This post contains Ad Astra spoilers.
I’m afraid of deep, dark water because I think a water monster will attack me.
This fear of deep water is not something that was birthed out of a horrific trauma. It’s a silly fear that was simply the result of watching Jaws and Jurassic Park III at age 8 in the summer of 2001 (the latter when I was on vacation with my family near a lake, making the tubing session the next day less than desired).
But it is a fear. One that I can joke about, but a fear nonetheless. I prefer to not be alone when I swim out 20 feet to the anchored dock on my Grandpa’s lake. I also haven’t gone water skiing in years, but I shudder at the thought of treading water by my lonesome as the boat drifts further away, however short a time period that might be.
There is an underwater scene in Ad Astra. On paper, it sounds like the perfect nightmare for someone with a fear like mine. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is making his way to sneak onto a rocket, with limited time before it takes off. To get there, he has to to swim along a wire through quite a bit of mostly pitch black water, with occasional illumination by way of orange lights. This illumination reveals no more than McBride and the wire he’s swimming along; he remains primarily surrounded by water and darkness.
On a purely surface level, there’s little about this particular body of deep, dark water that would have made it more comforting than any body of water that I would come across in real life. The tension surrounding the scene would, also on the surface, not seem to help in one’s appreciation for the beauty of the environment at hand.
And yet, here I was, appreciating the beauty of the moment. I felt a sense of calm in this race against time in a place of horror.
I didn’t think much of my appreciation for this scene until the climax of the film.
Roy has reached his target destination of the lima project and encountered his father Cliff (Tommy Lee Jones) for the first time in decades. The station is malfunctioning (or whatever) and causing dangerous electrical surges on Earth. Roy takes it upon himself to destroy the station and try to save his father.
The goal of the project, Cliff’s life’s work, was to find extraterrestrial life. He has not accomplished this goal, and wants to keep trying.
Time has not been kind to Cliff’s psyche. His obsession with finding extraterrestrial life didn’t respond well to this failure to find any. This, in turn, did not respond well to the insistence of his crew members to abandon the project, and so Cliff killed any dissenters. He insults Roy when they see each other for the first time, saying he never cared about Roy, Roy’s mother, their “small ideas”, none of it.
But as Roy suits his father up for the spacewalk to leave the station, Cliff slightly shifts his tone toward his son. His obsession with continuing the lima project continues, but upon realizing all that Roy did to come and find him, Cliff insists that Roy is just the help, just the ambitious mind he needs to keep the search for alien life going.
Amidst his ranting, Cliff begs Roy to not let him fail.
Roy then provides a comforting smile at his murderer of a father who had confessed to abandoning him not 10 minutes prior.
“Dad…you haven’t.
Now we know.
We’re all we’ve got.”
It was here when I articulated the word “contentment” in my head.
Amidst a vast universe, after decades of building space stations and traveling to other planets, Cliff McBride learned there was a limit to our aspirations and that we’re alone. But we still have other each other.
Roy’s father is an abusive madman, one who Roy knows must pay for his crimes, but he’s still his father, and he still wants to save him.
Deep and dark water is by its nature unsafe, and my mind fills that endless blank with untold, sharp toothed creepy crawlies.
But amidst this horror, and in a scene of tension, Ad Astra helped me appreciate the serene beauty that this previous place of horror can provide.
“Contentment” is also a perfect theme for a movie with flaws like Ad Astra. I think some of the dialogue (particularly the voiceover) is wonky, a certain baboon scene was ineffective, and Liv Tyler’s character is thankless.
But it’s also a brilliantly directed movie, with great performances from Pitt and Jones. And it’s a movie that feels, and it feels deeply.
And that’s damn sure good enough for me.
devilsadvocritic 