How do you make the cosmic seem personal? When a film is dealing with matters of potentially galaxy-sized importance, it's imperative that it also grounds its story in recognizable, relatable emotions. Otherwise, you end up with a movie that is big but hollow. That may seem like an obvious problem to try to avoid, but many sci-fi films nonetheless fail to do so. There are only a small number of movies that succeed at that. Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is one. James Gray's Ad Astra is another.
The underrated sci-fi drama hit theaters in September 2019. A few months earlier, its star, Brad Pitt, gave a charismatic, eventually Oscar-winning supporting performance in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Despite that fact, audiences largely ignored Ad Astra when it was released. While many prominent critics gave it positive reviews, plenty also undersold it. Five years later, its place on the list of Hollywood's best contemporary sci-fi dramas seems undeniable.
