Ad Astra trailer

I will confess that I had never heard of this Ad Astra film before, but it looks pretty cool. It stars Brad Pitt, who is always good, as an astronaut who has to go and see what the hell his long lost dad (Tommy Lee Jones) is up to somewhere in the solar system. For those of you who didn’t spend five years of their lives learning Latin, ‘Ad Astra’ means ‘to the stars’. I knew that knowledge would come in handy one day.

When I started to watch the trailer I thought it might be quite a cerebral bit of science fiction, like 2001 or Solaris. Then there are explosions and Liv Tyler looking vaguely forlorn and I thought of Armageddon. Then there’s a car chase with laser guns on the moon like a bigger budget re-imagining of Moonraker. I was struggling to work out what sort of experience I, despite the confusion, was thoroughly enjoying in the trailer. Then I read parts of an interview with the director James Gray who said that Ad Astra will have “the most realistic depiction of space travel that’s been put in a movie”. Which sounds like a good thing. He then went on to compare it to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which is a superb book set in the Congo, that was subsequently the basis of Apocalypse Now, a superb film set in Vietnam. This time it’s in space!

Put all the above in a big pot and it has all the ingredients of something I think I am going to enjoy. For more information you can check out the official website by clicking on the link. Ad Astra is due out on the 20th September 2019. Here’s the trailer: