"Ad Astra": Slow boat to Neptune
The space scenes in the movie Ad Astra are almost unbearably gorgeous, possessed of the kind of chilly, silent beauty also evident in space films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gravity. They are further served by the lead performance by Brad Pitt as someone also capable of a chilly silence, only to reveal torment as his walls break down. It's tempting to say this performance tops his engaging one in Once Upon a Time in ... Hollywood but it's better to argue that he's just having one of those stretches where the Oscars should grade not for single works but for the cumulative effort in a year. It would be an even more rewarding performance for audiences if the movie itself was something more. At times it seems like a science-fiction variation on Apocalypse Now, an episodic journey toward disaster, or one of those fat adventure novels that, having carried the reader along for hundreds of pages, abruptly wraps things up before a second volume is required. The film, directe