James Gray’s anemic space drama is devoid of human life.

This is a spoiler-free review. To discuss spoilers, head over to Ad Astra spoil sports.

The world hasn’t changed much in James Gray’s cerebral new sci-fi film Ad Astra. We still fight over territory, except now that territory isn’t on Earth. Our futuristic space outposts are populated with franchise restaurants and clothing stores. Want a pillow on your commercial flight to the Moon? That’ll be $125. Emotionally, the population is in the grip of a deep malaise, ungalvanized by passion or creativity. The humans of this future are aware of their own stagnation, so they have focused their efforts on the search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Looking for external solutions to internal problems: classic human. Such bleak predictions of our future have been made before but often emphasize our fundamental humanity as our saving grace. In Ad Astra, Gray has produced a visually pleasing but emotionally desolate film that fails to recognize the humanity of its characters.

Brad Pitt plays Roy McBride, a misanthropic military astronaut seemingly bereft of emotion. He possesses both a steady heart rate (it never exceeds 80 BPM even when free-falling from low orbit) and an intense loyalty to the program. This detachment gives him an advantage during his automated psych evaluations yet is also the source of a rift between him and his girlfriend Eve (Liv Tyler, glimpsed mostly in flashback as a mundane “lost love” trope). McBride is performing maintenance on an orbiting antenna when a cosmic EM burst wreaks global havoc on Earth, killing thousands. The government believes more bursts are imminent and that they originate from Neptune – specifically the Lima Project – a deep-space exploration vessel dedicated to the search for intelligent life. Lima was deployed decades ago and led by none other than McBride’s father (Tommy Lee Jones) who left on the mission when Roy was sixteen. Along with his father’s former colleague Colonel Pruitt (Donald Sutherland), Roy’s mission is to contact his father and stop the EM bursts before Earth’s entire electrical grid is crippled.

What follows is a journey akin to Apocalypse Now, but, y’know, IN SPACE. The beats are familiar: after being recruited by the government to seek out a rogue and fanatical ex-officer, McBride is passed from outpost to outpost before eventually hitching a ride on a long-range rocket to Neptune. McBride’s pensive narration is woven throughout while the crew use mood-stabilizing drugs to cope with the stress of deep-space and undertake routine but dangerous missions.

While structurally Ad Astra takes its cues from Apocalypse Now, Gray fails to create a similarly diverse cast of unique characters who react to and interact with their surroundings with relatable emotions. The entire cast plays their characters with understatement to the extreme. Pitt, whose strength has always been in eccentric supporting roles, gives a performance so minimal as to be almost catatonic. Nary a smile, grimace, or flare of intensity mars the stony faces of these forlorn souls (a brief cameo by Russian Doll’s Natasha Lyonne is a joyous burst of color on a suffocatingly monotone palette). And yet Gray expects us to become emotionally invested in characters who seem to experience little emotion themselves. How does McBride feel about his father and his mission? Small clues dropped in the narration and dream-sequences give us some inkling of abuse and abandonment, but it’s impossible to tell from Pitt’s immobile features what he’s really thinking. Ruth Negga is most ill-served by this comatose performance style, turning what should be a complex character into an impassive exposition delivery device.

The drab characters are further hindered by a weak script. The film keeps its dialogue minimal – mostly through narration by McBride – and in doing so attempts to disguise the lack of substance beneath the words. Conversations between actual characters tend to be purely expositional while McBride’s internal monologue veers into pseudo-philosophical prattle. Pitt and Jones’ gravelly murmurs inject gravitas into otherwise insipid lines like, “he was so focused on the stars he couldn’t see what was right in front of him.” Oh, brother.

While the film’s tone can feel suffocating, cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and production designer Kevin Thompson make striking use of shadows, shapes, and textures to convey beauty in the otherwise colorless vacuum of space. Use of brutalist architecture suggests geometric over organic, artificial over natural. The desolation of these environments reflects the overall lack of emotion in the story – though the film is not entirely devoid of sensation.

The most affecting sequences come in the form of action setpieces which run the gamut from thrilling to accidentally hilarious. The highlight of the film is a moonbuggy chase on the lunar surface where McBride and company attempt to fight off marauders like something out of Mad Max, but, y’know, IN SPACE. What little humor is to be found is at best deeply cynical and at worst unintentional. An ill-advised VFX choice turns an action sequence aboard an animal research vessel from spooky thriller to ridiculous at the drop of a hat.

All of this leads to a frustratingly aloof climax. Gray seems unwilling to allow his characters to experience intense internal conflict or self-awareness and ultimately gives us little reason to empathize with them for good or ill. McBride’s mission is, essentially, to save humanity. But if these dreary, cold-blooded automatons are all that is left of the species one is forced to wonder if they deserve to be saved at all.