Ad Astra sees Brad Pitt at his very best. Stripped bare of the idiosyncrasies and charisma that have defined some of his most memorable characters, Pitt’s Roy McBride is perhaps his most subdued and nuanced role. While Roy can overcome his physical challenges with calm and collected ease, the closer he gets to his father, the more his expressive eyes betray the craquelure of his hardened shell. Accompanied by a mostly effective voiceover (that occasionally drifts into heavy-handedness), Roy’s journey becomes more emotionally fraught the further we progress into the film’s 122-minute runtime: He begins to fail the psychological baseline tests he used to pass with ease, tears well up in his eyes, and memories of his estranged wife (Liv Tyler) - a relationship clearly ruined by his inherited failure to be emotionally present - rise to the surface. Halfway through the film, the message is clear: While Roy’s emotionally stunted persona may have shaped him into the perfect cool-guy pulp hero, it has also transformed him into an irreparably damaged human being.

James Gray’s biggest film to date, Ad Astra is an ambitious vision that dwarfs the earthly scope of his previous directorial efforts. And while Gray’s near-future world-building consists of awe-inspiring superstructures, minimalist moonbases, and incredible technology, his portrait of what’s to come is decidedly bleak. Some elements of this world are humorous, others are shocking, but nearly all of them are damning - travel terminals on the moon are littered with Applebees’ and Subways, blankets during space transit cost $125, and the greed-fueled battle for resources transcends its earthly origins in the form of marauding pirates. The world of Ad Astra is a sparse, cold, and lonely one, stretched into the vast cosmos, and Pitt’s performance as Roy McBride only fuels the sense of isolation. Mostly a one-hander, the film gives Roy a wide berth, therefore keeping its supporting players at arm’s length - Donald Sutherland gets some fleeting screentime as a mentor figure, and Ruth Negga’s appearance amounts to little more than a glorified cameo, playing the director of a Mars facility. The stage of Ad Astra is ultimately a solitary one, a structure that mirrors Roy’s claustrophobically insular monomyth.

There will undoubtedly be a large number of science purists that will dunk on the film’s many technical inaccuracies, but if you can look past the film’s shaky astrophysics and minor plot holes, there’s a bigger message that Gray is trying to convey. And helping to convey it is cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. No stranger to space movies, Hoytema changes up the visuals considerably from his work on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, opting for a fuzzier palette while also employing striking uses of color: the dusty ochre of Mars and the hazy blues and purples of Neptune make for some of the film’s most stunning visuals. Ad Astra may explore some heady themes, but its penchant for spectacle is something else entirely, deserving to be seen on the biggest screen possible.

On the surface, Ad Astra differs greatly from James Gray’s previous works, but under the hood, it runs on an engine similar to his previous filmography: the human engine. While the film may have antimatter energy surges and shootouts on the moon, in the end, it functions at its best as a stunning deconstruction of a pulp hero. Clifford McBride abandoned his family for “the work.” Unable to face his responsibilities as a husband and father, he blasted off into space under the guise of exploring the far reaches of the galaxy, leaving his son with deep psychological fissures. Ad Astra is a plea to redefine our gender and rediscover our humanity. What if whatever clench-fisted masculinity we use to punch through the veil of the unknowable, to defeat our adversities, and to push our scientific boundaries, ultimately proves to be moot? What if, in the end, there’s nothing out there for us more than what we have now? Then this is all there is, and all we have is each other.

GRADE: A-