In celebration of the Ad Astra trailer being released today, here’s my old review of the script, which was previously only available in the newsletter. Enjoy!
Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In the future, an autistic astronaut goes on journey into the solar system to find his father.
About: This was a top secret project that came together a few years go. James Gray, the director of The Lost City of Z, co-wrote Ad-Astra with Ethan Gross, who, before this opportunity, had only written four episodes of the TV show, Fringe. Gray, who will also be directing the film, was able to convince Brad Pitt to hop aboard, and the movie was off to the races. This is one of those rare big-budget projects that’s totally original, which is why I’m so excited to read it!
Writers: James Gray & Ethan Gross
Details: 108 pages – 8/11/16 draft
It takes a lot for me to get excited about a script these days.
I’ve always veered towards imaginative storytelling, writers who take me to a different world, a different time, a different place. But not only take me there. Find a really good story to tell once I get there.
That’s something I didn’t know as a young writer. I thought, just by taking the audience 500 years into the future, or just by taking them to another planet, I’ve done 75% of my job!
But time and place is only the beginning. You still have to find a really great story to tell in that world. Don’t just strand your hero on Mars. Figure out a great story to tell us about the guy who’s stranded on Mars. Everything else is just setup.
What little I’ve heard about Ad Astra sounds like it’s right up my alley. Brad Pitt has a history of attaching himself to good genre projects. James Gray is a thoughtful writer. And whenever good dramatic writers tackle sci-fi, the stories are richer and deeper than what we typically get. And then there’s that title: Ad Astra. It carries with it so much mystery. I want to know more.
It’s 100 years in the future and one of the primary goals of humanity is to find intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. They’re even putting the finishing touches on a giant telescope that reaches 100,000 feet into the sky (20 miles!) to try and find signals from alien planets.
Roy McBride, a 40-something autistic technician, is working on the top of this telescope one day when it’s rocked by a massive energy burst, hurling Roy off to certain death. Luckily, Roy is wearing a parachute and survives. But many others on the project weren’t so lucky.
After getting out of the hospital, Roy is pulled into an ultra serious meeting where officials tell him that the burst came from Neptune. Oh yeah. 20 years ago, Roy’s father and his crew were supposed to establish a base on Neptune to help look for alien life. They were never heard from again. Until now, that is. The government officials tell Roy that they think his dad is still alive and that he’s behind this Neptune burst. They want Roy to go find his father.
This begins a long journey where Roy travels first to the moon, then to Mars, and then to Neptune. 100 years from now, we’ve established outposts on all of these places. So we have an established transport system in place.
However, the further out you get, the smaller and more raggedy the outposts are. And when Roy finally finds what he’s looking for – which isn’t what he expected – he learns that the search for extraterrestrial life and his father’s place in it is way more complicated than he could’ve ever imagined.
Wow.
Okay.
So…….
Yeah.
I don’t know, guys. This was a weird script. Not weird like a Quentin Tarantino script is weird. Weird in that I could never get a handle on where things were going weird. And I’m still trying to figure out if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
The best way for me to categorize this script would be: The depressing version of Contact.
And “Contact” is a good place to start comparison-wise, because that script does so many things better than this one.
The problem with Ad Astra is its main character, Roy McBride. This may be the most forgettable main character in recent memory. Hell, I’d forget him between pages! As a character, Roy’s issues are two-fold. For one, he’s autistic. And therefore, whenever he speaks, he’s robotic and practical. This results in predictable and lifeless behavior.
But the more relevant issue is that Roy is achingly passive. He never makes any choices of his own. The whole movie is him doing what someone tells him to do. Go to the Moon. Okay. Go to Mars. Okay. Time to go to Neptune. Okay.
When you write a character who’s never active, who never makes their own decisions, they disappear on the page faster than a magic trick. It doesn’t matter if you have the carved granite features of Brad Pitt to distract audiences. We’re still sick of how inactive the hero of the movie is!
Contrast this with Jodie Foster’s character in Contact. The reason that character got Foster an Oscar nomination was because she was SO FREAKING ACTIVE! She was one of the most active characters ever in a major motion picture. She was the polar opposite of Roy. When someone told her, “You’re fired,” she would start up shop somewhere else and start looking for alien signals again.
That’s not to say all characters have to be super active. But when your hero is this passive, you better have something else up your sleeve to make them compelling. Forest Gump was passive and did what he was told, but he had such an intoxicating optimistic view of life that we overlooked it. Roy doesn’t have anything approaching an offset quality.
I think what Gray and Gross were banking on was that Roy’s inability to feel emotion (due to his autism) would make for a compelling exploration of his relationship with his father. There’s a scene early on where they tell Roy that his father, who he assumes has been dead all these years, is actually still alive. Roy kind of shrugs his shoulders in a, “Okay and?” manner.
The character journey then becomes: Will Roy start to feel something for his father?
This was a noble pursuit, but it was handled poorly. The whole movie Roy is unaffected by his father’s complicated plight. Then, BAM, in the end he cries. There’s no nuance to it. We don’t get there naturally. It feels manufactured. And because his character is so boring, it’s hard for us to care whether he cries or not in the first place.
I have no doubt that this will have a killer trailer. Brad Pitt is going to look great as a planet hopping sci-fi hero. That giant satellite is going to look great, along with Brad Pitt falling twenty miles off it. Cities on the moon. Outposts on Mars. An eerie base on Neptune. It’s going to look tremendous.
Unfortunately, Ad Astra cannot overcome a huge miscalculation on the main character front. And here’s the irony. I think that’s the only reason Brad Pitt signed onto this film – so he could play an autistic character. If this character would’ve been more traditional, more like the male version of Jodie Foster in Contact, Pitt probably would’ve passed. So go plug that into your Hollywood secrets-to-selling-a-script calculator.
I’m still rooting for this. Maybe Pitt will pull off a miracle and make the character come alive in some way that I’m not seeing on the page. But my experience has been, if it doesn’t work on the page, it doesn’t work on the big stage.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Richard Russo, one of my favorite writers, once said that a character who isn’t making choices cannot be an engaging character. If Russo is in need of material to back up that hypothesis, he may want to get a copy of Ad Astra. Roy makes so few choices in this script that it’s nearly impossible to be engaged by him.
