20 Best Science Fiction Movies Released Since 2000

Brad Pitt vehicles are one of the most reliable things in cinema today: you always know you’re in for spectacle, a bit of fun and a handsome lead. But that doesn’t mean Pitt doesn’t still star in great, capital-C Cinema films. And James Gray’s early 22nd century-set Ad Astra is just the kind of serious film we’re talking about.

Pitt is US Space Command Major Roy McBride, sent on a mission to the other end of the solar system to face his father Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones) who hijacked the Lima Project space station in orbit around Neptune twenty-nine years earlier. Roy must head to the moon, to Mars and then beyond in order to find out what happened aboard Lima and destroy what’s left of the project.

On the one hand, it’s Apocalypse Now in space; on the other, it is one of the most wondrous journeys through our solar system ever put to film, trouncing any Brian Cox special. Yes, Ad Astra is science fiction (we haven’t mastered cross-solar system space travel, after all; nor are there separatist pirates on our moon), but it is the film’s rigorous dedication to science fact that really makes it. These are images of space, and this is an experience of space travel, that is about as close to actually walking amongst the stars as the majority of us will ever experience.