"Brad Pitt is an intergalactic Captain Willard, taking a fraught mission up-river in James Gray’s Ad Astra, an outer-space Apocalypse Now. In place of steaming jungles, this gives us existential chills. Instead of Viet Cong soldiers, it provides man-eating baboons and pirates riding dune-buggies. It’s an extraordinary picture, steely and unbending and assembled with an unmistakable air of wild-eyed zealotry. Ad Astra, be warned, is going all the way - and it double-dares us to buckle up for the trip.
"Set in the near future, this casts Pitt as Major Roy McBride. He’s travelling out to Neptune in search of his lost father, a man he barely knows, and seeking to halt a series of unexplained cosmic rays that threaten life on Earth. McBride Sr (Tommy Lee Jones) is the film’s Colonel Kurtz, a brilliant astronaut who went AWOL years before and may in some way be responsible for the current crisis.
"Director Gray is an established purveyor of big, brooding, ambitious cinema, from The Yards through The Immigrant to 2017’s Amazonian adventure, The Lost City of Z. But he’s never made anything as ambitious as this soaring psychological space-opera, with its cool surfaces, dark pockets and sudden flashes of violence. Ad Astra is so deadly serious... immaculately staged and sustained that it sweeps us up in its orbit." - The Guardian