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Ad Astra
****
Dir: James Gray (12A, 120 mins)
Brad Pitt goes to space in this thoughtful sci-fi. Ad Astra, meaning ‘to the stars’, offers spectacle alongside some musings on the nature of human existence. Pitt is astronaut Roy McBride, out to contact his father (Tommy Lee Jones) who embarked in a deep space mission years ago, when Pitt was a child. As he grows up, McBride hero-worshipped his dad, believing him long dead in the vastness of space, but following a worldwide event called The Surge that produces power outages and chaos across the globe, he is called in to make contact with him. His father had been on a spaceship, part of the Lima project, a search for alien life, when he was lost – or was he? Adding to the intrigue is the fact that he was experimenting with substances that could end the solar system as we know it so… A mixture of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Heart Of Darkness and Interstellar, this seems to be an intelligent sci-fi that also features moon buggy chases. Written and directed by James Gray, who also gave us the excellent The Lost City Of Z and the gritty We Own The Night, with a top class cast including Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler and Donald Sutherland, this secretive blockbuster could be stellar.
Opens Sept 18
words Keiron Self