Review: Project Hail Mary

Directors:  Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub

While in the real world evidence of global warming seems to compound itself more and more each day, the Earth of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary faces quite the opposite predicament. Thanks to a voracious space virus – astrophage – the sun’s warming power is being consumed, and it’s a galaxy-wide pandemic. As in Norse mythology, the end of the world is coming as a slow blanketing cold. But there is hope. With the world united against the inevitable, project leader Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) invests her faith in middle school teacher Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling); a man with far less faith in himself.

We meet Grace in a state of amnesiac panic as he awakes from an induced coma aboard the Hail Mary; a spacecraft light years from home on an expedition he can’t recall. Arriving in the vicinity of another solar system’s sun, Grace bumbles back into competency, snatches recollections of the path that brought him so far from home, and discovers that he is not alone, making contact with an alien lifeform brought to the far reaches of space for the same reasons.

Project Hail Mary is adapted by Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir, whose The Martin was so smartly adapted for multiplexes a decade or more ago by Ridley Scott. Hail Mary certainly exists in a similar wheelhouse of plucky problem-solving science and bittersweet lonerism. For Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this is their first foray into live action filmmaking in quite some time, having busied themselves over the past decade with LEGO movies, TV shows, abusive conditions for Spider-verse animators and dissing Cuban cinema. To their credit, it’s a huge swing at a kind of blockbuster cinema that’s fallen by the wayside of late. Or simply hasn’t had space (no pun intended) amid the comic book superheroes. In spite of so much state-of-the-art visual trickery, there’s something decidedly throwback about Project Hail Mary. A heart and earnestness pulled from ’70s sci-fi like Silent Running or Close Encounters (pointedly referenced here). It even manifests in Grace’s slightly shambolic, retro wardrobe choices. There’s something immensely charming in their decision to go big on all the funny, sweetness and sentimentalism in Goddard’s screenplay, and in Gosling they have a game star, bringing a fair dose of Kenergy to the role.

Lord and Miller might have a little too much affection for their work, however, as pruning it seems to have been too painful to contemplate. Granted, there’s a lot of story to tell, and it’s all kept remarkably pacy thanks to the efforts of editors Chris Dickens and Joel Negron, but there’s a clear disinclination to throw anything out, which is why Project Hail Mary sprawls to an ungainly and unnecessary 156 minutes. It doesn’t really start to feel its length for the first 2 hours, but when exhaustion hits it’s overwhelming. Maybe we didn’t need Grace’s trip to Ikea with his mission security bro Hatch (Lionel Boyce) after all. And, frankly, there are too many problems to solve on this excursion. The third act feels like it flickbooks through material where the prior parts of the film had the energy to investigate them. Dramas are crammed in with the urgency of those last few minutes before the end of the exam when you’re sore from gripping the pen too tight.

There are other lapses of judgment that announce themselves along the way. Why mention muscle atrophy when you’re going to immediately and blithely ignore it? Grace’s klutziness is funny, but gets rested on a lot, particularly in the first hour, which can feel like Mr Bean Goes To Space, while his mission buddies (including Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub) are little more than featured extras. The film’s dramatic apex is lost in visual confusion, obscured in darkness, flashing lights and sirens. Lord and Miller convey the panic, but not the information. And there are, frankly, too many endings, another sign of a reluctance to let anything go. When Project Hail Mary drops the ball you know about it.

But – and this is a huge but – it also has the ability to charm the pants off of you, particularly once the film’s high-wire double act begins. It’s probably an hour or so before we meet ‘Rocky’ (as Grace monikers him), and it’s the make-or-break part of this story. Fortunately it’s the heart of the picture, too. The absolute rock (sorry). Brought to life by unseen puppeteers and voiced (eventually) by James Ortiz, Lord and Miller make Grace’s cute little alien friend a star; impressively expressive through gesture for a thing with no face. It’s clear Gosling appreciated something onset to work with. There’s a looseness to their simpatico that’s tough to fake with a tennis ball on a stick. If you’re offended by the saccharine and sentimental, Project Hail Mary might lay this aspect on a little too thick for you. But it’ll go into the pantheon of cute pairings.

Ultimately this is an expansive and (mostly) family friendly adventure, one that retains and rekindles the wonders of space travel, and probably NASA’s best advert in years. The cynic in me suspects that – having found an energy source so explosive and powerful – the human race would’ve wiped itself out several times over by the time Grace’s mission reaches its conclusion, but that might’ve killed the prevailing atmosphere of teamwork and self-belief that Project Hail Mary is powered by. It’s still too bloody long, though.