Ad Astra review: Brad Pitt’s space movie goes where no space movie has gone before.

When Brad Pitt, as the astronaut Roy McBride, flies to the moon in James Gray’s elegant space epic Ad Astra, he takes Virgin Atlantic. These brand names go uncommented on, mere background details in the dense weave of a story that pairs intense action sequences—we’ll get to the moon-buggy car chase momentarily—with long stretches of near silent cockpit-bound solitude. Ryan Gosling’s existentially adrift Neil Armstrong, Sandra Bullock’s solitary survivor of a space station–destroying disaster, Matt Damon’s left-behind scientist sowing his potatoes in the red Mars dirt: All these were movie stars-in-space in the same tradition as Pitt’s Roy McBride, who also supplies a noir-tinged voiceover that’s reminiscent of the older sci-fi classic Blade Runner. But Roy McBride also has unresolved family issues to solve, and it’s made clear from early on that these two problems—Earth’s survival, Roy’s dad stuff—are not fundamentally separable from one another.