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- Astronaut Roy McBride is assigned a secret mission, "Project Ad Astra," to travel to Mars and establish communication with his father, H. Clifford McBride, who vanished during the "Lima Project" searching for extraterrestrial life.
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Jun 7, 2020 · By the time Ad Astra’s ending sees Brad Pitt completing a mission that takes him to the depths of known space, an audience member wouldn’t be faulted for being confused about what just happened.
Astronaut Roy McBride is assigned a secret mission, "Project Ad Astra," to travel to Mars and establish communication with his father, H. Clifford McBride, who vanished during the "Lima Project" searching for extraterrestrial life.
A breakdown to the ending of director James Gray's Ad Astra, starring Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones, now that it's available to watch on HBO Max.
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It’s fair to say Ad Astra lies at the highbrow end of the sci-fi spectrum. It may come with a side of big explosions and space monkeys, but this is an introspective tale of loss and loneliness. To get to that, you need to look past the blockbuster tropes – not to mention some pretty bogus (or strategic?) marketing. Not only does the trailer feature...
Ad astra, Latin for “to the stars”, is a big clue to the film’s themes and encounters. Most obviously, the story revolves around Roy’s voyage to Neptune to find his dad. However, that journey has striking parallels with finding a “father in heaven”, and mirrors Clifford’s own obsessions with touching God. Variations of the phrase also appear in mot...
It is a truth universally acknowledged that films which put a journey front and centre of the plot are never just about the journey. Movie voyages are tools of transformation: it’s not just the landscape that changes, but the protagonists. The Fly has a great spin on this, btw. As you’d expect, then, there are a couple of journeys in Ad Astra. Firs...
After three decades of being utterly alone, it’s very likely Clifford McBride is quite mad. After all, he kills his crew because they want to stop searching and go home. In fact, Clifford’s insanity is driven by a very different kind of isolation. Project Lima was the first manned expedition to the outer solar system, an offshoot of humanity’s comp...
Roy and Clifford are looking for what’s lost. In their own ways, each is searching for a father figure, only to be disappointed. Meh, it’s not as bleak as it sounds. More significantly, it’s one of myriad ways these characters mirror each other. When they leave Earth, the curiously decrepit Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland) confides that men like ...
How else are Roy and Clifford twinned characters? Clearly, both are astronauts, self-absorbed, and emotionally unavailable; both abandon their wives. Both work on the same project, 30 years apart. So far, so obvious. However note also: 1. Roy boarding the SOS craft to find it full of dead astronauts foreshadows his arrival on Lima. 2. Similarly, Cl...
Of course Ad Astra works exactly as we see it unfold. It’s a fantastical story grounded in the realism of physics and space travel. Well, kinda. There’s no end of rebuttals to the film’s science, including tweets by Neil Tyson. Still, essentially it’s a story about two men who go to the edge of the solar system, and only one comes back. The End. … ...
If Ad Astra is a fever dream, that might explain the monkeys. On their own, however, they don’t necessarily suggest delusion, because there’s a plausible reason for their being in the plot. Simply put, the electrical surge knocks out the craft’s power, releasing the vengeful baboons. Story of my life. Either way, the monkeys are symbols of rage and...
Nov 9, 2020 · Ad Astra comes to its climax when Roy, after receiving communication from his father, disobeys the orders from his superiors and travels to the outskirts of Neptune to bring the senior Clifford...
Sep 20, 2019 · Earthly disasters possibly caused by a creator who has been absent as the world has lost hope—the religious allegory embedded in “Ad Astra” is crystal clear if you look for it, but never highlighted in a way that takes away from the film's urgency.
Sep 23, 2019 · Ad Astra is a space epic that's as much about the inner journey as it is about a space exploration. Set in the near future, the story opens with Major Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) barely surviving...
