Ad Astra 4K 2019 Ultra HD 2160p

Ad Astra 4K. Roy McBride works as a space engineer and suffers from mild autism. Once upon a time, his father disappeared without a trace during an expedition to Neptune and is an enemy of the people. Roy will go on a space journey full of dangers and obstacles in order to find his father in the mysterious corners of the solar system.

Ad Astra 4K review
In the near future, mankind has fully got out of the earth's cradle: you can fly to the moon on vacation, on Mars scientists painstakingly study the remote corners of the universe. Roy McBride's father (Brad Pitt) - astronaut hero Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones) - went on a long mission 20 years ago outside the solar system, but disappeared somewhere in the Neptune area. Now Roy is also an astronaut and an extremely unhappy person - his wife (Liv Tyler) left due to his obsession with work, but he still can’t stop looking up and waiting for answers to questions from childhood. The earth, meanwhile, is in danger of death: powerful cosmic pulses have several times become the cause of total blackout and, according to scientists, after some time they can destroy all life on the planet. These impulses are moving somewhere from the side of Neptune, and their source, most likely, is the lost ship of Clifford McBride. Roy is sent on his most important mission - to contact his father and find out what happened on his ship.

Cosmos as a space of absolute vacuum has long and regularly rhymed in art with a personal vacuum, it becomes an ideal place for all kinds of introspection - it is not so difficult to look inside when there is nothing outside but a lifeless cold void. About this “Gravity” by Cuaron and “Moon 2112” by Duncan Jones, about the same partially “Interstellar” and low-budget “Love” by William Eubank, from this position “Solaris” by Tarkovsky humiliated Kubrick's “unnatural” “Space Odyssey”. In recent years, Hollywood has somehow become particularly frequent in space - either the political situation forces us to engage in such a distant escapism, or it won’t let go of the Couaron-Nolan award award. That year was “Man on the Moon” by Damien Chazella, in addition to “To the Stars” there will be Proxima and the Pale Blue Dot on exactly one topic: astronauts return home, fly back up, but they don’t dream at all about the roar of the cosmodrome and not this icy blue.

True, it’s impossible to ascribe to the stars either the political conjuncture or the desire to join the cosmic trend: firstly, James Gray started writing the film script seven years ago, and secondly, the picture is built into his filmography too ideally. Heroes of Gray are eternal immigrants, whom he first persistently tried to reconcile with the house, then - to send him to hell. The dream of dumping his beloved in San Francisco burns Joaquin Phoenix at the end of “Lovers”, escapes from dysfunctional Poland in search of a better life, Marion Cotillard from “Fatal Passion”, over and over again refuses Charlie Hunnam's quiet family life, trying to find “Lost City Z ". With the last film “To the Stars”, the closest twin cities are like that: both paintings tell about people who are obsessively running from home to there, they themselves don’t know where (or they know, but it doesn’t help much), in search of that, they themselves don’t know what.

In both cases, Gray in unexpected proportions interferes with the deep metaphysics of personality drama with completely adventurous plots: Kipling's pioneering heroic poetry is openly quoted in “The Lost City Z”, and “To the Stars”, if you retell the plot without psychological details, will sound like an adaptation of tabloid fiction. All of these space pirates, bases on Mars, who screwed up star primates and flights through asteroids with a metal shield at the ready seem to be completely unsuitable for a depressing film about an infinitely unhappy person. But they probably have a special Greek charm: a modernist director’s vibe using genre paths as if they hadn’t filmed anything about space before him, and therefore have no idea of ​​“low”, “high”, “ridiculous” and “ inappropriate. " Only at him “Solaris” can become “Cowboy Bebop” in a second.

There is a negative side in this modernity of Gray, of course, - in “To the Stars” he is somehow quite literary sentimental and constantly duplicates the visual with a monotonous off-screen muttering rhetorical existential questions. The speeches of Brad Pitt overlaid on top of the film sound like they were attached by producers somewhere in the late stages of production - something like it was with the theatrical version of Blade Runner - otherwise the silly viewer won’t understand what the hero feels and what drives him . This is insulting, because “To the Stars” perfectly explains everything without words: in Pitt’s look and ascetic mannerisms psychology is incomparably more than in the dry text, and the magnificent Hoyte Van Hoytem’s camera is similar to Dickins in the sequel to the same “Blade Runner” , then in Lyubetsk in “Gravity” - it captures the alienation and total disorientation of the hero billions of times better than his monologues. Purely cinematic "To the Stars" is one of the most impressive films of recent years, surprisingly combining the grandeur of the space epic with the chamber heat of a granular film. And it is difficult, looking at his formal achievements, not to think about how much the film would have been better if it had opened its mouth a little less often.

Toward the end, however, the voice-over calms down and gives vent to the cinematic poetics of Gray, who in the finale tacitly and without any strain summarizes his own philosophical searches from "The Lost City Z". “A man should always reach for the stars. Otherwise, why do we need heaven? ”Stated one of the heroines of his last film. “Yes, in general, there’s no reason,” “To the stars” confidently answers her. In the sky, says Gray, there is nothing that you could not find on Earth - wherever people have penetrated, there will be the same Subway shops, the same joys and the same problems. There is absolutely no need to reach there: in the end a person needs only a person. And you go on, whistle, fly to your distant galaxies, and I will go to enjoy a beautiful autumn sunset on the banks of a warm southern river.