Ad Astra sends Brad Pitt’s Roy McBride on a mission across space to find his missing father, Clifford, played by Tommy Lee Jones. The film spends its runtime exploring isolation, family, and the quiet horror of the void, and it mostly earns its weight.
Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.
Roy McBride’s Long Journey
Pitt plays Roy McBride, an astronaut tasked with reaching a distant antenna after a massive solar flare cripples Earth’s power grid. The mission sends him from orbit to Mars to a distant planet, each leg stretching the story thin but giving director James Gray room to linger on the emptiness around him.
The performance is controlled and still, a man moving through duty who rarely lets emotion surface until the film forces it out. Jones appears as Clifford McBride, a scientist whose work has consumed him and his family for decades. His scenes are few but heavy, and the film trusts the silence between them to do the work.
The Look of Space
Gray builds his story around the vastness of space, and the film’s technical craft is where it truly excels. The shots of Roy floating between planets are genuinely beautiful, and the sound design — the absence of it — sells the loneliness of being alone in the dark. This is a film that understands that silence can be more terrifying than any monster.
The visual effects hold up. The film avoids spectacle for atmosphere, and the result feels lived-in rather than staged.
What Holds It Back
Ad Astra is not a fast film. Its pace is deliberate, almost somnambulant, and some viewers will find stretches of it dragging. The middle section, where Roy drifts between stations and ships, loses urgency even as the stakes remain high. The film is also light on character development outside the McBrides, leaving supporting figures feeling like plot devices rather than people.
None of this sinks the movie, but it keeps it from greatness.
Roy McBride’s Mission Stages
Here’s how Roy McBride’s journey breaks down:
- The initial mission to repair the damaged antenna.
- A stopover on Mars, where the story pauses to breathe.
- A journey to a distant planet, where the film’s central mystery comes into focus.
- The final confrontation with Clifford McBride.
Each stage is necessary to get Roy to the moment of truth, though the pacing suffers in the middle.
Comparing the Two McBrides
| Character | Role | Relationship to Roy |
|---|---|---|
| Roy McBride | Astronaut | Son, carrying guilt over his father’s disappearance |
| Clifford McBride | Scientist | Father, disappeared years earlier, now a legend |
The table shows how tightly wound the story is around this single family line.
The Final Act
The film’s ending is a slow reveal rather than a grand one, and it asks the audience to sit with ambiguity rather than resolution. That choice will please some and frustrate others, but it fits the film’s overall tone of quiet dread.
Roy McBride’s journey is a lonely one, and the film never pretends otherwise.
Where It Lands
Ad Astra is a deliberately slow, contemplative science fiction film that leans on mood and atmosphere over action. It’s not for everyone, and its middle section drags, but the performances and the visual poetry make it worth sitting through. Pitt gives a career-best performance, and Gray directs with a sure hand, even when the script stumbles.
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