Yahoo News Ad Astra's ending delivers a powerful message
Note: Contains spoilers for Ad Astra.
Ad Astra has now landed in cinemas after some unfortunate delays, but it's proved to be worth the wait and packs a punch with its ending.
The masterful sci-fi sees Brad Pitt play astronaut Roy McBride whose father (Tommy Lee Jones) might just be responsible for a series of electrical storms, despite disappearing on a space mission 16 years ago.
So Roy sets out on his own mission to discover the truth behind his father's disappearance, but does Roy succeed? To go into that, we'll have to venture into spoilers, so don't read on if you haven't seen Ad Astra yet.
Roy's journey is far from a smooth one. When we first meet him, he literally falls to Earth as a result of one of those electrical storms, which – Roy is told – come from cosmic-ray bursts near Neptune.
That's where Project Lima, which Roy's father Clifford was a part of, was last thought to be and NASA believes that the cosmic rays are caused by the antimatter used in the project. They believe that Clifford is carrying on the experiment, unaware that it now threatens the very existence of mankind.
So Roy sets off on his journey, initially just to get to Mars and send a message to his father, fighting off moon pirates and some rabid primates aboard an abandoned shuttle along the way.
He's shown an SOS message from Project Lima by a friend of his father, Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), that says Clifford intentionally disabled communications. But it's not until he's on Mars that Roy finally learns the truth about his father.
After Roy's kicked off the mission for being too emotional in his message to his father, Helen Lantos (Ruth Negga) – whose parents were on Project Lima – tells him that Clifford killed everyone else on the project, fearful of them mutinying against him.
Roy sneaks on to the shuttle heading to Neptune but not without unintentionally killing the rest of the crew when they try to stop him boarding during take-off. Given that the journey lasts 79 days, he has plenty of time to mull over his decision with the isolation challenging his mental state.
When he reaches Neptune, Roy is reunited with his father, who has been carrying out the Project Lima experiment all these years. Clifford blames the Project Lima crew for their deaths, saying that they "never cared" and wanted to quit to head back to Earth.
"You and I have to continue on together to find what science claims does not exist," Clifford pleads to Roy who replies: "We're all we've got."
The decision to have Ad Astra's big reveal be that there's no other life in the universe is likely to be one that causes debate, but it also delivers a powerful message. Talking to Digital Spy, director and co-writer James Gray admitted that it could be "frightening for some," but not to him.
"What's frightening for me is if there are aliens out there who are gonna come get us, kill us or eat us or whatever. There will be people who will be upset about it, but I don't know why because why does it freak us out or terrify us that we have each other. That seems OK to me," he said.
"There's a famous Arthur C Clarke quote about it, either we are alone in the universe or we are not, both are equally terrifying, and that's true. But, at the same time, Earth's pretty good. I've got my wife and children and they're great, and I can find plenty of joy in that.
"To rely on false Gods, the idea that there's these little green men out there that'll either save us or eat us, to me that's more horrifying than having to rely on other people."
After the reveal, Roy persuades his father to give up and come home with him, putting an end to the experiment by blowing up the equipment. But Clifford has no intention of returning to Earth. When they head out the airlock to go to the shuttle, Clifford forces Roy to cut him loose and he drifts off into space.
Roy uses the explosion to kickstart his journey back to Earth, and the movie ends with Roy safely back home, hinting at a potential reunion with his wife.
The sequence after he returns was shot this year due to Pitt not being available earlier because he was filming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But it wasn't added because Gray felt the need for a different ending.
"The ending was always part of the design where the guy reaches into the space capsule, and the camera pulls back. Then there was an added coda, the psych eval where he finishes by saying, 'Submit', which was something that I had added," he explained.
"We wanted to make sure the audience understood his transcendence. Not that he was alright and he was gonna be doing great, but that he had been able to come out the other side.
"It was my intent never to make a downer or downbeat movie because, unlike his father, he breaks the cycle and he returns to the Earth. So I wanted his transcendence to be clear. We always thought of it as a coda."
Ad Astra is out now.
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Instagram and Twitter account.
You Might Also Like
