Winning Project Hail Mary Celebrates Intelligence, Selflessness, and Friendship with Crowd-Pleasing Gusto
As far as rousing, interstellar science fiction pulp adventures are concerned, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie) pull out all the stops with the monumentally entertaining Project Hail Mary. Working from the best-selling novel by Andy Weir, and with a script written by Drew Goddard (who was nominated for an Adapted Screenplay Oscar for bringing the author’s The Martian to the screen in 2015), the filmmakers craft a stunningly inventive yarn of survival, first contact, and heroic daring-do that kept my pulse racing. It’s a marvelously riveting Spielbergian throwback, all of it centered on a sublime performance from Ryan Gosling that’s easily one of the actor’s all-time best.
Ryland Grace (Gosling) is alone. Awoken out of cryogenic sleep by the onboard robots of the spaceship Hail Mary somewhere between the Earth and the distant star Tau Ceti, his memory is annoyingly fuzzy as to why he’s here, what the mission is, and what his job is on it is supposed to be. Worse, his two shipmates did not survive the journey, their stasis failing long before they could be awoken.
Told in a nonlinear fashion, Lord and Miller playfully keep the audience on their toes as viewers try to figure out what is going on at roughly the same pace that Grace does. As he begins to piece his memories back together, it becomes clear he’s the last hope for humanity’s survival. His job is to discover why a mysterious phenomenon is slowly eating away at the Earth’s sun, with the Hail Mary traveling an unimaginable distance in the hope that answers to what is going on (and how to stop it) will be found at Tau Ceti.
Grace is a beloved Middle School science teacher who also happens to have once put forward an evolutionary theory that made him an outcast from the larger scientific research community. But it is exactly his wacky ideas that lead Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to seek him out. The powerful head of a secret multigovernmental project, she thinks he might be the key to unlocking an apocalyptic mystery. In familiar plucky, everyman fashion (he’s like Dr. Hans Zarkov, Professor Indiana Jones, astronaut Dr. Dave Bowman, and linguist Louise Banks all rolled into a single charismatic package), she’s absolutely right about this — Grace is the man they need.
The two parallel stories (one involving Grace and Stratt prepping the Hail Mary mission, the other with him on the spaceship attempting to learn what’s eating away at Earth’s sun) proceed in terrific tandem. Mirroring the source material whenever possible (although understandably streamlining things considerably), Goddard’s screenplay is a model of efficiency. Moments of discovery on the spaceship can only occur after similar memories back on Earth are unlocked. It’s a delicate narrative give and take, and Lord and Miller handle it with confident dexterity.
The most important element to solving this puzzle is the addition of another tragically solo astronaut, this one a fellow traveler from a different corner of the galaxy whose home planet’s sun is also being dissolved by this peculiar phenomenon. A rock-like spider creature that Grace unimaginatively nicknames “Rocky,” it is the pair’s evolving relationship that becomes the drama’s emotional foundation. From making first contact via their dual knowledge of mathematics, to learning to communicate verbally, to becoming close shipmates willing to do whatever is necessary to ensure the other’s survival, they are the picture’s heart and soul. It’s all rather glorious.
Rocky is brought to life by a wide array of spectacular effects, the majority of them practical. He’s like a cross between a Muppet (more of the The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth variety than a character who’d interact with the likes of Kermit the Frog or Miss Piggy), E.T., and a super-smart Paddington Bear. Creature effects supervisor Neil Scanlan (Babe, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) has crafted a creature that’s utterly unique and entirely adorable. The film would not work nearly as well as it does without him.
The same goes for Gosling. In almost every scene, while Lord and Miller understandably make perfect use of the movie star’s trademark megawatt smile, it’s what they put the three-time Academy Award nominee through emotionally that allows the picture to resonate as fully as it does. Grace is squashed in the proverbial metaphorical wringer. The weight of the Earth’s continued survival is literally placed upon his shoulders, and Gosling does a fine job of showcasing the full magnitude of that right down to the smallest, most idiosyncratically personal detail.
I won’t say this otherworldly undertaking always warrants its epic 156-minute running time, and some of the sillier bits (especially early on with Grace discovering exactly what makes the organisms consuming the Sun tick) didn’t always work for me. There’s also something to be said about how a handful of Weir’s more pointed environmental and sociological themes from his book are significantly diluted (and in some ways excised completely). While I can’t solely blame studio tinkering for this, what with the film being an Amazon production, I find I can’t erase that possibility, either.
But these are minor issues. Lord and Miller are strong visual filmmakers (veteran director of photography Greig Fraser, known for successes like Zero Dark Thirty and the first two entries in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune trilogy, is also in top form). Their utilization of aspect ratios, special effects (both practical and digital), and eye-popping color variances is sublime. The picture also features a vibrant, eclectically robust score composed by Daniel Pemberton (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse), and his themes augment the various components (action, drama, comedy, etc.) quite nicely.
It is its core ideas revolving around hope, togetherness, friendship, and collaboration that allow Project Hail Mary to soar into the stratosphere with magnetic resonance. This is a richly rewarding sojourn into the unknown that celebrates intelligence and selflessness. As both of those items are currently in tragic short supply in the public discourse, having Lord, Miller, and the rest of the creative team reintroduce them back into it with such subtly intoxicating euphoria is worthy of celebration. That they’ve done so with so much crowd-pleasing gusto, even more so.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
