Ad Astra

Tying itself firmly to the coattails of recent, 'hard' science fiction films such as Gravity, Interstellar, and Moon, Ad Astra is very much an attempt to do a Heart of Darkness for the space age in much the same way that Apocalypse Now did for the Vietnam War.

Visually sumptuous, well-acted, with an evocative Max Richter score, and in writer/director James Gray a creator who has an interesting body of work behind him. On paper at least, it certainly has all the right credentials

Hopes were high for this film before its release, and some critics have praised it highly. Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is sent on a mission across the solar system to contact and stop his long-lost father (Tommy Lee Jones) from an enterprise that could threaten all life on earth. We are also promised that what he discovers along the way could have profound implications for humanity and our understanding of our place in the universe.

We explore McBride's inner turmoil over his long-absent father through a series of inner monologues, while externally he shows little or no emotion or human connection. It's because he's never really known his father, you see. His father, we are repeatedly told by other characters, is a hero of space exploration, someone who went further into space than anyone else in order to uncover the truth of whether there is any other intelligent life out there. McBride only knows him as an absent figure for most of his childhood and his whole adult life.

A series of action-packed set pieces break up these introspective musings. They make little sense in themselves; an attempted hi-jacking on lunar buggies; an abandoned space station with rage-filled, killer test-subjects; a lethal zero-g fistfight. Each gives McBride an excuse to muse on the fragility of human existence, the pointlessness of our endless wars and conflicts and the bitterness of the unintended consequences to well-intentioned but misguided choices.

But its baggy, clumsy plotting could have been forgivable if there was a denouement that actually brought everything together or, at the very least, left us with a sense of awe and mystery. As best I can I will avoid too many spoilers, but it is hard to critique the film without hinting at the finale - so skip to the last three paragraphs if you would rather not know anything about how the film finishes.

Firstly, it is a pretty saccharine and bland ending. When father and son finally confront one another at the very edge of our planetary system, there are two major revelations - about his father and about what his father has found. They should fall like hammer blows, but they don't. The first is meant to change how McBride sees himself, the second how humanity understands its place in the universe. But they are skipped over so quickly that there is little impact at all.

Secondly, because we never see much of McBride's childhood or his marriage, we are only given vague visual cues and ponderous voice-overs to tell us he finds it hard to form emotional attachments or care for others. Consequently, we end up not really caring about him. More showing, less telling would have fleshed McBride out more and given us some emotional investment in him. Giving the criminally under-used Liv Tyler, as his long-suffering other-half, some actual dialogue and character development would also have given McBride's character arc far more emotional heft and depth.

Thirdly, Arthur C Clarke said that there were two answers to the question of whether we are alone in the universe. Either there is intelligent life out there, or there is none. Both answers are profoundly terrifying and have huge existential ramifications for the human race. While the question remains open, like Schrodinger's cat in its unopened box, we live with both options and can explore the ideas that they may unleash. The film opens the box, finds the cat dead and then shrugs its shoulders. McBride resolves his daddy issues with a similar shrug, resolves to be more connected with people in future (in another voice-over) and goes back to a presumably happier life with his long-suffering wife. And that's it! So much for uncovering the profound mysteries of the universe!

One of the other incidental issues touched upon in the film is religion. The crew with whom McBride travels to Mars, pray to St Christopher as they launch, commit the body of a departed comrade to God's keeping with a Christian prayer and, in an old recorded message, McBride's father talks of the profound sense of God's presence with him as he heads further out into the void. The denouement kind of skips over this, but the implication is that his discoveries have stripped McBride's father of hope and faith. This was another wasted opportunity that the film could have explored.

In a vast, beautiful but apparently lifeless universe, who are we, and what is our world? It is a question we are increasingly having to confront as we discover more and more about the scale and nature of our cosmos.

As a Christian, I do not see the universe as devoid of meaning. On the contrary, it is filled with divine meaning, whether or not there is any other intelligent life out there. Why the universe is so unimaginably vast is a mystery. Why God has created all of this to lavish his love on one species on one, tiny world in all this vastness is a source of wonder. The alternative, that we are utterly alone in the vastness of a meaningless void is truly soul shrivelling.

My faith in Christ, who left the divine realm to take up frail humanity and to walk a path of self-sacrifice to the cross for our sake, is nonsense to many, but for those of us who believe, it takes that vast, existential ache as we look out into the expanse of the cosmos and says 'I am known, I am loved and my existence has meaning'.

Our hope is not, as the film's opening and title suggest, in the stars. It is in the one who made them.

The Girl on the Train

Now, leaving aside that Emily Blunt's Rachel is not a girl, or that millions of books fans complain that the action has been moved from London to New York, this is a enjoyable B movie thriller. But it left me feeling uncomfortable.

Maybe it was that despite having three strong female leads, the film fails the Bechdel test - all the dialogue shared by the women ends up revolving around the male characters, even though they are very much in supporting roles.

It might also be that all the women are in some way dysfunctional because of motherhood and social expectations around having children.

It could be because of the many plot holes that stretch the willing suspension of disbelief to the limit. Maybe.

Actually, for me it was the first two points that really bugged me (I cope with plot holes in most films and TV series reasonably well - otherwise I would never be able to watch most dramas!). Spoilers ahead for those who have neither read nor seen the film!

Movies that are about women being badly treated by men should, in this day and age actually be addressing the causes of that abuse, not just accepting it as an inevitability and giving the women the let out of a bloody revenge at the end. In the film, the reason the women were reduced to mere appendages to the men was the issue that was not  adequately explored. The book, apparently (I have not read it yet) addresses the fact that the women are trophy wives for successful men, despite having their own careers and skills and that their whole identity and purpose is tied up around their ability to produce offspring.  However, early on in the film one of the main characters observes bitterly that the whole suburb where the action happen is 'one big baby farm'.

This is the issue that the films never quite gets to the heart of. How much our culture still only values women because of their ability to reproduce. Rachel's real pain because she not only cannot have children, but has been replaced by a new wife who has given her ex-husband the child he wanted, is compounded by the expectations of society around her. Megan's grief over a lost child and her husband's pressure to give him a family that can only remind her of her awful loss cause her increasingly dysfunctional behaviour. But why the culture around these women sees this as their only value and purpose is never challenged.

The Bible has several stories about women facing the pain of the childlessness, and the social disgrace that went with it - Sarah and Rachel in Genesis and Hannah in 1 Samuel are obvious examples. However, God eventually gives them all children, There are no stories about the women denied the chance to have children or who chose not to, so we have to address those issues from elsewhere in scripture.

So what of those who cannot have children. And why is it just the women denied children who suffer - what about their husbands? It seems to me that our culture, including our churches makes the ideal of marriage and parenthood, especially motherhood, a dangerous idol. It leaves those not able or not willing to have children on the edge, left out of social gatherings and conversations that revolve around parenting. For those of us who are parents, the struggles and challenges of parenting occupy our time and energy so much that we are often blind to those around us who are left out.

For women though, the sense that one is only validated by being a mother is a toxic pressure. There is already the ludicrous notion that a woman can only be validated by a romantic relationship with a man. Then, once that man is found and domesticated, the only role left is to become a mother.

The bible does place motherhood (and fatherhood) in a place of great esteem, but Paul points to a higher calling that may lead women and men to eschew such a role, and Jesus himself gave hope that those denied biological parenthood can become mothers (and fathers) to many by other means. Marriage and parenthood matter, but they are not all there is to our humanity and value, and the more we hold on to the truth that there is more to us than our reproductive roles, the saner (and happier) we will be!