Movie review: James Gray's sci-fi epic 'Ad Astra' fuses the emotional and intellectual to dazzling effect
Somber, stirring, ridiculous and just shy of sublime, James Gray's speculative fiction "Ad Astra" opens with a vision of a man falling to Earth. He's an astronaut named Roy McBride (Brad Pitt), and he's perched on an International Space Antenna - basically a very, very high-altitude ladder, with the world spreading out like a vast blue-green carpet beneath him. It's an impossibly serene and beautiful moment that is disrupted by a series of sudden explosions, as shock waves surge through the antenna and send Roy tumbling toward what looks like near-certain doom.
Miraculously, he survives the fall, thanks to a parachute and a gift for staying calm in even the riskiest situations. In this he resembles his father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones), a legendary space explorer who vanished decades ago on
