With every frame a treat for the eyes, a surprisingly emotional through line, and one of Ryan Gosling’s best performances, Project Hail Mary is a rare blockbuster that’s firing on all levels.
Let me get the comparisons to the previous Andy Weir novel adaptation immediately out of the way: Project Hail Mary is a better time than The Martian.
Don’t get me wrong, Ridley Scott’s red planet epic about a man stranded on Mars is the epitome of a crowd-pleasing comfort watch, but it feels like you’re being held at arm’s length the whole time while Matt Damon quips scientific jargon he knows nothing about to several cameras. Director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller go in the other direction by making you feel things while taking you on a space odyssey made up of elements from some of the best space movies of the last few decades.
And boy, what a crowd-pleasing odyssey it is. You have no idea what’s going to happen (unless you’ve read the novel), but you’re just excited to go along for the ride.
Project Hail Mary wastes no time by starting in media res with Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) waking up on an empty spaceship. Struggling with temporary amnesia, Grace (and we, by extension) is just figuring out what’s going on. What’s refreshing is how the movie isn’t too bothered about holding our hands through it, which is almost surprising given the dire state of brain-dead blockbusters these days. When Grace goes through a rollercoaster of emotions upon realising his predicament, a shot of him reaching for a drinks pouch with ‘vodka’ written on it is all you need to know about where he’s at mentally.
This first hour contains echoes of The Martian mixed with Duncan Jones’ Moon, particularly in how the stakes are laid out and problem-solving traits of our protagonist. Whereas Matt Damon goes about things in a pragmatic, almost detached way, Gosling’s Grace is much more flappable and raw. The movie leans into his comedic and dramatic chops to convey just how out of his depth is. There’s an underlying fear beneath every funny thing he does and you’re legitimately not sure how exactly Grace will get out of this jam. By the time Grace dumps a heap of thoughts on a whiteboard, the ‘WHO AM I?’ at the top of the list already feels earned – and we’re only 20 minutes in.
As Grace is figuring out what exactly is going on, intermittent flashbacks reveal how this self-deprecating weirdo teacher was recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to be part of an ambitious interstellar mission to save the planet, titled the ‘Hail Mary’ project. These flashback scenes are primarily science-filled exposition designed purely to push the story along, which isn’t exactly riveting stuff per se. Still, screenwriter Drew Goddard manages to make it digestible before Gosling cranks it up a notch by delivering sci-fi yada yada like his bumbling detective character from The Nice Guys. His idiot scientist schtick has shades of annoying Marvel main character energy, but you quickly realise that it all comes from a place of absolute terror. The man is thrown into the deep end against his will, of course he’s going to have his defences up. He just wants to teach kids about science in peace, dammit.
The intercutting between past and present adds up to a lengthy 156-minute runtime, but it never feels draggy. Part of it is the whole ‘how’s Grace going to get out of this’ hook, and part of it is Lord and Miller being unafraid to let scenes breathe for character reasons. Take Stratt as an example. She is the typical ‘stern boss’ in Project Hail Mary, but Hüller is able to infuse just a hint of personality into Stratt in the few opportunities given to her. During an extended karaoke scene, the character steps out of her shell to sing a cover of Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times so beautifully that the room – and all cinemagoers – is rendered speechless.
In fact, there are several little scenes like this where the plot isn’t being advanced, most of them involving Gosling messing around while in his spaceship. This penchant for letting actors do their thing in service of their characters has all the hallmarks of Lord and Miller’s famed improvisational directing style at play, and it does make one forever wonder what their Star Wars movie would’ve been like had they been allowed to make it their way.
When Project Hail Mary introduces the rock-like alien, dubbed ‘Rocky’ by Grace in one of many pop-culture references casually dropped, the movie takes a turn towards the spectacular. In contrast to the build-up of the first hour or so, the second hour has the emotional frequency Arrival combined with the buddy-cop energy of Lord and Miller’s 21 and 22 Jump Street.
Grace and Rocky are well-matched intellectually while occasionally butting heads (in a nice way) due to this strange dynamic being, ahem, alien to both of them. It doesn’t take long for their respective freaks to match, and the resultant chemistry towers above almost every other cinematic duo in recent memory. That is a testament to the top-tier puppetry work to bring Rocky to life, Gosling’s ability to act opposite anyone and anything, and Lord and Miller’s uncanny ability to pack relatable humanity into all their stories, whether it’s about Lego, man-child cops, or radioactive spiders.
During the quieter, grounded moments when Grace and Rocky open up to each other about their respective predicaments and loneliness, all thoughts about the survival of their planets are as far away from your mind as they are from the sun. You wouldn’t know it, but Gosling is a surprisingly beautiful crier. By the time we arrive at the climactic moments of Project Hail Mary when big decisions are made, the emotional wallop hits just as hard as the visual spectacle.
Speaking of visual spectacle, Project Hail Mary cuts no corners when it comes to production design and space sequences. Lord and Miller have boasted about using no green screen for the movie, and they’ve earned the right to brag, honestly. It’s like they took everything they’ve learned about sentimentality and visual filmmaking from The Lego Movie and the fantastic Spider-Verse movies and poured it all into this. All the Interstellar-inspired spaceship designs and epic space travel sequences are a feast for the eyes. Cutting-edge CGI may be good for some things, but this movie makes a great case for good old-fashioned practical effects. Since the movie explores areas of space we only theoretically know about, Lord and Miller can lean into their imaginations a bit more, imparting a colour-splashed sense of grandeur.
As the flashback scenes culminate alongside the Project Hail Mary’s big third act climax, the full picture of Grace’s predicament is presented before us in unexpected ways. The movie asks both Grace and us some seriously big questions that’ll make you wonder whether you’re capable of making certain decisions or big sacrifices. Regardless of the answer (if you have one that is), you have no trouble buying how Grace can be both a brilliant molecular biologist and a lonely, unassuming guy who looks like Ryan Gosling.
He’s also a cowardly man whose grasp of himself is in stark contrast to the movie’s grandiose presentation. But as the threads of the past and present are tied up, the flashbacks recontextualise everything about who he is in a way that makes sense. It’s ultimately a bittersweet revelation that makes you realise how many layers there are in Gosling’s fantastic performance.
Underneath all the visual bluster and practical effects, this is ultimately a story about two lonely beings becoming friends that’s told on the grandest scale possible. Distilling what doesn’t work in Project Hail Mary is almost pointless because any time a movie can effectively use a rock alien to pull on my heartstrings like Rocky’s puppeteers, it is already operating in the realm of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Combine that with a heartwarming message of forming a connection that’ll stand the test of time and space, that’s about as good a blockbuster movie as one could ask for.
