AD ASTRA

AD ASTRA. James Gray, director, co-script with Ethan Gross, producer (along with seven others, including Brad Pitt). Kevin Thompson, production design. Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, featured players. China, Brazil, USA: Twentieth-Century Fox (one production company and US distribution), 2019. See IMDb for highly complex production and distribution.[1]

Quest for the Father story, with some degree of the Atonement part and other key elements of the Quest/Odyssey ("Monomyth") pattern.[2] Relevant here for containment within spacecraft and underground or otherwise-protected installations on Earth's Moon and Mars. There is also one sequence of a deadly Moon-buggy chase for a different sort of military vehicle and take on future warfare, or piracy, and a fair number of the traditional hexagons (a visual trope in SF films and video).[3]

In the line of his periodic reminders that he's not just a pretty face and celebrity, Pitt delivers a master-class on close-in acting: cf. and contrast MAROONED and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film). The effect is like that pointed out by film critics and historians on how low-key ("flat") b/w SF films of the long 1950s in a sense trained their audiences to watch for small actions and deviations from what we think of as normal or normal within the world of a specific film or with a character. Impressive scenes with Pitt have him under surveillance and his psychology probed and mission-fitness judged, putting together inevitable containment within layers of human-made artifacts for protection from vacuum and other space dangers with intrusions — however gentle as these things go — into his mind.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24Sep19