James Gray
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Fitzcarraldo (1982)
Directed by Werner Herzog
influenced The Lost City of Z (2017)
Visuals Characters
A nod to Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is one – a gorgeously odd segment in which Fawcett and his team stumble upon an opera performance deep in the heart of the jungle.
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
He’s an upstanding Englishman, selfless and heroic, always trying to keep his emotions under wraps, and yet he has that same zealous, obsessive quality that Klaus Kinski brought to his roles as men on mad quests in Aguirre, Wrath Of God or Fitzcarraldo.
Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo is even quoted in a luminous scene featuring an opera house in the middle of the jungle.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
A jaw-droppingly surreal interlude in which Fawcett stumbles on an opera house in a clearing nods to “Fitzcarraldo,” while a sudden ambush signaled by a deadly rain of arrows is scarcely Gray’s sole invocation of “Apocalypse Now.”
Deliberate, downbeat, vast in scope and theme but emotionally intimate, it evokes — at times overtly — the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey , Solaris , Contact and Arrival .
Shot with widescreen majesty on 35mm, Ad Astra combines sinewy, space-bound sequences – all floating elegance and weightless wonder – with moments of shimmery inner stillness, reminiscent of Soderbergh’s undervalued Solaris remake.
The influence of iconic science-fiction films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are evident from the outset with the narrative following a path akin to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now .
Truthfully, Gray’s feature rather terrifically splits the difference between the high-momentum survival thrills of Gravity and Interstellar and artier, more ruminative sci-fi touchstones: 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Solaris (1972) The Fountain (2006), Melancholia (2011), Arrival (2016), and Claire Denis’ recent, slippery contribution to that sub-genre, High Life .
Solaris, Interstellar, Gravity, 2001: A Space Odyssey — Gray pays homage to each and more, along with another, more earthbound, masterwork: Apocalypse Now.
Visually, it combines the best of Interstellar , Gravity , The Martian , and First Man , with plenty of callbacks to classic space fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey , Contact , and Solaris .
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
influenced Ad Astra (2019), The Lost City of Z (2017), Armageddon Time (2022)
Visuals Themes
There are some bold editing choices, harking back to Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey, so Gray’s nods to cinematic history are a shorthand way to expand the film’s scope.
Deliberate, downbeat, vast in scope and theme but emotionally intimate, it evokes — at times overtly — the likes of 2001: A Space Odyssey , Solaris , Contact and Arrival .
A medical room, with its white equipment and orange easy chairs, harks back to the stylised 1960s vibe in 2001: A Space Odyssey .
One can sense an attempt by filmmaker James Gray to tap into the vein mined by Stanley Kubrick in his classic 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The influence of iconic science-fiction films like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey are evident from the outset with the narrative following a path akin to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now .
With Ad Astra he has ventured into outer space, fully aware of the pitfalls: being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or, more recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
influenced Ad Astra (2019), The Lost City of Z (2017), Armageddon Time (2022)
Themes Visuals Plot
The film’s immaculate design and near-mythic approach to its surroundings bring to mind Apocalypse Now, the obvious comparison given each film’s subject matter, but a relevant one as The Lost City of Z plays like a direct, life-affirming response.
The latest epic period drama from director Gray (The Immigrant) vibrates with the aftershocks of Herzog, Apocalypse Now, and even 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent, and while it never quite escapes those intimidating shadows, it’s an engaging picture nonetheless – and a gorgeous one, its overwhelming images (lensed by the great Darius Khondji) blessed with the grace of a ballet and the period resonance of tintype photos.
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
It would be far too easy to dismiss The Lost City Of Z as simply mimicking films such as Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Herzog, 1972), or even Apocalypse Now (Coppola, 1979); however the film is a genuinely touching story about fighting for what you believe in.
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
His colonial malevolence was echoed in two landmark films of the ’70s: “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” in which Klaus Kinski’s bug-eyed, raving conquistador led a jungle odyssey into madness, and “Apocalypse Now,” in which Martin Sheen’s burnt-out assassin discovered, in Marlon Brando, a different kind of Kurtz — a philosopher of war’s evil, a leader who had gone “insane” only because he was the only one who saw Vietnam with utter clarity.
Heart of Darkness (1994)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
influenced Ad Astra (2019)
Plot Visuals Characters
The search riffs on the “Heart of Darkness” dynamic of Joseph Conrad, with Roy’s search for a father he has mirrored his career on.
I can think of any number of sci-fi films Ad Astra seems to be paying homage to, but it’s also clear Gray looked to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a model for the plot.
Gray and his fellow scribe, Fringe' s Ethan Gross, are clearly aiming for ( The Tree of Life 's Terrence) Malick-meets-Kubrick ( 2001 's Stanley) by way of Joseph Conrad ( Heart of Darkness , the book that inspired Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now ).
The “Heart of Darkness” template is, of course, anyone’s to draw upon, but what made Francis Ford Coppola’s film great is that he used Joseph Conrad’s classic as a frame on which to hang his psychedelic-slaughter vision of contemporary combat.
In this sense, Clifford is more like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , transposed so brilliantly to Vietnam by Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now!
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Directed by David Lean
influenced The Lost City of Z (2017)
Visuals Themes Characters
Though visually resembling Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, with hallucinatory night-time jungle scenes recalling Apocalypse Now, Gray’s exploration into a driven individual’s morality more resembles Lawrence of Arabia in tone, and he largely succeeds in managing the same coupling of lush, lyrically expressive imagery with rich emotional resonance.
(There is also a cut that clearly references Lawrence Of Arabia .)
James Gray's , based on the best selling book by David Grann, is an epic adventure that brings to mind cinematic classics like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, and similar stories centered on obsessive men wading through plots rife with thorny racial issues.
For the first act of the picture, Charlie Hunnam barely registers; he doesn't catch the eye the way the stars of "Lawrence of Arabia" or "Fitzcarraldo" immediately did.
It’s a mission fueled by a near-maniacal obsession, with undertones of “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Fitzcarraldo” (though I am not suggesting it measures up to any of those; it doesn’t).
Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now meets Lawrence of Arabia with a taste of The Emerald Forest .
Known to his contemporaries as “the David Livingstone of the Amazon”, and an inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World , he was one of the last great British explorers — a man who, until he himself became as lost as the city he sought, kept his composure and dignity amid the heat, starvation and occasional deluge of tribal arrows.
But it's an unusual approach for what half pretends to be a manly, action-adventure saga, the true story that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World .
Fawcett is most remembered in history for his final trek to the Amazon in 1925 with his adult son Jack (Tom Holland), and how his adventures inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World .
Well before his vanishing, legend coiled around him; his reports and speculations may have prompted his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write “The Lost World” (1912), the precursor of “Jurassic Park.”
It’s a sci-fi movie in the same vein as Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” and Alfonso Cuaron’s “Gravity” – it actually sits rather nicely at a midpoint between the two in terms of relative technological advancement while also echoing the complex emotional dynamics they put forth.
In particular it recalls Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar , and not only because of the sweeping, naturalistic visual sensibility that Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema brought to both films.
Ad Astra , the new movie from James Gray ( The Lost City of Z ), naturally recalls any number of other sci-fi exercises, from 2001: A Space Odyssey (which set the Bakelite-gleam standard for decades of extraterrestrial adventures to come) to Gravity and Interstellar .
The visual genius behind Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk and Interstellar (which feels much like Ad Astra) is again at the top of his game, assisted admirably by Max Richter’s inspirational score, not to mention an impeccable sound design and impressive but never obtrusive special effects.
Ad Astra is a sometimes compelling space drama, but it can't quite match the heights of both Gravity or Interstellar.
Solaris, Interstellar, Gravity, 2001: A Space Odyssey — Gray pays homage to each and more, along with another, more earthbound, masterwork: Apocalypse Now.
The tone is sometimes reminiscent of the one struck by Barry Levinson in his memory films (“Diner,” “Tin Men,” “Avalon”), with Gray, in this case, trying to present his experience of growing up in as genuine a way as possible, as if he were ripping pages from his diary.
When “Armageddon Time” focuses on that story, it’s reminiscent of far better films like Barry Levinson’s “Avalon.”
Critic Owen Gleiberman’s comparison to Barry Levinson’s multigenerational Jewish-American saga Avalon is on target.
It’s a little “Basketball Diaries,” a smidge of “The Graduate” and a heaping helping of Barry Levinson’s far more sentimentalized childhood reverie “Avalon,” which was also built around lots of extended family dinners.
It's like Barry Levinson's Avalon morphing into The 400 Blows.
Geographically, The Lost City of Z recalls Werner Herzog’s two great Amazonian adventures and that other riverbound jungle journey, Apocalypse Now, but Darius Khondji’s stately, golden-hued imagery constantly brings to mind Vilmos Zsigmond’s lugubrious photography in Heaven’s Gate.
It is a beautiful film with many small wonders and mysteries of its own for the viewer to discover: the candor of the first scenes between the Fawcetts, and the way they give a human face to the era’s social maneuvering; the explorers’ visit to a rubber baron (Franco Nero) who has built a small open-air opera house on his slave plantation; the scene of the boisterous debate at the Royal Geographical Society; the use of Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis Et Chloé to suggest an elusive meaning to the jungle; the sweep and Tolstoy-esque detail of the scenes of social life in mid-1900s Ireland and England, which bring to mind Michael Cimino’s attempts to re-sculpt the New Hollywood auteur cult in the image of 19th century fiction in films like The Deer Hunter and Heaven’s Gate .
There are a few decent ones here, starting with a lunar action sequence that kicks up a lot of moon dust and suspicion, and one grisly shock that nods ever so quickly in the direction of “Alien” and its creature-feature ilk.
Kevin Thompson’s production design is also impressive, with the futuristic sets combining the austerity of Kubrick’s vision with the more lived-in feel of films like Ridley Scott’s “Alien.”
Director James Gray’s style harks back to classic space movies, such as “Alien” and “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” that played around with the vastness of the stars, and made it seem like there was nowhere lonelier.
Like Alien and Total Recall , it imagines how space exploration (and space tourism) might become ordinary.
Therein lies the barely serious plot of Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”), which also borrows freely from 2001: A Space Odyssey , Gravity , Alien and Interstellar .
That’s pretty much what the spaceship does in “Alien” (1979), too, except that what happens there plants the squirming seed of everything else that unfurls in the rest of the film.
Influence is everywhere but never overwhelms: the splendorous grandeur of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon,” the striking photography of Vittorio Storraro, the torch-lit nights of “Apocalypse Now,” and one direct homage to Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” another picture beset by the madness of obsession (though it’s not the Where’s Waldo of cinema either).
Gray’s made no secret of his admiration for Stanley Kubrick, and it would be difficult for well-acquainted viewers not to think of Barry Lyndon in an early ballroom sequence thats adorned with baroque music, ornately dressed extras, and slow zooms — which is after an opening of horse-backing through a wide-open field to hunt and kill a buck now prominently displayed in the ballroom.
Whether it’s Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon or Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner, there are movies in which the fundamental act of living a life starts to accrue a profound, hypnotic power.
Because he has been “rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors” (the film’s killer line, delivered by Murray Melvin of Barry Lyndon, thematically a forebear through its own depiction of European high society as a finely filigreed social warzone), Fawcett first leaves his wife (Sienna Miller) and children behind in England for a spot of survey work in “Amazonia.”
Unfolding like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now by way of Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon , it’s as much an adventure of the mind as of the eye, although cinematographer Darius Khondji outdoes himself with stunning visuals.
“He’s been rather unfortunate in his choice of ancestors” is how we hear one old duffer—Murray Melvin of Barry Lyndon fame—put it shortly before disappearing behind closed doors with the bona fide gentlemen as tarnished Fawcett looks from across the room in envy, still second-class in spite of the fact that he’s ostensibly being celebrated for his valor in the morning’s hunt.
It opens with a dramatic scene just outside the Earth’s atmosphere that evokes 2013’s “Gravity.”
With Ad Astra he has ventured into outer space, fully aware of the pitfalls: being compared to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or, more recently, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
Ad Astra is a sometimes compelling space drama, but it can't quite match the heights of both Gravity or Interstellar.
The score from Max Richter might sound familiar because he’s worked on The Leftovers and Villeneuve’s Arrival, but it’s also evocative and enveloping, especially during a third-action scene that brings to mind Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.
Astra begins, for instance, with an enormous set piece on the International Space Antenna–a Babelian structure made in the hope of contacting distant life forms–that echoes the opening to Cuarón’s Gravity with all its flying debris and flailing human bodies.
Consistent with the past decade’s run of high-profile space thrillers – including Gravity (2013), Interstellar (2014), The Martian (2015), and First Man (2018) – as well as the influential “NASA procedurals” Countdown (1967) and Marooned (1969), Gray’s film is absorbed with the process by which humans are hurled across thousands, millions, or billions of miles of airless nothingness.
Ryan Gosling’s existentially adrift Neil Armstrong, Sandra Bullock’s solitary survivor of a space station–destroying disaster, Matt Damon’s left-behind scientist sowing his potatoes in the red Mars dirt: All these were movie stars-in-space in the same tradition as Pitt’s Roy McBride, who also supplies a noir-tinged voiceover that’s reminiscent of the older sci-fi classic Blade Runner .
(As in Blade Runner [1982] and Total Recall [1990] such product placements rather cunningly work double-duty as tart satire.)
This science fiction story pulls from all manner of influences – “Blade Runner,” “Apocalypse Now,” 50s pulp sci-fi, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris,” the works of Stanislaw Lem and Alejandro Jodorowsky, “2001: A Space Odyssey” and more – in its design, storytelling and artistic touches but ends up becoming a singular work of its own.
Roy McBride’s on-the-nose musings feel less akin to Terrence Malick’s poeticism than they do to the notorious theatrical cut of Blade Runner .
(Like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, there’s surely a cut of Ad Astra out there that is free of Pitt’s voice-over; 20th Century Fox would be wise to make it a Blu-ray extra.)
And just in case you miss the turmoil under the placid surface, director James Gray helpfully provides Roy with the klutziest internal monologue since “Blade Runner.”
Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
influenced Ad Astra (2019)
Dialogue Visuals Themes
Through repetition, Roy’s flatly-delivered declarations eventually begin to recall K’s eerie “baseline tests” in Blade Runner 2049 (2017), with their ominous, numbing poetry.
There’s also a dusty passage haunted by a dog, snuffling around in homage to Stalker, and a chillout room where the walls ripple with images of birds, fishes, bees, and flowers (you may remember something similar, but glossier, in Blade Runner 2049).
One shot in particular, of Roy running on Mars, is reminiscent of Roger Deakins’ iconic silhouette from Blade Runner 2049 ‘s Las Vegas wasteland.
Like a number of recent, thoughtful science fiction films, including Ex Machina (2015), Arrival (2016), and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), Ad Astra is decidedly more interested in its philosophical underpinnings than its excitable surface of danger and adventure.
Imagine if Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 were in a throuple: a bunch of daddy issues, existential concerns about the meaning of life, and considerations of how to operate as a person within a society that is built to diminish you.
There are the obvious generic comparisons: the emotional overtones of parental abandonment of Interstellar ; the gee-whizz set pieces of Gravity ; the psychological evaluations of Blade Runner 2049 .
A New York undercover police saga, "We Own the Night" is set in 1988, but it recalls even earlier eras: the 1970s, when movies like "Mean Streets" blurred the line between crime film and art film, and the 1930s, when audiences flocked to such good brother/bad brother gangster yarns as "Manhattan Melodrama," the movie John Dillinger watched before he was gunned down outside the Biograph theater in Chicago in 1934.
Roy is a guarded, internalised character for much of the movie, touting a stoicism not unlike that of Ryan Gosling’s reserved rendition of Neil Armstrong in last year’s riveting First Man, and Pitt nimbly makes Roy terse while still nodding to the man’s internal turmoil.
Gravity , First Man and now Ad Astra all follow in a similar vein; the films are all deep psychological studies into each protagonist, exploring themes of survival and loneliness throughout their journeys.
Pitt gives one of the best performances of his career as the younger McBride, delivering a stoic, magnetically pensive turn reminiscent of Ryan Gosling’s work as Neil Armstrong in last year’s “First Man.”
Ad Astra is reminiscent of last year’s First Man — not just because they’re both technically brilliant space movies grounded by extremely interior lead characters.
This sequence is brilliantly controlled by Gray – what could have so easily descended into bombastic spectacle is scarily personal, the echoing of Roy’s flailed spinning scratching away like the Gemini 8 nightmare in First Man .
An astronaut who was the head of a U.S. Space Command initiative called the Lima Project, whose portrait hangs next to Buzz Aldrin’s at SpaceCom (a nod to First Man, I hope), Clifford’s goal was to investigate the potential of intelligent life in the far corners of our solar system.
Scolding stuff, compared to the fun Paul Verhoeven in Total Recall.
Ad Astra charts Roy's journey, which is marked by a progressive loss of control: with each leg of the trip—first to the moon (which Gray depicts as a corporatized tourist trap reminiscent of the red planet of Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall), then to Mars, and finally to Neptune—Roy encounters new dangers and receives less support from other people.
(As in Blade Runner [1982] and Total Recall [1990] such product placements rather cunningly work double-duty as tart satire.)
This is far more character-driven and introspective, but its themes and approach echo film classics from John Ford’s The Searchers to Apocalypse Now, and even the father-son dynamic that was so movingly a part of Field of Dreams, all movies in which our key player in on a mission that takes detours beyond what you might normally expect from big-budget Hollywood movies.
Gray’s script, written with Ethan Gross, is like a broodingly sincere outer space mashup of Solaris , Apocalypse Now , The Mosquito Coast , The Searchers , First Man and Mutiny on the Bounty .
The Boston Strangler (1968)
Directed by Richard Fleischer
influenced The Lost City of Z (2017)
Visuals
It’s here, during a meeting with a medium who has been smuggled into a British bunker—in a riveting scene that I have on good authority was modeled after an effect in Richard Fleischer’s The Boston Strangler (1968)—that Fawcett appears suddenly to be transported into the rain forest, an image mirrored, quite literally, in the film’s mysterious closing shot.