Neptune was the name the Romans gave for their version of Poseidon, the God of the Sea. Appeals to him were meant to ensure safe travel aboard ships as if his wrath was stoked, he could turn placid water into tempestuous waves. It is also the name of the eighth planet in the solar system. An Ice giant about four times the size of the Earth made up of mostly hydrogen, helium, and methane in a massive weighty atmosphere crushing upon a compressed icy rock core. The vast temperature differences between its frigid upper atmosphere and highly pressured interior create faster winds than anywhere else in the solar system. Neptune has fourteen known moons and a faint ring system and is subject to seasonal changes and dark storms which appear and disappear, some of which could encompass entire rocky planets.

To hear people speak of it recently is to hear tales of woe about how Neptune was struck a blow by astronomers. Its deep blue demoted to just a hue darker than the off-teal cue ball of its sibling Uranus. The differences between the two outer worlds diminishes. Uranus, with its almost 90 degree tilt (which includes the orbital planes of its rings and moons) now seems the more interesting of the two as many lament Neptune’s lost sapphire sheen.

This was all due to decades of compounded human error too. The original photos from the Voyager 2, taken in humanity’s only flyby in the late 1980s, were intentionally heightened in color contrast in order to make Neptune’s wild weather more apparent to the casual observer. This was even noted in source materials of the time, as I distinctly remember the kids’ books in the elementary school library mentioning this on the page. Nevertheless, the planet’s depiction became that of the altered photo to such a degree that we are now shocked to see it portrayed accurately. Of course, anyone lucky enough to see it in a telescope (which I am) knew it was a different sort of blue all along.

The ice giants are my favorite planets. Lonely sentinels of the outer solar system, their freeze-frame Voyager pictures deceiving many from their churning interiors and seasonal weather. They are a glimpse of what might be one of the most common types of major planet in the universe. Their study is vitally important, but the challenges of reaching Uranus and Neptune leave them overlooked for obvious logistical reasons.

Neptune was the one people tended to like more. Now, so many who bet that its particular beauty was not a lie are struggling to cope. In time, I suspect, they will come and see that it is no less the marvel it was before. Teal and its field are among my favorite colors, even if I too mourn the loss of that familiar-looking deep ocean in official photographs. Feelings are temporary, and Neptune (by human standards anyway) is eternal. This reconsideration should keep our views of it steady going forward.

This line of thought brought me back to thinking about the movie Ad Astra, which was released in 2019. When I first watched this movie, I was struck by how awkwardly paced it was, with mood-breaking narration and some odd plot holes. It presents itself as hard sci fi and very much in the NASA-punk aesthetic that Starfield would go on to use later. Despite this realistic look, the movie neglected to depict Mars as having lower gravity than Earth, and depicted a trans-solar system journey as one where a ship would pass directly by both Jupiter and Saturn before hitting Neptune. A gravity slingshot maneuver would require only one of these planets, and the worlds of Sol are not lined up right after each other in a queue like they are depicted in schoolbooks. This I found tonally jarring. It was made even more incongruous when the movie got to the end and had one of the most moving and thought-provoking conclusions I have ever seen in a sci-fi film. One at considerable variant with the normal euphotic nature of the genre.

I eventually figured it was worth seeing it a second time, since the planet Neptune is featured so prominently in the story and it was on thoughts of people reconsidering Neptune’s place in their minds that brought my attention back to the movie. (Perhaps later I will indulge in that other Neptune-focused movie, the far dumber and yet more enjoyable film, the space Hellraiser itself, Event Horizon.) Knowing what to expect on the second try made me enjoy Ad Astra significantly more, a similar effect I had with my favorite solar system focused film of all time, Sunshine.

This paragraph is full of spoilers, so be warned. Decades before the start of the film Major Roy McBride’s father was leading an expedition out to Neptune, where no one had yet been, to set up a space station that would survey the galaxy for sentient life. He disappeared and was assumed dead. Then, in the present day, Earth starts to get bombarded with periodic antimatter waves causing wanton destruction. Secretly, the government determines McBride’s father’s station is the source, likely due to malfunctioning equipment. As he begins his complicated and at times almost tragicomic journey out to find his father and destroy the station, Roy learns that his father has gone mad, killed most of the crew, and in the battles with the mutineer’s damage has been done to the station causing it to create the emissions. The crew had wanted to abandon to mission after finding no signs of sentient life, but McBride senior, a religious fanatic obsessed with his mission, refused, and even sabotaged their attempts to return home, bringing about the events that would leave the station damaged and himself the only survivor on board. McBride finds his intimidating and uncaring father as a husk, dejected. He would rather kill himself in space than give up. McBride salvages the planetary survey data, plants a nuke on the station, and escapes back to Earth.

This is a bare bones summary that does not do justice to the themes of the film, which include using faith as a crutch against reality and the complex relationships between authority figures and the people they command. But what struck me both the first time I watched it, and this second viewing was at the very end, when McBride is going through his father’s data on the way back from Neptune. We see glimpses of high-resolution photos of all kinds of lifeless worlds surveyed by his father and scorned for not meeting his goal of harboring sentient life, their colors shining out of the blackness of space like stained glass lamps. Then, the one time the narration adds to the film kicks in.

‘He captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful, magnificent, and full of wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces was nothing. No love or hate, light or dark. He could only see what was not there- and missed what was right in front of him.’

Ad Astra’s embrace of nature’s true neutrality, its existence for its own sake above and beyond arbitrary human values, is my favorite part of the film. It is a speculative realist movie at its core, where the very physical realness of things is upheld as its value totally apart from moral meanings humanity often feels it is necessary to impart. When we look at a hostile and indifferent universe, we should not retreat into cope but embrace it as it is because it is ours all the same. If we keep exploring space, and I hope that we do, we should never be put off by what we fail to find out there because all that matters is that we keep finding what is there, whatever it might be.

It this world view I try to inculcate in myself when I need a sense of distance from an issue or subject matter. Right now, it could certainly be applied to those finding an idealized portrayal of something stripped away from them. Perhaps like the appearance of Neptune itself. A perceived color change does not change its amazing wonders, moons, or the fact that its extreme interior might create diamond rain that falls for unfathomable depths before striking the core.

Circling the sun at the utmost extremity, this churning orb of superfluids spins oblivious to the judgement of anyone. A remarkable example of nature’s indifferent power, Neptune will dance around its parent sun for eons, outlasting the inner worlds who will eventually be engulfed in Sol’s coming red giant phase.

In Alastair Reynold’s novel Inhibitor Phase even the backdrop of a species-exterminating interstellar war between decaying ancient machines and an endangered human race cannot take away that the true thrilling climax of the story. This is the descent of a spaceship into an ice giant in a quest to find a lost ancient weapons cache. The awesome crushing forces and ever-increasing temperatures of the planet has a power and danger not even the existential conflict raging above can rival, putting one of the most advanced spaceships ever built in the far future into the greatest peril it has ever faced. It is telling that before the descent this random planet is referred to by the protagonists as mundane and unremarkable. Something barely worth logging in an astronomical survey. The kind of world you could find in any system that no explorer would give a second thought. But up close, it is the engage with its power is to embark upon a trial of immense courage and risk.

In such a way are all worlds well-named when called ‘Neptune-like.’ For, like the god the name derives from, the ‘waters’ can go from still to tempestuous based on the nature of the journey and the whim of the genus loci. And those currents certainly run deep.