Sad Astra, Dad Astra, Bad Astra—the Twitter jokes about James Gray’s lonely space thriller Ad Astra, which stars Brad Pitt as a man in search of his father at the far outskirts of the solar system, wrote themselves. And yet no joke can really summon the strange wonders of Gray’s movie, which landed an opening weekend gross of about $19 million—an amount almost twice as much as the lifetime gross of Gray’s last movie, The Lost City Z, and likewise big enough to become the second largest opening of Gray’s career, after his 2007 crime classic We Own the Night.

Still, it's not a hit, or at least not the kind of hit we're told movies without the backing of dependable I.P. will need to be to survive a franchise-happy industry. It probably doesn't help that Ad Astra landed a B-minus Cinemascore—a reliable but not easily decipherable indicator of whether audience expectations were met by the movie. A B-minus isn’t a great grade, on those terms, but Gray is in swell company. Lorene Scarafia’s J. Lo-starring hit Hustlers, which has been the talk of the town since the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this month, got a B-minus, too—and like Ad Astra, the movie is trailing the likes of familiar I.P. fare like Downton Abbey and a Rambo sequel at the box office. Yet likely no one who’s seen Hustlers in a crowded, rowdy theater rife with enraptured young women would say it failed to give its audience what they came for.

So it’s subjective. And mysterious. And yet in the case of Ad Astra, the charge that the movie undercuts and fails to satisfy our expectations probably sticks. Ad Astra is a James Gray film, after all, and though the director has wound his way through a melange of varying classical genres over the years—from the period piece melodrama (The Immigrant), to the thoroughly wrought jungle adventure (Lost City of Z), to crime family sagas (We Own the Night, The Yards, Little Odessa) and the unrequited romance (Two Lovers), to, now, the space odyssey—the director’s distance from the usual rigors of what we’ve come to expect from movies like these has remained consistent.

Audiences expect well-timed emotional peaks and valleys, steadfast psychological through-lines, loud action when the genre demands it, and resolutions befitting the arduous internal journeys Gray usually hits us with. And that’s all typically there. Ad Astra has extraordinary action scenes: a desperate shootout on the lunar surface, a fiery plummet to earth with a broken parachute in the film’s opening minutes. There’s a jump scare-ridden encounter with an angry animal in space, and mysterious communications from a wayward father, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is thought to be responsible for a series of devastating power surges felt all the way back on Earth, increasingly verge on skin-tingling horror. That’s to say nothing of the existential horrors that are already at the heart of almost every space movie: the pure, basic, insurmountable problem of humanity’s smallness amid so much space.

Much of this action, it should be said, invokes other, recent space movies—not unusual for this director. I thought, more than once, of Gravity, First Man, Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, of course, and Brian de Palma’s Mission to Mars (really!). I thought of the mythologizing power of films like The Right Stuff, too, and of how, by fashioning this story into a veritable Heart of Darkness, a journey into the corrupted center of the Western world’s grand colonial enterprise, Gray was deforming the genre’s mythological power.