Ad Astra (2019)

It's divisive. Only 64% of audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics gave it 82%.

The near future, a time when both hope and hardships drive humanity to look to the stars and beyond. While a mysterious phenomenon menaces to destroy life on planet Earth, astronaut Roy McBride undertakes a mission across the immensity of space and its many perils to uncover the truth about a lost expedition that decades before boldly faced emptiness and silence in search of the unknown. Wikipedia ↗

Ad Astra is a 2019 American science fiction drama directed by James Gray. Brad Pitt stars as Major Roy McBride, a stoic, emotionally detached astronaut in the near future who is sent on a classified mission across the solar system to find his father H. Clifford McBride, played by Tommy Lee Jones, a legendary astronaut-explorer who went missing near Neptune 16 years ago while searching for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Roy's journey from Earth to the Moon, Mars, and the outer planets becomes both a literal and metaphorical odyssey into the void — the emptiness of space reflecting Roy's emotional isolation and the distance between fathers and sons. James Gray conceived Ad Astra as an intimate character study set against the vastness of space, drawing from Apocalypse Now's journey-into-darkness structure and 2001's contemplative pacing. Brad Pitt's understated performance, largely conveyed through internal monologue and subtle facial expression, was one of his most restrained.

Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography created stunning images of lunar landscapes, Martian settlements, and the rings of Neptune. Ad Astra earned $135 million worldwide on a $80 million budget.