my own home. Active subway stations were repurposed into the sleek, commercialized pedestrian tunnels of a bustling Moon colony, echoing the production’s grey, tech-dominated design aesthetic for Earth’s original satellite. Mars is marked by its characteristic warm hues, favoring oranges and yellows more so over the expected reds. To render the stark remoteness of the Mars outpost, Gray and company used abandoned Red Car subway tunnels underneath a department store in downtown Los Angeles (2).
This considered approach extends to the film’s spacecraft designs. Each ship and floating waystation receives its own look; the tech and aesthetic touches growing more outdated and simple the further Roy travels. Roy’s first flight represents space travel at its most advanced and commercialized, depicting a ride to the moon aboard a Virgin spacecraft – complete with signature purple cabin lighting. The choice to make it a commercially branded flight is natural, reflecting the expected trajectory of private space travel over the next hundred years, but it also evokes the famous Pan Am flight to the moon depicted in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (itself reinforcing Kubrick’s legacy as a cultural and technological thinker ahead of his time). That an in-flight pillow costs $125 is a passing detail that nevertheless builds Gray’s world – a jaw-dropping price by today’s standards, but it would seem that inflation is as certain a force as gravity. As Roy travels to Mars and beyond, the spacecraft interiors increasingly resemble the inelegant, utilitarian forms we know from today’s designs, further conveying the dramatic distances of deep space and the unfathomable scales of time they engender. This conceit echoes a similar journey in APOCALYPSE NOW, with Martin Sheen’s Captain Willard venturing further into humanity’s primitive past as he treks deeper into the jungle in search of Colonel Kurtz.
Composer Max Richter proves instrumental (no pun intended) in conveying the soulful emotionality of Gray’s storytelling, delivering an expansive suite of poignant & brooding orchestral cues. Recorded in Vienna (4), Richter’s score works on a majestic scale even as it burrows deep into Roy’s aching inner monologue. Curiously, the film also makes extensive use of a parallel score by Lorne Balfe, giving the Scottish student from “The House of Zimmer” an “additional music” credit. His contribution is mostly electronic in nature, possessed of a pulsing intensity and avant-garde, almost animalistic flourishes. While one might think these dueling scores would clash, Richter and Balfe’s cues play surprisingly well together, capturing the cold emptiness of space as well as the warm, soaring majesty of the human heart. AD ASTRA’s musical soundscape is further textured by an electronic track from the German composer Nils Frahm, in addition to imaginative sound design that underlays the real “sounds” emitted by the planets themselves – that is, the sound that results in translating their natural frequencies into an audible signal (Neptune in particular sounds extremely spooky).
AD ASTRA makes for an unexpected companion piece to Gray’s previous film, THE LOST CITY OF Z, in that both deploy a “Heart of Darkness”-inspired storytelling structure to document a solitary man’s obsessive quest into the unknown, and the complicating effects that his ambitions have on those closest to him. Being a particularly dramatic departure from the indie chamber dramas that made his name, and working with the biggest budget of his career, Gray would find himself at a slight disadvantage in this unfamiliar mass-market frontier. For one, he was deprived of final cut, which he would later describe to the Hollywood Reporter as “painful a thing as I have ever experienced outside the death of a loved one” (5). Poor test screening results ensured maximum hurt in this regard, necessitating a week of reshoots that forced Gray to bend the integrity of a brilliant story, beautifully told, to the fickle whims of mass audiences unwilling to apply the same care in their own watching.
That Gray doesn’t lose himself entirely to the studio machine is a testament to his artistic fortitude. AD ASTRA’s inward-looking storyline allows ample opportunity for the same kind of soulful grace notes and sublime creative touches that define his previous films. One of the film’s most standout images, in my mind, comes during Roy’s lunar buggy ride, just before the pirate ambush. As he takes in the moon’s surface rushing past him, he reaches up and lets a floating stream of moon dust breeze through his gloves. It’s a small moment that foregrounds awe, emphasizing mankind’s natural tendencies to make physical contact with creation… even if it must be done through inches of bulky rubber. Indeed, it’s moments like these – the brief close-ups that might otherwise have been ruthlessly cut for running time – that illustrate the beating heart of Gray’s artistic intent. In his own words, given in that same interview with American Cinematographer magazine: “what I was trying to say with the close-ups in this film was that, as an unknown, deep space isn’t anything we can relate to. What actually matters is the human being; the true terra incognita is the landscape of the soul”. (2)
If there’s a solitary theme running throughout Gray’s filmography, it is that of a protagonist separated from their destiny by a challenging distance; yearning ambitions nevertheless grounded by the obligations they feel towards their family and the places they come from. Films like THE YARDS (2000), WE OWN THE NIGHT (2007) and TWO LOVERS (2008) use the East River as a natural barrier for characters in the outer boroughs chasing the promise of betterment and self-realization as embodied in the twinkling spires of Manhattan. THE IMMIGRANT portrays the complicated and often-heartwrenching process of assimilation, positioning the psychological barriers of culture, language and man’s tendency to exploit and deceive the disadvantaged as the distance its protagonist must navigate. THE LOST CITY OF Z takes this template rather literally, with Charlie Hunnam’s British explorer actually disregarding his familial duties in pursuit of glory in an exotic and unmapped paradise, only to pay a terrible price. AD ASTRA’s place in this milieu is self-evident, taking the ideas of distance and familial responsibility to their extreme conclusions. Roy’s journey across the void is mind-boggling magnitudes wider than a trip across the East River, but the psychological quests are similar – after all, the term “astronaut” is Greek for “star sailor”. Family issues don’t get more dramatic than a son appealing to his deluded father’s innate humanity to prevent him from destroying all of creation.
After a warm reception at the Venice Film Festival, AD ASTRA would meet with generally positive reviews upon general release. Writing for RogerEbert.com, critic Brian Tallerico would praise Gray’s “rare, nuanced storytelling, anchored by one of Brad Pitt’s career-best performances and remarkable technical achievements on every level”. If there was any worry that the grounded dramatist couldn’t deliver on sci-fi spectacle, it was soon assuaged. “Gray proves beyond measure that he’s got the chops to make a movie like this”, writes Variety’s Owen Gleiberman. Critical admiration, however, doesn’t always translate to financial success. AD ASTRA would be a decent performer at the box office, earning $127 in worldwide gross receipts – not quite enough to be regarded as a financial success, considering the cost of prints and advertising and the theaters’ cut. Awards recognition would be minimal, culminating in a single Oscar nomination for Best Sound Mixing.
This was a respectable showing, considering the commercial risks of Gray’s artistic approach, and the quiet integrity of his storytelling has only grown stronger in the years since. It’s not a bad legacy in the least to be mentioned in the same breath as INTERSTELLAR, and Gray’s mainstream profile is bigger than it ever was before. He’s proven his range as a filmmaker, as well as his ability to maintain his singular voice as an artist in the face of studio demands and audience-friendly compromises. Now that he’d ventured out into the farthest reaches of time and space, he’d demonstrated a mastery of the whole spectrum of narrative and physical production scales. No matter which direction he would now choose, his next project would inevitably stand to be a declarative statement on the kind of storyteller he wished to be going forward.
AD ASTRA is currently available on 4K ultra high definition Blu Ray via Twentieth Century Fox.
Credits:
Producers: Dede Gardner, James Gray, Anthony Katagas, Jeremy Kleiner, Arnon Milchan, Brad Pitt, Rodrigo Texieira
Written by: James Gray & Ethan Gross
Director of Photography: Hoyte van Hoytema
Production Designer: Kevin Thompson
Edited by: John Axelrad, Lee Haugen
Music by: Max Richter and Lorne Balfe
References:
- IMDB Trivia Page
- Marcks, Iain. “Terra Icognita: Ad Astra”. American Cinematographer; October 23, 2019
- Declaration of James Gray (Dkt. No. 150) Jones v. Twentieth Century Studios, Inc. (C.D. Cal. May 31, 2023), Text.
- James Gray’s ‘Ad Astra’ to Feature Music by Lorne Balfe”. Film Music Reporter. August 23, 2019. Archived from the original on August 27, 2019. Retrieved September 19, 2019.
- Abramovitch, Seth (September 28, 2022). “Jeremy Strong Knows What You Think”. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved September 29, 2022.
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