'Ad Astra' Trailer: Brad Pitt Heads To Space To Find Tommy Lee Jones

James Gray, one of the best directors working right now that you've probably have never heard of, is back with Ad Astra. The sci-fi epic finds Brad Pitt traveling into space to find his missing father, played by Tommy Lee Jones. Gray has been working on Ad Astra since 2017, spending a large amount of time making sure the special effects were just right. Now, we finally have our first look at the film. See the Ad Astra trailer below.

Ad Astra was initially set to launch in January of this year, before being bumped to May. Now, it's been relocated to September. Sometimes when a film is shuffled around like this, I get nervous. But I'll remain optimistic in this case, because I trust James Gray. Gray is the filmmaker behind films like We Own the Night, The Immigrant and The Lost City of Z, all of which are fantastic, but none of which ended up making much money at the box office.

Gray was determined to take his time with Ad Astra, considering he's never made a big effects-driven movie before. "I've been very insistent because I didn't want to be up against a release date," Gray said last December, adding that he felt "science fiction films (often) have a number of shots that don't look very good." At the time, the filmmaker had over 600 special effects shots to review, and wanted to make damn sure they looked good before the public got to take a peek.

"There's a lot of spacewalk stuff," Gray told THR. "The word 'acrobatic' doesn't really apply, but some very complicated rig work and that stuff is going to look amazing. And there's also a lunar rover sequence, which is also basically CG-built, which is going to look terrific, I think. But to make it look perfect doesn't happen overnight."

Here's the synopsis:

Twenty years after his father left on a one-way mission to Neptune in order to find signs of extra-terrestrial intelligence, Roy McBride, an engineer, travels through the solar system to find him and understand why his mission failed.

As a fan of Gray's work, I'm excited to see how this all turns out. In addition to Pitt and Jones, the film also stars Ruth Negga, Donald Sutherland, Jamie Kennedy, John Finn, Kimberly Elise, Bobby Nish, LisaGay Hamilton, and John Ortiz. We've been blessed with some truly fantastic sci-fi films in recent years – Interstellar, Arrival, Gravity, and more. Here's hoping Ad Astra joins their ranks.

Ad Astra opens September 20, 2019.