Let’s start with the obvious. Brad Pitt has managed to give the performance of a lifetime in Ad Astra. There are many scenes in the movie when he just emotes, there is nothing else going on in the entire frame, just him in focus with melancholic colors of space and science providing the stage. You can see his expressions go through an array of subtle but powerful changes, a slight tremor in an eyebrow, a hesitant blink, a slight quivering of the lips, a surreptitious teardrop that betrays the stoic facade. Never once does he look at the camera. You’re forever in his periphery, while he searches for a footing to stand on.

The runnerup is the cinematography. The vivid imagery reminds of Arthur Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. For me, space is a manifestation of grandness, emptiness. It is a harsh, dry, and yet beautiful, devoid of and unsullied by the human chaos. It is difficult to portray this beauty. It needs to slow and muted, patient and peaceful, intimidating and inviting. The quietness of the moon, the dustiness of the red planet, the solitude of a spacecraft, are all extremely well done in this movie. Moreover, space is not displayed as a static background but as people themselves. The actors in the movie become indistinguishable the space they live in. The earthlings are busy with their petty quarrels, the moon has become a metropolis and merged with its parent planet, Mars is uncertain and proud, Neptune, so far away from the sun, is lost and untethered.

It is said that science fiction is escapist. I would give away everything to live on a different planet, to start over again, in an uninhabited uncrowded land, to not be worried about the day-ins and the day-outs, to be able to touch and smell an alien earth. But the earth is all we have so far, and it is frustrating. Space is a scientist’s utopia, a heaven that does not need believing.

I love the experience of going to a movie theater, giving up your time, just focusing on one thing, getting entranced. As I drove home from this movie, my mind was completely blank. Driving out into the darkness felt like a continuation of space, an out-of-body experience of being suspended, but alas I could feel the constraints and the rules slowly creeping in and regaining their hold on me, pulling me back to the sticky tangleness of the human existence. Perhaps one day,