Just over a decade ago, Drew Goddard wrote the adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian for Ridley Scott, a big sci-fi hit that overcame its various flaws thanks to a charming central performance and feeling so authentic that you would be forgiven for mistaking it for a true story. Now, with Project Hail Mary, Goddard is back in the Andy Weir business for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and business is still pretty good. Again, we’ve got a funny and compelling ‘man alone in space’ performance (Ryan Gosling subbing in for Matt Damon), but this time out the ‘fi’ is much heavier than the ‘sci’, replacing The Martian’s ‘realism’ with much stranger and much prettier deep-space fantasy. It makes for a great remix of the original recipe, lifted up by the secret ingredient of earnest, humanist hope.
Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a scientist and teacher we first meet as he wakes up from a years-long coma in a spaceship 11 light years from Earth with a dizzying case of amnesia. Both his other crew members have died in their sleep along the way, and now Grace must figure out who he is, where he is, why he’s there, and what the hell to do next. This opening sequence is Project Hail Mary at its roughest, delivering an absolute ton of exposition with no great urgency (at 160-ish minutes, the film has a lot of time) through a combination of flashbacks to Grace’s past on Earth and his deductions about his situation in the present.
Long story short: the Sun is dying, being eaten away by some strange lifeform, and the Earth will become extinction-level cold in 30 years. Grace is the most imaginative biologist the governments of the world can find, and so he is essentially press-ganged into a suicidal space mission to find a solution at Tau Ceti, the one star that the organisms (dubbed ‘Astrophage’) aren’t eating. There’s a lot to unpack and, while both Gosling and Sandra Huller (as the head of the ‘Hail Mary’ mission Eva Stratt) give good performances, the earthbound stuff really isn’t what we’re here to see.
It all clicks into place when we meet Rocky. An alien who looks like a boulder got carved into a spider shape and has the personality of a scientifically ingenious housecat, Rocky has been sent by his planet on the same mission as Grace and so, when they arrive at Tau Ceti at the same time, they team up in an instantly heartwarming way. There’s a lot of Arrival-lite language exchange as Grace devises a translation app that allows Rocky to speak English through a laptop speaker (eventually settling on a slightly dorky voice provided by James Ortiz, who also puppeteers the Rocky model), and you fall in love with the stony guy very quickly.
It’s less kinetic and joke-packed than Lord and Miller’s previous directorial work like The Lego Movie or Jump Street and the humour is a little gentle and dated for my tastes (Project Hail Mary feels like a product of the Obama era that helped craft The Martian, all optimism and cooperation), but Gosling and Ortiz are a fantastic double act. Goddard’s script isn’t afraid to get soppy, which could risk the whole thing tipping into overly saccharine, but instead is used just enough to get you deeply invested in this ‘man and his sentient pet rock’ dynamic, helped along by soaring, old-school score from Daniel Pemberton.
By journeying much deeper into the unknown than The Martian was ever allowed to, Project Hail Mary gets to show us some real cosmic wonder, Lord and Miller and DP Greig Fraser filling their frames with explosions of colour, the planets near Tau Ceti swirling between painterly greens and glittering pinks. There are some moments where everything treads on Interstellar’s toes a little too much, but the overall effect is pretty dazzling.
A little overlong and deeply indebted to a litany of more visionary recent sci-fi films, Project Hail Mary can feel like a ‘best of’ compilation (there’s even a bit of Slaughterhouse 5 here), but it is a very fun one. Both Gosling and Rocky are irresistibly charming (you never doubt Rocky’s realness for a second, a superb mix of practical and digital effects), their friendship just as powerful an engine as the whole ‘save the world’ story, a vision of hope for the future that doesn’t require war or superheroes. Naïve? Maybe. Loveable as hell? Absolutely.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 