Ad Astra

Ad Astra is a 2019 American psychological science fiction film produced, co-written, and directed by James Gray. Starring Brad Pitt (who also produced), Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, and Donald Sutherland, it follows an astronaut who ventures into space in search of his lost father, whose obsessive quest to discover intelligent alien life at all costs threatens the Solar System and all life on Earth. The project was announced in early 2016, with Gray saying he wanted to feature "the most realistic depiction of space travel that's been put in a movie". Pitt signed on to star in April 2017 and the rest of the cast joined later that year. Filming began around Los Angeles that August, lasting through October. Ad Astra premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August29, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States on September20, 2019, by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures via 20th Century Fox. It received positive reviews from critics, with praise for Pitt's performance. At the 92nd Academy Awards, it was nominated for Best Sound Mixing. The film grossed $135million worldwide against an budget. Plot In the late 21st century, mysterious power surges threaten to destabilize human civilization. Major Roy McBride is informed that the surges have been traced to the "Lima Project", a space station in orbit around Neptune, sent twenty-nine years earlier to search for intelligent life. Roy's father, H. Clifford McBride, was the project's leader. Roy agrees to travel to Mars in an effort to determine whether the station's crew are still alive. En route to the SpaceCom base on the Moon's far side, a band of scavenger pirates ambush Roy and his colleague Pruitt, but they manage to fight them off. Pruitt then reveals to him that should he fail to prove that the crew survived, the Lima Project station will have to be destroyed. Roy obtains passage to Mars on the SpaceCom cruiser Cepheus.