Ad Astra

James Gray alternates on purpose: an action piece, then a long stretch of interior weather. Silence follows the lunar rover chase; the narration returns after the distress call at the station where the baboons are loose. Roy’s psychological evaluations are the measuring device, a man reciting his own stability to a machine while his pulse declines to contradict him. What the film is about is how little he decides: even the message to his father is written for him. The narration is the most argued over layer, not by accident. Gray worked on it with the poet Tracy K. Smith, wanting a voice unlike his own, and Charlie Kaufman rewrote the dialogue without credit. After test screenings went badly in May and July 2018 there were reshoots, and Liv Tyler’s wife character was added then. Gray calls the closing forty seconds a compromise, and he did not hold final cut: in 2026 at Cannes he said the film was taken from him and his version would run twelve minutes shorter. The Academy nomination came in sound mixing, not cinematography. A good fit if the machine reading Roy’s pulse and the narrator saying what his face withholds do not bother you. Not a fit if you will spend it wondering why the marriage never lands; that role was added later.