Ad Astra stars Brad Pitt as Major Roy McBride, the unshakable pride of Space Command and son of trailblazing astronaut H. Clifford McBride, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Writer-director James Gray has described the movie as a “giant mash-up” of Apocalypse Now and 2001, A Space Odyssey.

Warning, there are spoilers below.



If you are looking for non-stop action, Ad Astra will disappoint. If you've seen the trailer, you've seen much of the action. This is a story about one man's introspection. This is made clear as Pitt’s character reflects en route to save the solar system from his AWOL father: “So many times in my life I’ve screwed up. I’ve talked when I should have listened. I’ve been harsh when I should have been tender.”



It is also a story about the gravity (pun intended) of a strained father-son relationship. “I do what I do because of my dad. He was a hero. He gave his life for the pursuit of knowledge." Some are calling it "Dad Astra."

But it's also a beautifully shot space movie.



Unlike so many films set in space, this one looks familiar, in part because it is set in the near future but mostly because things look like they were designed more by engineers than artists. Scene after scene I found myself saying, yup, that’s probably how that will be done.

This is thanks in part to the film's technical advisor Garrett Reisman. As a former astronaut and ISS crew member who has also lived in an underwater laboratory, he understands working in confined places for long periods of time. Reisman also serves as Director of Space Operations at SpaceX.

Space shuttle astronauts Steve Frick and Tony Antonelli were also brought in to advise Pitt on life in space. Both now work for Lockheed Martin. Antonelli, a former Navy test pilot, is now supporting the long-range exploration systems in Houston. Frick directs the company’s advanced technology partnerships with universities. You'll see the Lockheed Martin logo show up in the film on the backs of contractors supporting lunar operations.

In the movie, spacecraft flight decks have elements of the space shuttle with the rest of the long, cylindrical vehicle laid out like the International Space Station, complete with port, starboard, deck and overhead markings on walls to help orient astronauts in directionless microgravity. There are also no huge rotating wheels in space nor are there unexplained magic buttons to conveniently provide artificial gravity.

The now-commercialized Moon is revealed to include a casino, Nathan’s Hot Dogs and an Applebees. The $125 charge for a pillow and blanket on the Virgin Galactic commercial lunar flight seems unfortunately like how that will be done as well.



While space monkeys aren't going to explode like that and the physics of the shockwave in the final scene is questionable at best (as are some aspects of Neptune's rings), overall, the science is remarkably good in Ad Astra.



The emotional state of these astronauts, especially Pitt’s character, is revisited throughout the movie. This is not new to film or science. The idea of measuring emotional response is reminiscent of Blade Runner's Voight-Kampff test, which is rooted in neuroscience. NASA and every other organization with boots on Mars as a goal have also been thinking a lot about how an astronaut's mental state might degrade over long spaceflights.

You only have to think back to the storm that had your family cooped up for a few days to understand why. Shrink your home to the size of an RV and then extend those days to two years and we begin to understand why Space Command would check in on Major McBride’s mental fitness for duty so often. Scientists have been studying the effects of living in space over increasing periods of time since the early 70s.

The Mad Max-inspired Moon rover chase scene was based in more reality that moviegoers might realize. The rovers themselves are essentially versions of those used on Apollo missions 15-17 down to fenders, mesh umbrella antenna and webbed seats. The chase scene is a combination of a CG lunar surface and footage shot in California’s Death Valley. The lunar surface was shot with infrared digital cameras to get the dark black sky and “virtually created, unfiltered, hard sunlight firing through the atmosphere-less air,” cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema told IndieWire. The film location is not far from where JPL tests its Mars rovers for their ability to safely climb hills.



The suspended dust Pitt's character marvels at while speeding across the lunar surface seems non-sensical in that air-less environment at first. But the Apollo astronauts observed what they called a "horizon glow" along the night/day line near where this scene supposed to take place. Recent studies have explained this phenomenon as a permanent dust cloud around the Moon created by impacts from high-speed particles from passing comets. The Geminid meteor shower is particularly strong contributor.

The film also gets the blue sunrise on Mars right. The sun appears about 2/3 the size of sunrises on Earth and blue in color as other wavelengths of light are scattered by dust particles in the atmosphere-starved Martian sky.

Fixing a punctured spacesuit with duct tape isn’t unreasonable. Duct tape has been an important part of the space program. It helped saved the Apollo 13 astronauts and was used to repair a lunar rover fender on Apollo 17. Ad Astra's spacesuits are also very familiar – from the orange "pumpkin suits" worn by shuttle crews after the Challenger disaster to the helmet design which relied on the skills of the cinematographer to light actors faces rather than internal lighting used in films like Armageddon.

The interplanetary engines pictured in the film look like ion drives. These are already in use by the Deep Space 1, Hayabusa and Dawn missions. Ion drives use electricity to accelerate ions of a fuel like xenon or argon gas proving a small but steady amount of thrust.

Ad Astra also gets sound right, embracing silence when necessary. Some scenes take place in an anechoic chamber, an incredibly uncomfortable place designed isolate sound and radio waves, quiet enough to hear your own blood flowing. Even the aircraft hanger-sized anechoic chambers used to test dump-truck sized satellites can feel like the walls are closing in.

Yes Neptune has rings. All the gas giants do. While we aren’t exactly sure how dense Neptune’s rings are, the environment portrayed in the movie probably isn’t very accurate. When the Cassini mission flew through Saturn’s rings, only a few micron-sized particles hit the spacecraft. What we do know about Neptune’s rings has shown similarly small dust, mostly widely separated by clumped together by nearby moon Galatea.



Roy McBride makes his way through a huge underground Martian lake to reach the Neptune-bound rocket. We’ve known since the Viking missions in the 70s that Mars' permafrost extends down around 3 miles in the that location and as deep as 5 miles at the poles. However, Major McBride could be swimming through salt water.



The European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft discovered signs in 2018 of a mile-deep, subsurface salt water lake. Placing a launch pad above a huge water source is not a bad idea. Water deluge systems have been used with large rockets such as the Saturn V and space shuttle to disrupt sound waves preventing them from reflecting back on the vehicle, even destroying it.



Avoiding triggering a planet-encircling dust storm is also not a bad idea.