“It’s very ‘Heart of Darkness.’ It’s sorta like, if you got ‘Apocalypse Now’ and ‘2001’ in a giant mash-up and you put a little [Joseph] Conrad in there and you hope its as good. But it’s probably not. I’m being silly. But those were the influences,” director James Gray said earlier this year about his heady new sci-fi epic “Ad Astra.” The film has been in the works for years and sees Gray pulling further and further away from his roots in crime films set in New York. But as every film Gray has made has demonstrated since he “left” that genre, “The Immigrant,” “The Lost City Of Z,” the DNA of his films, stories about class and struggle and the darker underbelly of the soul are always present.
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“Ad Astra” sees Brad Pitt as an astronaut who has to go on a mission into outer space to unravel a mystery that also involves his father; an astronaut that went missing on a similar mission 20 years earlier.
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Astronaut Roy McBride travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his missing father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. His journey will uncover secrets that challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.
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The film seems to very much be in the Tarkovsky-ian vein of strange, mysterious, intelligent sci-fi films like, “Solaris,” the influence of which we’ve seen recently in films like Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and Claire Denis’ “High Life.” The meaning of life and the fragility of our existence, dwarfed by the magnitude of space, always seems to factor into these movies somehow existentially. Gray, no doubt, will pursue the same line of thinking, but perhaps it’s more of a commercial release like “Interstellar” or Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity.” At least, Fox, now owned by Disney, would love that.
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Starring Brad Pitt, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, and Jamie Kennedy, “Ad Astra’ is due for release on September 20, this fall. Hopefully, if we’re lucky, we’ll get to see it early at Venice, Telluride, TIFF or all three. Watch the new trailer below and check out the new poster as well.
New poster! James Gray Calls Upcoming Sci-Fi Epic #AdAstra A “Giant Mash-Up” Of ‘Apocalypse Now’ & ‘2001’ https://t.co/FGEfKGfipO pic.twitter.com/GXlYLtTzyB
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Updated: new featurette with lots of new footage and behind the scenes clips and interviews.