First Trailer for AD ASTRA Starring Brad Pitt

It seems as if I first heard about James Gray's Ad Astra a little over a year ago when it was scheduled for release in May of this year, but the premiere showing at the Cannes film fest was canceled and the rumors were that the opening may be delayed until the fall depending on the Fox/Disney merger and how everything shook out with that. Well, it seems the fall it will be as 20th Century Fox (as now owned by Disney) has released the first trailer for Gray's follow-up to his critically acclaimed, but seemingly little seen The Lost City of Z (you can stream it now for free if you have an Amazon Prime account). The filmmaker has also had good luck with critics in his 2007 and 2008 releases of We Own the Night and Two Lovers, but neither of those lit the box office on fire either and I'm curious as to what it is that might keep the hordes away given Gray tends to attract some pretty big names to his movies. For instance, Pitt has been eager to work with the director for some time as he was originally scheduled to star in The Lost City of Z, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts. Gray has worked with both Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix multiple times, but not even when he paired those two in that aforementioned 2007 crime thriller was he able to tap into a wider audience. I say all this with the hope that Ad Astra is the turning point for the filmmaker. Gray, who wrote the original screenplay with Ethan Ross (Fringe), has seemed to craft nothing short of a fascinating mystery/sci-fi film that isn't so much going to be leniant on the "fiction" part and instead be more grounded in its approach to discussing extraterrestrial life forms. In the film, Pitt plays an astronaut who travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet; ultimately uncovering secrets that challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the universe. This sort of thing is right up my alley. I love when movies really go for it in the vein of something like 2001, The Tree of Life, or Interstellar, and this film seems as if it will fit really well into that line-up. It's also encouraging that films like Gravity, The Martian, and the aforementioned Interstellar have done well financially in a similar release landscape as this film will face. Ad Astra will also star Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, Liv Tyler, Donald Sutherland, John Ortiz, Kimberly Elise, and opens on September 20th, 2019.



Synopsis: Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his missing father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. His journey will uncover secrets that challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.


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