Tommy Lee Jones And Brad Pitt To Search For Aliens In ‘Ad Astra’

Director of The Lost City of Z James Gray has announced that his next film would be Ad Astra, which Brad Pitt is attached to star in. According to Deadline, Tommy Lee Jones is the next star to be added to the cast, with final details being negotiated.

Gray co-wrote the futuristic sci-fi script with production aiming to start in September.

Details about the project are very secretive, but according to Deadline, “Pitt would play the slightly autistic space engineer Roy McBride. Twenty years after his father left on a one-way mission to Neptune in order to find signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, McBride travels through the solar system to find him and understand why his mission failed.”

The outlet also reports that Jones is slated to play the father in the film, but that has yet to be confirmed.

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Pitt produced Lost City of Z and was slated to star in it before Charlie Hunnam eventually took over the lead role.

The upcoming film is said to have a similar tone and theme to the British novella Heart of Darkness, about a man voyaging into the Congo who realizes the similarities between so-called civilized people and “savages.” If true, this would continue the recent string of films like Interstellar and The Martian, which aimed to be far more grounded depictions of outer space than films from previous decades.

If Ad Astra has a Heart of Darkness vibe, that would also fall in line with the tone of Lost City of Z, which followed an exploration into the Amazon to discover an undocumented tribe. The film earned strongly positive reviews, sitting at 88% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes, lauded for its lush cinematography, complex themes, and captivating performances.

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Sadly, despite the positive reaction from critics, the Hunnam-starring film couldn’t translate those reviews into financial success, earning roughly $8.5 million in its theatrical run.

When speaking with Vulture, Gray expressed concerns over making films that weren’t big-budget spectacles nor micro-budget indies.

“You know, people assume that because I’m a director, I make tons of money. I am struggling financially, Gray confessed. “Now, I’m very lucky I get to do what it is I want to do. I’ve made, good or bad, very uncompromising movies, the movies exactly that I wanted to make, and that’s a beautiful gift, so I’m not complaining about that. But I struggle. I have a hard time paying my bills. I’m 47 years old, I live in an apartment, I can’t buy a house.”

Here’s hoping the star power of Brad Pitt will earn the director more attention with his latest endeavor.