Rocket Man meets Rocky
Whilst everything down here on Earth seems topsy-turvy and land-mined with peril, rising gas prices and tumult, Ryan Gosling is up there in space, winning hearts and minds in Project Hail Mary.
Brought to you by much the same gang that did The Martian (screenwriter Drew Goddard, based on a pop science novel by Andy Weir), Project Hail Mary opens in a floating spaceship where high school physics teacher Ryland Grace (Gosling) awakens in shock to discover he’s the sole survivor on a space mission he only dimly recalls. His crew members now dead, Grace scrambles to get up to speed on a project to stop a spreading chain of “astrophage” organisms that are eating their way through the universe, consuming solar energy like Pac-Man. Pretty soon (30 years), it will be “lights out” for our sun. And the universe.
It’s a leap to believe that bespectacled Grace is the only scientist on earth uniquely qualified to handle the mission’s objective—somehow arresting the virus from consuming solar energy. But Gosling brings plenty of goofy charm and humor to a role that soon becomes as deadly serious as Matt Damon’s in The Martian.
And it’s a wonder that Weir’s novels seem to effortlessly translate to the screen. Science isn’t the easiest kind of story to tell, yet Goddard manages to boil down the exposition into quick exchanges and flashbacks that give us the Cliff Notes version. It’s a genre you might call “Duct Tape Sci-fi,” pioneered by Apollo 13, in which last-second fixes solve everything. The shortcut science may not add up, but it moves the story along.
More importantly, at its heart, Project Hail Mary is a problem-solving movie: Grace is presented with challenge after challenge to resolve and move on—making science seem way cool in the process.
It would be remiss not to mention: he doesn’t do it alone. As Grace’s ship heads toward the astrophage trail, he encounters another spaceship. And—as trailers have already revealed—there’s a squawking, spiderlike creature that Grace dubs “Rocky” involved.
Kudos to Spider-Verse and Lego team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller for bringing their slapdash pop culture sensibility and fast-paced banter to the enterprise. Little gags involving opposable thumbs, dance moves and a karaoke version of Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times go a long way in making this likable. (Compare with the outsized role that Abba music played in The Martian’s success.) It means that—even at a running time of 2:36 and with a budget of $248 million—this feels like an intimate, cozy adventure movie that focuses on the right things.
There are twists, and a mission head played by the implacable Sandra Hüller (she of Anatomy of a Fall and Zone of Interest), who wrangles a reluctant Grace to join the mission. Whereas The Martian had a stolid, constantly wisecracking Matt Damon trying to save himself on Mars as things constantly went kaboom, Gosling goes for a more vulnerable register, infusing Grace with self-doubt, and lots of buddy-buddy emotion. A little too cute? Let audiences judge. Only drawback: about one too many endings, as things are finally resolved, only to introduce… yet another perilous problem to fix after the two-hour mark passes. Scientists: they never rest.
Project Hail Mary (I heard Filipinos trying to work out what the Catholic prayer has to do with the title: it basically refers to a longshot, last-second pass or 3-point attempt in sports) is really 2001 crossed with E.T., with a little bit of Life of Pi and Cast Away mixed in for good measure. It shouldn’t work as well as it does, but it brings to the screen a dose of hope, can-do spirit and optimism at a time when those quantities seem to be woefully lacking here on terra firma. We need to believe that Grace can find answers up there.
