Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy – Vulture
Photo: Vulture, Twentieth Century Fox, Touchstone/Shutterstock and A24
I love space movies, especially those that darkly ponder the human experience. But lately, they have started to gently warp my brain. Watching them, I’ve begun to wonder things like: Are you really a dad if you have not ventured sadly into space, leaving your children behind, blinking forlornly into the sun? Are you really a son if you have not followed your sad dad into space, bravely heading into the unknown universe to complete his life’s mission rather than grapple with the most tender parts of your human nature? Can you rightly call yourself a daughter if your sad dad has not left you totally alone on the Earth while he saves the world? Can you call yourself an astronaut if you have not exploited space as a metaphor for your own personal failings?
2019 alone has blessed us with not one but two Sad Dad Space Movies. In Ad Astra, Brad Pitt plays Roy, a sad man chasing after his sad dad, who went to space several decades ago and disappeared and might now be accidentally destroying the planet. In High Life, Robert Pattinson is a sad dad raising his daughter alone on an increasingly hopeless spaceship with a complimentary “fuckbox.” But it’s not just this year — our filmic history is rich with repressed men who must leave literal Earth to feel something. Everyone from Bruce Willis to Matthew McConaughey to Will Smith has played a mopey parent boppin’ around in zero-G. Liv Tyler and Chris Pratt and Jessica Chastain have all played the child left behind who feels a responsibility to carry on a father’s mission. Chris Pine has done two Sad Dad Space Movies!
What is it that draws the cinematically inclined back to this depressing well again and again? What is it about this particular story, and its metaphorical implications, that makes so many male filmmakers say, “Whoa, I should make a movie about a fuckin’ sad dad … and set it in space!” Is it about male-centric legacies and fatherly approval and the inevitable void these things create? Are all of the wormholes the sad dads have to travel through metaphors for the birth canal? Is it about dicks, somehow?
In an effort to understand the manly impulse to keep making this sort of movie over and over, behold: a taxonomy of Sad Dad Space Movies. By no means is this taxonomy a complete encyclopedia of all Sad Dad Space Movies ever made; instead, I’ve chosen a few representative films for each category and delved into their patterns and similarities. (Also, any movie where all of the characters are native to space and/or are, for all intents and purposes, “aliens,” doesn’t count, but we can all agree that, yes, Star Wars is about a sad dad.) So look melancholically out your window at the world below, open your clenched fist to reveal a little locket with your child’s photo in it, then throw that locket into the universe’s gaping maw and read on.
1. Dad Disappears Into Space and Kid Follows Him, Only to Discover That He Basically Sucks
Photo: Francois Duhamel/Twentieth Century Fox
The Trope: One of my personal favorite — and most regularly exploited — Sad Dad Space tropes involves a father disappearing completely into space while working on a very important space project that throws his lack of attachment to his own family into sharp relief. Eventually, his abandoned child — often at this point an adult himself and profoundly messed up — follows him into deep space, only to discover that his father is kind of a chode. At some point, both sad dad and sad child have the same realization: The ultimate daddy is space itself — cold, unknowable, infinitely alienating, floaty, scary.
There’s also a lot of Sad Daddy Shit in Guardians of the Galaxy — Gamora, you have my sympathies — but in my eyes the most significant Sad Dad situation belongs to Peter Quill (played by the absolute worst Chris, Chris Pratt). Abducted and raised by absolute jamokes, half-human Peter has no idea who his dad is; when he eventually meets the guy, it’s revealed, in a rampant abuse of Freudian metatext, that his name is Ego. His name should make it readily apparent, but yeah, Ego sucks. He has fathered thousands of kids to keep his seed going, Jeffrey Epstein style, and occasionally murders them. He gives the mother of his child a brain tumor so that he can continue conquering the cosmos. When he finally meets his son, he says incredible Sad Dad in Space things like, “I don’t know where I came from exactly. First thing I remember is flickering. Adrift in the cosmos utterly and entirely alone.” Ultimately, he sucks so badly that his own son needs to kill him. (This is its own subgenre, really, similarly played out in Star Wars.)
2. Good Dad Dies (in Space, or Not in Space!), Inspiring Child to Go to Space (Either Way)
Photo: Warner Bros.
The Trope: Juuust variant enough from “sad dad disappears in space,” this trope centers instead on “sad dad disappears in time,” and follows the child who’s inspired by their perfect sad dad’s untimely death. Space is the void is death, etcetera, etcetera. These movies usually begin with shots demonstrating the things sad dad did to inspire in his child a lust for adventure and an insatiable curiosity regarding the unknown: Show them space through a telescope; make sweeping statements about the incomprehensibility of the universe; say some mysterious shit and then walk calmly into another room and die. Subsequently, the child becomes singularly obsessed with traveling to space, perhaps in hope that once there, he or she will discover the meaning of the universe and understand why his or her perfect dad had to die. The ultimate motive, though, is to finish what the dad started: You can’t get your sad dad’s approval if he’s dead, but by completing his mission, you can sort of assume that you’d have it, which is enough if you’re also in a lot of therapy. Which brings us to …
In the massive Chinese space hit The Wandering Earth, an astronaut named Liu Peiqiang attempts to save Earth from being scorched by the sun and has to leave his son, Liu Qi, behind for most of his childhood. Dad is supposed to come back, but we all know how that sort of promise unfolds. Just before he’s due to return, everything goes to shit onboard, and Liu Peiqiang must sacrifice himself by hurling his body into a lot of hot plasma in order to save the world. The film flashes forward and reveals that Liu Qi has now adopted his dad’s mission and is now in charge of saving the Earth. You love to see it.
(Some tangential films that nearly make it into this subgenre: Thor: Ragnarok, a reverse of the trope, in which Thor’s sad dad’s death inspires him to go to Earth; Solaris, in which George Clooney is haunted by the memory of his sad wife in space; Gravity, where Sandra Bullock is haunted by the memory of her dead daughter in space; and Arrival, where Amy Adams is haunted by the future memory of her dead daughter while speaking to aliens on Earth.)
3. Dad Leaves Child on Earth to Essentially Go Fuck Themselves
Photo: Paramount Pictures
The Trope: In these films, the sad dad is the central figure, and their children are mere supporting players who are left on Earth like chumps. The point of the film is usually something along the lines of, “Sad dad makes the ultimate sacrifice to pave the road ahead for his children.” The sad dad can never fully enjoy space because he feels bad about leaving his kids behind, but not enough to, like, actually come back from space. Sometimes the kids turn out okay and toil away on the ground in an effort to bolster their fathers’ legacies. Sometimes they sit forlornly in a bathtub, playing idly with a floaty rocket-ship model as their sad mom bathes them. If the kid is a girl, there is a better chance that she won’t turn out all fucked up; the girl and her dad often share a love of space and that connection motivates her to become a spunky genius. But if the kid left behind is a boy, he usually take things extremely personally and turns out like Casey Affleck in Interstellar, making his kids breathe in toxic dust just to prove a point.
The most sad dad part of the movie happens early on, when Matthew McConaughey tells a young Murph that, as a father, one is essentially “the ghost of their children’s future” (which he takes a little too literally later on). Or maybe it’s when a gentle robot tells McConaughey, “The only way man has ever gotten anywhere is by leaving something behind.” Or maybe it’s when a 50-something McConaughey has to watch his 90-something daughter die? I don’t know; this movie is sad as hell!! Jesus!
First Man, based on the true story of Neil Armstrong’s jaunt to the moon, takes sad dad in space to new heights, if you will (you will). Not only does Ryan Gosling have to watch his baby daughter die tragically of cancer, he must then leave the rest of his kids as he goes to the moon — who is the saddest dad of us all! Ryan deals with his sad-dad-ness by becoming totally dissociated from his loved ones and himself, which is a classic sad-dad coping mechanism. As David Edelstein writes in his review, the film is “full of scenes in which Armstrong is torn between his kids asking him to play and the papers on his lap. Those are the only times you see Armstrong’s fear. He sticks with the papers.” Sad dads in space: They love papers. But the most sad-dad moment of all happens near the end of the film, when Ryan reaches the moon: The very first thing he does is hurl his daughter’s bracelet into the void.
4. Child Goes to Space With Dad, Often to Disastrous Effect
Photo: Frank Masi/Columbia Pictures
The Trope: Sometimes, sad dads cannot bear to leave their offspring on the Earth, or some kind of catastrophic global event compels them to bring their kids into space. This never ends well. Sometimes the kid becomes a maniac (Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century); sometimes the kid presses the wrong space button and somebody ends up dying. Either way, nothing good ever comes of a kid and a dad being in space together — it’s unnatural, somehow, to have two members of the same family staring into the void simultaneously. How is space supposed to act as a metaphor for the unknowability of the universe if the person confronting that unknowability isn’t depressed and alone?
5. Man Goes to Space with Father-Figure Computer Who Murders All of His Co-Workers and Then Tries to Kill Him, But Eventually He Kills the Computer and Later Is Reborn As a Fancy Evolved Baby
Photo: MGM
This is what happens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Which is further proof that, in essence, every space movie is about dads, daddies, being daddied, or failing at daddying.
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