The actor blasts off in search of long-lost pops Tommy Lee Jones in James Gray’s intergalactically po-faced take on Apocalypse Now
Brad Pitt is an intergalactic Captain Willard, taking a fraught mission up-river in James Gray’s Ad Astra, an outer-space Apocalypse Now which played to rapt crowds at the Venice film festival. In place of steaming jungles, this gives us existential chills. Instead of Viet Cong soldiers, it provides man-eating baboons and pirates riding dune-buggies. It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.
Set in the near future, this casts Pitt as Major Roy McBride, a lonesome samurai who prides himself on the fact his pulse rate has never climbed beyond 80. He’s travelling out to Neptune in search of his lost father, a man he barely knows, and seeking to halt a series of unexplained cosmic rays that threaten life on Earth. Pitt embodies McBride with a series of deft gestures and a minimum of fuss. His performance is so understated it hardly looks like acting at all.
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