LOS ANGELES: Brad Pitt, a critically acclaimed actor, plays as a troubled astronaut in James Gray’s movie Ad Astra.
Ad Astra premiered in the UK on Wednesday and it is set to release in the US on Friday. The film’s production has been something of a bumpy ride, too. Produced by Fox, the release date was pushed twice including after the takeover of Fox by Disney in March and Gray’s film’s release date was changed, so it wouldn’t clash with the Aladdin remake.
Still, Ad Astra is at least making it to the theater halls: The Disney takeover saw several of Fox’s projects brutally butchered.
“I was vaguely terrified,” Gray acknowledges about showing his adult sci-fi opus to his new family-friendly parent company. “But they loved it and they’ve been incredibly supportive of the film.”
Ad Astra showcases a vision of the future that’s more of a troubling sign than a celebration of space tourism and cosmic capitalism.
“If we were having this conversation in 1960, we could talk about the counterweight of the communist or socialist dictatorship bloc. But today there’s not really a counterweight to market capitalism,” says Gray. “It’s an unstoppable force. In the developed nations, the gap between the richest and the poorest is growing ever larger. And why would we project that space would be any different?”
“It’s very, very rich in natural resources, and you have treaties that will govern it to some degree, but how the fuck do you enforce them? You have a part of the moon, the far side, that’s always facing away from us. When there’s a lot of resources and nothing to govern, there’s obviously gonna be a degree of lawlessness,” Gray says.
The sci-fi audience in the United States can take a sigh of relief, as the movie will be shown in the theatres across the country from tomorrow onwards.
