“Ad Astra” is a love letter to those very near and very far

Brad Pitt is searching for love in all the wrong corners of the galaxy (and family tree)

Is there life out there, somewhere? It’s hard to gaze up at the stars and consider the vastness of the universe only to conclude we truly are the only intelligent beings. It’s fascinating to consider the possibilities, because any discoveries could help explain some of our biggest questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here?

Since humans, presently, are incapable of traveling to these distant planets to more conclusively find answers, movies have attempted to bridge the gap in our collective imagination. However, these fictional astronauts’ curiosity walks hand in hand with their sanity. 2001: A Space Odyssey starts at the beginning of man and dives all the way down the rabbit hole of existential wonder, until its protagonist goes crazy. Intersteller sends its protagonist out into deep space to aide a researcher who claims to have found an inhabitable planet, only to find that (spoiler alert) he went crazy too. In The Martian, being alone on Mars causes the protagonist to…go crazy. Characters go various levels of crazy in Arrival, Gravity, Apollo 13, First Man.

Ad Astra exists in conversation with all those great space movies which have…