In an era where a space travel has been done more often, many spaceship facilities has been built, including outside the Earth. At that time, the solar system is struck by unknown power surge. Roy McBride, who survived the surge when doing an observation was told about Lima Project, a past mission which is considered to be related with the surge. More interesting, the project was led by Roy’s father, Clifford McBride, to discover the existence of intelligent life on the outer planet. Wondering his father’s whereabout, who is believed has reached Neptune and still alive, Roy agreed a secret mission to try to communicate with him. Along with his inner conflict during the journey, the movie also showed the unexpected hurdles faced, such as the “space pirate”. The farther Roy’s journey has been passed, the more he would know the truth of the Lima Project.
Ad Astra is not for everyone, including me. That’s my first note regarding this movie. It shows a slow developed narration instead of series of thrilling space trip scenes, perhaps it reflects how long it takes to reach faraway planet like Saturn. Honestly, I almost fell asleep twice during the second act of the movie and considered to walk out of the cinema. It also didn’t show any space wonders and give a plot hole about how people can live longer outside Earth when this movie illustrate a basecamp on Mars. I mean, how could they fulfill their food and oxygen need? However, our solar system is illustrated well with its cinematography, especially when the movie visualises the outer planets. Even though having unclear time setting, the movie still explore about what astronauts can do at the space at the time, like raiding other spacemen and experimenting with animal. However the setting seemed inconsistent since Roy and the other seems don’t prepare well for any of those known obstacles.
Here, Roy is very motivated in searching for his father, made him keen to finish the secret mission, whatever it takes. This motive, and the big question at the start of the movie, triggered the inner conflict of himself. Alongside with the quiet plot of his space journey, this movie gives a plot to reveal what the astronauts did during the Lima Project, to answer “Is anybody out there life beyond Earth?”. It narrates that the astronauts (or researchers) are willing to literally die, or (at least, like what Clifford did) abandon their family, to answer that question. Talking about death, the movie shows the corpse of the dead astronauts convincingly, makes the plot quite gore for a while. As minor spoiler, there is a moment when Roy finally encountered his father. However, their father-son chemistry is less explored. At least, the meeting would give Roy answer to the main question in this movie. It would give him double satisfactions in the end.
I couldn’t say anything more about this movie since the movie isn’t for me who expected an epic space story like what I watched on The Martian. Personally, I can only give 6 of 10 scores for this movie.
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