Per Aspera Ad Astra

The Dream Factory’s Broken Promise

I keep thinking about the moment when Ge Yang—played with eerie stillness by Wang Duo—presses his palm against the glass of the dream pod, his breath fogging the surface just enough to blur the reflection of the world he’s about to abandon. It’s a small gesture, almost incidental, but it lingers like a bruise. Per Aspera Ad Astra is a film that wants to dazzle you with its spectacle, to sweep you up in the thrill of its virtual dreamscapes, but it’s in these quiet, unguarded moments that it accidentally reveals something true: the way we cling to illusions not because they’re beautiful, but because reality has become unbearable.

Han Yan’s near-future sci-fi adventure arrives with all the trappings of a blockbuster—slick CGI, a high-concept premise about a virtual dream technology called "Good Dreams," and a pair of charismatic leads in Dylan Wang and Victoria Song. But beneath the surface, there’s a tension here, a friction between the film’s ambitions and its execution. It wants to be Inception’s cerebral cousin, a meditation on the cost of escapism, yet it often settles for being a visually impressive but narratively derivative ride.

The question isn’t whether Per Aspera Ad Astra is entertaining—it is, in fits and starts—but whether it earns the emotional weight it occasionally claims.

The film’s greatest strength is its visual inventiveness. The dream sequences are a feast for the eyes, a kaleidoscope of shifting realities where physics bend and landscapes fold in on themselves. One moment, the characters are navigating a neon-lit cyberpunk city; the next, they’re adrift in a vast, star-studded void, their bodies dissolving into particles of light.

The CGI is undeniably impressive, especially given the film’s reported budget constraints (a modest $14.8 million, by blockbuster standards). The Norwegian VFX house Gimpville deserves particular praise for the way they render the dream world’s instability—glitches, distortions, and sudden shifts that make the virtual feel tactile, almost alive. It’s the kind of work that makes you forget you’re watching a screen and instead feel like you’re falling into a waking dream.

Yet for all its visual bravado, the film struggles to ground its spectacle in something deeper. The premise—people using "Good Dreams" to escape their lives, only to find themselves trapped in a crisis of their own making—is ripe for exploration. What does it mean to choose illusion over reality?