This is one of those films where the elegant title and poster alone already had me sold that I should go watch this movie. I only had the general idea that this was going to be set in space. I like this genre of motion picture, as films like "Gravity," "The Martian" and "Interstellar" all made it to the top of my yearend lists. I purposely never watched any trailer nor read any article about it, so that I can go in unaware of what the story was all about.
This film was set in the "near future" -- when humans can live and populate settlements on the moon and Mars. Astronaut Capt. Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) was sent to Mars to participate in the search for his long-lost father H. Clifford McBride. The elder McBride was the leader of the Lima Project, which aimed to search for intelligent life forms in outer space. Now, it was believed that this Lima Project, marooned in Neptune for 16 years now, was the cause of deadly power surges happening across the solar system.
The quietly dignified performance of Brad Pitt in the lead role merits a thumbs up for me. The acting was so restrained that he did not feel like he was acting. He was really that very cool and collected guy whose heart rate never went over 80 bpm. He managed to still be very believable as a person, even if he's had some pretty incredible luck that had flawed scientific basis. I felt sincerity in the way he was narrating his story and sharing the lessons he had learned from tragedies he met all along the way.
Tommy Lee Jones played Capt. Roy's lost father who may or may not be alive, who may or may not be a hero. Ruth Nega played Helen Lantos, director of the underground facility in Mars. This once Oscar nominee (for "Loving") had an interesting character key in Roy's discovery of the truth. Liv Tyler (whom I did not recognize) played Roy's estranged wife Eve, frustrated with how he spent more time at work than on her. Donald Sutherland played Clifford's old friend Col. Pruitt, whose part could have been edited out with no consequence.
I cannot ignore some obvious scientific impossibilities in the film. I believe that science fiction should still somehow obey scientific laws. How can a human stowaway survive if he was still climbing up the ship right beside the rocket boosters all fired up at launch time? A person was working on a station beyond the atmosphere and fell all the way down to earth, but he survived thanks to a parachute within his space suit? Can an explosion in Neptune really launch a spaceship low in fuel all the way back to Earth?
Under all of the dazzling cinematography (by Hoyte van Hoytema), thoughtful musical score (by Max Richter) and spectacular outer space special effects and , writer-director James Gray was actually just telling a story about a son's valiant effort to reconnect with his estranged father. In this case though, this particular son's efforts bring him all the way to the icy-rocky rings of Neptune where his father's space station had been stalled all these years. I must admit the simplicity of the core story was a bit of a letdown for me, even if they sugarcoat generously with sentimental life philosophies. 7/10.
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