Summary of this article
Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of Andy Weir's 2021 sci-fi bestseller.
Ryan Gosling essays an unwilling, unlikely saviour of humanity on a spaceship
Oscar-nominated Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller offers sharp, drily scathing support.
As Project Hail Mary opens, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up light-years away from home in a spaceship, saddled with foggy memory. His two crewmates are dead. He gropes for clarity, whilst simultaneously struck by an epiphany that he’s actually clever, that he might know a thing or two about the spaceship. Slowly, his memory floods back in sporadic bursts. He’s a biologist who was signed up by the German technocrat Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) for the mission Project Hail Mary. She heads the multinational programme dedicated to solving the rapidly intensifying crisis. Alien microbes called the Astrophages are eating into the sun’s radiation, dimming it, which will lead to Earth being too cold to support life. Roughly three decades remain before the cooling turns lethal. However, one distant star remains unaffected. Grace’s team has been dispatched to collect information from the star. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Project Hail Mary is as dazzlingly enrapturing as tremendously moving and compassionate. This buoyant, good-natured and sincere studio-backed sci-fi has enough heart and joy to make light of the cynicism and despair of our times.
In this adaptation of Andy Weir’s eponymous 2021 bestseller, the science hasn’t been whittled out too conveniently but condensed after significant exposition. These are interwoven with flashbacks, as nuggets of critical memory come pouring. Of course, a crucial decision is reserved for the very final stretch. Such dealings can make a film run aground, jab inertness into the mix, but the generous dose of levity ensures nothing is too laboured. The filmmaking is crisp, strenuously working at an emotional register, summoning it mostly in the unexpected friendship blooming between Grace and a rock-like alien whom he names Rocky. Acclaimed puppeteer James Oritz has done the gestures as well as lent his voice. The repartee and rapport between Grace and Rocky forms the film’s emotional fulcrum.
Project Hail Mary is frenetically funny, peaking in a slew of visually gobsmacking sequences as the sublime, fearsome majesty of space glows and looms large. Occasionally, you do feel Lord and Miller are hunting too busily for jokes in every scene. This overeager impulse to be funny and witty takes the shine off more organically possible trajectories. This is a typical Weir characteristic, no stranger either to the filmmakers’ recognisable vein. Gosling and Oritz chew off the teasing and nudging between their characters. The film fuels up with rip-roaring energy and smarts with the gradual anthropomorphising of Rocky. There’s a lot of fun to be had in just watching Gosling teach humour, only to spectacularly fail. When the jokes skid, Greig Fraser’s cinematography pulls in heart-stopping vistas of space. Every time the film hovers its gaze between the two ships in space, it’s a staggering visual marvel.
Benefiting enormously from Gosling's effortless charm, Project Hail Mary is at its strongest in the bonding between Grace and Rocky. Gosling can just as well switch on an emotional turbo force to the quietest effects. There are only initial stumbling blocks before Grace and Rocky devise a shared language. Communication is key to the film's plea of redemption, as well as a willingness to stick one's neck out for the other. Grace begins from a place where he's sure of his inability to rise to challenges. His journey of mustering bravery becomes as integral to the film as its jauntiness. The mission has doom written over it. He doesn’t want to throw his life away even as Eva implies no one will miss him if he’s gone. He has no immediate family nor a pet.
The film wobbles in the earthbound flashbacks especially after Grace proves his mettle. A tangle of back-and-forth, the persuasion mounted to strap Grace onto a mission he wants no hand in could have been trimmed. It falls hence to Hüller and Gosling to infuse the simplest scene with deep, sneaky emotion. As Eva, Hüller is flinty and no-nonsense, someone truly terrific at her job who doesn't blink twice if the road to realising her pursuits asks a lot. The ever-formidable actress is an absolute delight to watch in her cutting directness. In a standout scene, she gives a glimpse of what lies beneath her steeliness, belting out Harry Styles' Sign of the Times, her voice holding both lament and hope. Grace learns the import of those telling lyrics at that particular moment only much later once he’s experienced the gamut with Rocky.
Project Hail Mary chooses not to be dour but upbeat, arrogating friendship, community and kindness for one another as our strongest assets against any encroaching threat. A reluctant hero, Grace grows into his purpose slowly and with conviction. He goes from doubting himself to doing whatever it takes to steer a friend towards safe harbours. However, an overstretched denouement weakens the power of an effective mutual recognition between the two interstellar friends. The last act just goes on and on, begging to be cleaved as finely as the richly engrossing first hour. Nevertheless, this is a supremely engaging adventure worth the long haul.
