REVIEW: ‘Project Hail Mary’ will make you want to cuddle a rock alien
Ryan Gosling as biologist Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
“Am I smart?!?” is one of the first things Ryan Gosling’s character in Project Hail Mary yells out when he wakes up from an induced coma. It’s the opening sequence of the movie, and Ryland Grace (Gosling) finds himself, unshaven and amnesiac, aboard a spaceship heading for the star system of Tau Ceti. He’s not quite sure why he’s there but he knows he’s scared, alone, and on a mission of some kind.
But it’s that simple question, hilariously delivered by Gosling, that assured me that I was on this movie’s wavelength. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Project Hail Mary is another example (following the Lego, Spider-Verse, and Jump Street movies), of how the directors blend irreverent, quippy jokes with complicated concepts to make mass-market movies with just enough edge to stick with you long after the screening. Grace may know he knows things, but loss of his memories adds an extra layer of fright to an already terrifying situation.
Through frequent flashbacks, we learn the stakes of the story. Grace is a biologist who was dismissed from academia after he posited a fringe theory about the necessary conditions for life. Forced to work as a school science teacher, he’s approached by a mysterious government operative (Sandra Hüller) to investigate a strange new microscopic lifeform. It turns out this lifeform is spreading through our galaxy, feeding on stars’ energy and causing them to dim, jeopardizing any life nearby.
Back in space, Grace remembers enough of the mission to begin forming a plan: find out why Tau Ceti isn’t dimming like its neighbouring stars. And the arrival of a huge, geometric-looking spacecraft only adds to the challenge. Aboard it is a craggy, spider-like being from the star system Erid that Grace names Rocky, and they find they’ll need to team up to solve the phenomenon that’s affecting both of their species.
Rocky is voiced by James Ortiz.
Project Hail Mary is adapted from the novel by Andy Weir, whose book The Martian was adapted with huge success in 2015 by Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard. Goddard returns here to adapt Weir’s work again, and proves he has a knack for interpreting Weir’s technical prose. Just like in The Martian, this new movie has a big emphasis on the scientific process, following characters as they try out different scrappy experiments and occasionally fail. This isn’t one of those stories where science is like a form of magic; it’s easy to be drawn in when the characters need to improvise a solution using any materials that come to hand.
Compared to The Martian, Project Hail Mary does skip a few steps. By introducing an alien race with amazing technical abilities (like crafting objects from a fantastical version of the element xenon), certain story obstacles are more easily overcome than poor Matt Damon’s character, marooned on Mars without an alien buddy to help. But where the new film loses some plausibility, it gains in the relationship between Grace and Rocky. Both are castaways, and they each doubt their own abilities to solve the problem at hand. Further flashbacks to Grace on Earth show him resisting the call to go to space, no matter how crucial his discoveries were to the mission. But Grace rediscovers his self-confidence with Rocky’s help, even if we don’t get much of a clue about the source of Grace’s anxieties.
The amnesia angle gets sort of dropped as well. For all of Grace’s struggles early in the movie, his ability to remember what happened to him doesn’t impede him very much by the time the second act arrives. The amnesia is more of a storytelling device to explain the use of flashbacks, though arguably that wouldn’t really be necessary. It would have been interesting if the amnesia was a more significant obstacle to completing the mission, but perhaps it would have overcomplicated an already intense story.
Sandra Hüller as Eva, the leader of the mission to save the Earth.
It’s easy to fall for Rocky, and the puppeteers, VFX artists and voice actor working to bring him to life are to thank for that. The character needs to be a balance between strange, cute, and soulful - after all, despite his size, he’s not a pet (he has a wife back on his home planet, and they’ve been married for over a century!) In order for the movie’s conclusion to work, you need to believe that Grace would sacrifice himself for this little guy, even though he doesn’t really have a face.
I also have to call out Greig Fraser’s work as the cinematographer. It would make sense to approach a story like this with crisp digital images that reinforce the science-based story. But Fraser occasionally uses softer, diffused lenses for certain contemplative sequences, reminding you that there are moments of beauty amid the galactic peril.
Project Hail Mary is an easy recommendation for almost anyone; like The Martian, it makes science more approachable, buoyed along by another bubbly Gosling performance. See it big and loud with your best Eridian pal.
Project Hail Mary gets four stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
The design of the Eridian spaceship reminded me heavily of the tesseract inside the black hole in Interstellar.
I don’t know if they made plushie versions of Rocky that play his lines when you squeeze him, but they absolutely should if not!
As an introvert, the idea of Grace returning to Earth and becoming the saviour of the planet is terrifying.