Inside the look of Brad Pitt's 'Ad Astra' and its 'near future' sci-fi vision
An opening title card declares that "Ad Astra" takes place in the near future. That means far enough away from now that there is a populated colony on the moon, but also close enough to our time that within that colony is a Subway sandwich franchise and a DHL shipping outpost.
Directed and co-written by James Gray, "Ad Astra" convincingly creates a world that is both familiar and fantastic. In the film Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride, an astronaut sent on a top-secret mission to discover what's behind the destructive electromagnetic pulses coming from near Neptune that threaten the existence of life on Earth. The answer might involve McBride's father (Tommy Lee Jones), a decorated astronaut long considered missing in space.
As McBride journeys billions of miles across the galaxy, he also contends with pirates on the surface of the moon, must break into a rocket as it is launching from Mars, wards off
