AD ASTRA

'''AD ASTRA. James Gray, director, co-script''' with Ethan Gross, producer (along with seven others, including Brad Pitt). Kevin Thompson, production design. Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, featured players. China, Brazil, USA: Twentieth-Century Fox (one production company and US distribution), 2019. See IMDb for highly complex production and distribution.

Quest for the Father story, with some degree of the Atonement part and other key elements of the Quest/Odyssey ("Monomyth") pattern. Relevant here for containment within spacecraft and underground or otherwise-protected installations on Earth's Moon and Mars. There is also one sequence of a deadly Moon-buggy chase for a different sort of military vehicle and take on future warfare, or piracy, and a fair number of the traditional hexagons (a visual trope in SF films and video).

In the line of his periodic reminders that he's not just a pretty face and celebrity, Pitt delivers a master-class on close-in acting: cf. and contrast MAROONED and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (film). The effect is like that pointed out by film critics and historians on how low-key ("flat") b/w SF films of the long 1950s in a sense trained their audiences to watch for small actions and deviations from what we think of as normal or normal within the world of a specific film or with a character. Impressive scenes with Pitt have him under surveillance and his psychology probed and mission-fitness judged, putting together inevitable containment within layers of human-made artifacts for protection from vacuum and other space dangers with intrusions — however gentle as these things go — into his mind.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24Sep19