To the Stars

There are plenty of better-than-average sections of Ad Astra. The trouble is that the movie itself is just mostly average. It manages to hit all of the basic generic tropes of the loner-in-space film, and if there are a couple of cool sequences that seem novel in the movie, these are overwhelmed by the generic basicness of the whole thing. Brad Pitt is excellent, of course. His performance is wonderful, and honestly I quite liked this film. It just doesn't really ever hit its stride or soar; it plods along instead, stubbornly refusing to surprise us and confident that we are happily along for the ride.