Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller | Written by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir | 156 min | ▲▲▲ | In Cinemas
The advance buzz for this one has been almost universally positive. That’s what you’d expect when you combine the talents of Lord and Miller, famed for their animated fantasies as well as the Star Wars movie they never got to make, Andy Weir, the writer of The Martian, Drew Goddard, who adapted The Martian and was responsible for Cabin In The Woods, and beloved Canuck Ryan Gosling, a movie star at the peak of his powers.
And the buzz is legit — there’s a lot to enjoy about Project Hail Mary, starting with its look. Lord and Miller go easy on the CGI, especially in their vision of an alien played by a puppet. This is the Spielberg technique going back to Close Encounters of The Third Kind, referenced directly, and ET, to which this movie really wants to be an indirect sequel. The visuals hugely benefit this approach, providing a genuine physicality to this alien odd-couple buddy-comedy. It’s also a very science-friendly brand of science fiction, even though it glosses over a lot of the science it doesn’t want to bother explaining.
Gosling is Ryland Grace, a school teacher whose molecular biology doctorate is largely going to waste because his theories got him laughed out of academia. He’s recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, terrific), to be part of a program to study a tiny alien organism, the Astrophage, that’s cooling our sun. Turns out it has done so to a number of stars in the galaxy, like some kind of star-chilling virus, all except one relatively nearby. The plan is to send a three-crew spacecraft to that star to figure out why, but it’s a one-way trip. The fuel — also made of these tiny buggers — will only carry these specialists to their destination and no further. It’s a suicide mission to save humanity.
Structurally, this scenario takes most of the first act to piece together because the picture starts with a bearded Grace waking from an induced coma, unsure of where he is and how he got there. The flashbacks are surprisingly effective as he gets his memory back and they parcel out important information when most needed. I confess, I may have enjoyed the scenes on Earth more than many of the ones in space — Gosling, Hüller, and Lionel Boyce, who plays an agent named Carl, all have solid chemistry with each other and the existential themes really resonate when the characters can discuss them.
That’s not to say Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz) doesn’t emote — that’s the adorable, faceless alien Grace meets who communicates partly using sculpture. I kid you not, this alien race who has mastered space travel with three clumsy digits can do much more than you’d expect, but the sculpture and gift-giving is a flex. While it takes more than an hour of movie time before Grace and Rocky connect, once they do they bridge communication gaps surprisingly quickly.
And here’s where I struggled with some of this. It’s so goofily crowd-pleasing and comedic, with a full-on jaunty-for-the-jaunt choral score — it’s borderline annoying. We’re talking about a mission where death is a sure thing played for machine-gun laughs, a tone that frequently crosses over into trite. That’s a lot to manage, especially when the movie’s running time is almost two hours 40 minutes.
But what’s especially impressive here is the third act, which delivers plots twists you won’t see coming and a lot of genuine emotion, the score settling in to better match the action. That’s a rarity with such a big, studio-primed production, that it gets better and more sure-footed as it goes along. Full marks to the puppeteers behind Rocky and the care given to all the physical environments; the alien space ship, the Earth ship, the celestial bodies they encounter, and Gosling, an actor who is currently going from strength to strength.
Is it a little too cute, especially in the midsection? Sure. But so was ET, and yet it’s considered a classic by many, and was for a long time the highest grossing film ever until Jurassic Park showed up in 1993. Despite my mild reservations, I could see Project Hail Mary mustering similar sentiment.
