There’s something immensely refreshing about a skillfully put together piece of pop pastiche like Project Hail Mary. It’s almost entirely made up of parts from the best cinematic sci-fi of the last few decades, yet it’s constructed with a fleet earnestness that makes it all feel a lot fresher than it actually is. An adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel — and it’s worth noting that he also wrote The Martian, and that this film is also adapted by that film’s screenwriter Drew Goddard — it stars Ryan Gosling as scientist-turned-schoolteacher Ryland Grace. When it’s discovered that some alien life form is slowly devouring all of the stars in the galaxy except one, Ryland improbably ends up sent on a mission to that star to find out what’s happening and save Earth from a frigid demise when the sun dies out.
Once he gets there, he encounters a different alien life form, one on a very similar mission — imagine a five-legged starfish made of rock. Despite all of the sci-fi trappings and references to other outer space epics, however, the developing relationship between Ryland and the alien, who he of course names Rocky, forms the heart of the movie. What if the real Project Hail Mary was… learning how to make a new best friend?
The non-linear story opens with Ryland already in deep space and then gradually flashes back to fill in story beats across the film’s runtime, which normally would feel like an expository crush, but in this case serves to keep narrative momentum going and foreground the emotional throughline. Surprisingly, given the obvious connection to The Martian, Project Hail Mary — the movie, in contrast to the novel — is not heavy on technical or scientific problem-solving. Most of that shoe leather is taken as read, such as when a quick montage shows that Ryland and Rocky have learned how to communicate even though we didn’t see that process. Which means, you might be a little disappointed if you came here looking for The Martian’s brand of competence porn.
On the other hand, the glue that holds everything together is an incredibly charismatic lead performance by a guy mostly explaining what he’s doing and cracking jokes about it. Gosling remains pretty effortlessly charming even in the absence of any other actors to play off of for more than half of the film. The generosity to his fellow actors apparently even extends to the space rock alien that becomes his pal; he’s often setting the creature up to deliver punchlines rather than the other way around. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller — who haven’t directed a feature film since getting unceremoniously dumped from Solo — would appear to be the perfect stewards for this sort of wisecracking buddy adventure, bringing the same constant humorous energy they put into their Jump Street comedies. But they’ve also got an incredible skill with choosing where and when to crib. The Martian is, of course, all over this, but visually their film takes cues from the likes of Interstellar and Arrival, while its shameless tear-jerking comes straight out of E.T., and on and on, etc.
All of that might have been enough on its own, but the VFX on display are also nothing short of amazing. Rocky is a completely convincing illusion created with heavily digitally-augmented animatronics; the character belongs on the pantheon of great puppet characters right alongside Yoda or Gizmo. And that puppet is also wildly expressive despite barely having what you might call a face, successfully articulating feeling and meaning even without the computer voice that Ryland uses to talk with him. That tremendous digital work extends across the film’s entire visual character, too, mostly deployed in service of extending the gorgeous, fully built-out spaceship’s interior set.
Project Hail Mary does falter a little bit in its final act; the mission, and therefore the story, seems to come to a natural end point before both a final flashback and a last-minute narrative twist that provide a somewhat unnecessary 20-minute fourth act — though it’s by no means an unsatisfying one. At that point, if you’ve been susceptible to the film’s copious charms, you’ll probably be too wrapped up to notice and perhaps even enjoy the Midwest goodbye, but it does objectively interrupt the relatively fleet structure of the film. Then again, it’s all in service of avoiding a downbeat ending, something that would sabotage the film’s largely optimistic and genuinely heartful tone. You simply can’t have people going home bummed out by a space epic that at its core is really just a humble flick about a movie star and his best pal the space rock.
DIRECTOR: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller; CAST: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung; DISTRIBUTOR: Amazon MGM Studios; IN THEATERS: March 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 36 min.
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