What better time to see Ad Astra than now, at the end of the second decade of the 21st century, when we still have made but a pittance of progress beyond our landing on the Moon in 1969?
In the "near future" of Ad Astra, we're established on the Moon and Mars - not well established, by any means, but good enough - and the story concerns Roy McBride's (Brad Pitt) trip to Neptune to find out what happened to his father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones). Clifford was the first man to reach Jupiter and then Saturn, but he got hung up around Neptune, and most people don't know if he's dead or alive.
Roy thinks he's alive, and he's right, which leads to the bigger story: is it worth leaving Earth, permanently, in the quest to find some alien intelligence, that Clifford is sure must be out there? Clifford's so sure that he begs Roy to let him float away in space, to die, rather than return to Earth with Roy. In the decisive scene, Roy lets his father go, and Roy returns to Earth. Because, having discovered there's likely no other intelligence out there, Roy wants to return to his home.
It's not the ending I wanted, but the movie was nonetheless powerful, and the ending was emotionally satisfying. Indeed, Ad Astra was so good a movie, so different in the combination of individual personality and grand scale, that I'd say it's the 2001 of our 21st century, at least so far.
As to what I would have rather seen at the end: that would have been Roy refusing to let his father go, bringing Clifford back to Earth, where Roy could have unpacked, savored, and assessed his father's immense knowledge gathered over thirty years at the furtherest our species has ventured from Planet Earth. Yes, Roy speaks of great stores of knowledge in the records his father kept, but there's nothing like actually talking to the person who made and kept the records to get the deepest and fullest picture of what he (or she) learned.
Nonetheless - great acting Brad Pitt, great movie by James Gray, see it.
The 12 Monkeys series which just debuted on the SyFy Channel had a lot to live up to, at least in my book. I've long considered the 1995 movie the best time travel movie ever made, because it respected the paradoxes of time travel so well, which is to say, wove them into an at once thrilling but plausible - by the logic of time travel - story. Indeed, the only competition to the 12 Monkeys movie arrived just recently - last week, in my viewing - in the form of the movie Predestination, of Heinlein's "All You Zombies," which I reviewed 
