Project Hail Mary

What’s It All About, JG? The Earth’s sun and almost all nearby stars are getting eaten by microbes – a plot so believable it’s possible it was a rejected sequel to The Core – but it’s discovered that one isn’t. That means it’s down to a small team of astronauts to go figure out why. Unfortunately, only one survives the trip, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), and he’s got amnesia, the better to explain the plot in flashbacks. Orbiting Tau Ceti e, the only star without Space Cooties, he encounters a stone-like alien he dubs Rocky. Between the two of them, they have to figure out how to save the sun (well, lots of suns), get their cure back to their respective civilisations, and survive long enough for a feel-good ending. Do they make it? Yes. Yes they do.

Why Did You Give It A Go? Well, it’s been quite the buzz movie, hasn’t it? It’s been talked about pretty much endlessly, and that talk has largely been very flattering for the movie. It’s been getting strong reviews, Ryan Gosling has been well regarded in it, and it’s apparently worth seeing in the cinema. Also I saw, and was exceedingly bored by, The Martian*, the other Andy Weir novel-to-movie adaptation, so, eh, sure, I’ll give it a go.

* I rewatched The Martian the day after I saw Project Hail Mary. I enjoyed it considerably more the second time around and have no idea why it bored me so much initially. It’s a great movie, Matt Damon is much better than Gosling is here, and, spoilers, it’s a lot stronger than Project Hail Mary despite some superficial similarities.

Is It Any Good? There are plenty of good things about it, certainly, though it’s also a film that the more distance I have from it, the more I feel a certain lack of satisfaction about it. I should say that I went into this with absolutely zero expectations as to what it was about, what the point of it was, or even how long it was. I went in completely cold, and it’s actually lovely to go into a film without any idea of what to expect – just a really refreshing change.

But that does mean I wasn’t quite prepared for a film that’s produced like it’s Interstellar and written like it’s Beverly Hills Cop. Especially early on in the film, there’s a lot of grand shots of space, accompanied by ponderous music that desperately, desperately wants you to take all of this terribly seriously and is doing much of the heavy lifting, impact-wise. Then, not long thereafter, we’re into a knockabout buddy-cop movie with a puppet made of stone. It’s quite a tonal shift.

Still, there’s no denying that a lot of the special effects are genuinely impressive. The shots of Tau Ceti, Gosling’s spaceship, and Rocky’s… craft (somehow, “spaceship” doesn’t seem like quite the right word) are all genuinely impressive and, while the music labours a little too hard to make these seem capital-s Significant, they still look great. The zero-g shots of Grace (what an on-the-nose name to give someone in this situation, incidentally) bouncing around his ship look terrific too, and Rocky is a fantastic creation. There’s real time and effort put into establishing just how different and alien this creature really is, from the fact it can’t survive in our environment, to the time taken to establish language and understanding between it and Grace. All that is extremely welcome and it’s a level of detail and attention rarely afforded alien races in a big-budget movie like this one.

So with all these points in the film’s favour, why does it remain faintly unsatisfying? Well, for one, as soon as it becomes a buddy-cop movie, all the tension – rather effectively built up until that point – just drains out of the movie. There’s not that much of a feeling of threat even early on but all the talk of the “Petrova line” (an absolutely lovely name for the phenomenon, incidentally, and a great use of language) and space-things eating the sun drains away when the movie decides it just wants to be a knockabout romp instead. Oh, also, major demerits for using David Bowie’s “Starman”, a fantastic song that should forever be barred from being used in a sci-fi movie ever again for being an unforgivable cliché. Ahem. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with the knockabout romp part of the movie, just as there’s nothing wrong with the slightly more more ponderous first part. But the movie can’t quite land the dog-leg the film takes at the mid-point and so is left feeling rather broken-backed. If it had all been ponderous, existential-threat stuff, that would be fine, and if it had all been a daft comedy, that would be fine too but the transition just doesn’t quite land.

The flashback structure is kind of rubbish too. It lets us establish – very slowly – that Ryland Grace isn’t in fact a “good man”, he’s a scared man that’s too afraid to go on the mission after the original astronauts get blown up in an accident. But gradually learns how to be a better person through bonding with a rock-monster thing. It’s both an incredibly obvious emotional arc to put the character on and just not very well played out across the film. When we first see Grace on screen, he’s happily teaching some kids in a classroom. When we last see him on screen, at the end of the movie, he’s happily teaching some kids in a classroom (though these kids are stone creatures). In between, everything seems… kinda fine?

In fact, there’s not much sense of an arc at all. When Grace wakes up, he can’t remember anything about who he is. Fine. But then he just gets on with some scienceing, which he seems happy doing, then meets Rocky, which he seems happy doing, then figures out the cure to the sun having Space Clap, which he seems happy doing, then he saves Rocky when Rocky won’t make it back to his own planet, which he seems happy doing, then ends up teaching rock kids, which he seems happy doing. That’s not an arc – it’s barely more than a straight line. I guess the real rock monsters were the friends he made along the way?

In all of this, Ryan Gosling is certainly… Ryan Gosling. He’s absolutely fine and absolutely never anything else. He can be quite charming at times, and he can do a bit of emoting at times, and so on, but there’s not an awful lot of depth to the performance. To be fair, there’s not a lot of depth to the character either, yet you’d be hard-pressed to say he was really adding to what’s on the page either. He’s pretty endearing when confronted with a rock-puppet and he looks sad when the rock might die but it’s all very much surface level. The supporting cast is mostly fine, though a special shout-out to Sandra Hüller as the head of Project Hail Mary on Earth, Eva Stratt. She’s pleasingly blunt and unforgiving in her performance and the character is a welcome relief from everyone else being terribly nice all the time, no matter what, always.

But it must be said, moment to moment, the film is pretty entertaining and it’s certainly easy enough to get carried along by. It’s not quite the great classic it sometimes seems to think it is – it’s not a lot more than a popcorn movie with a bit of existential angst welded to its first forty-five minutes or so. It’s certainly a reasonable way to spend a couple of hours but there’s a nagging sense that it could have been a bit more, and the more you pull on that thread, the more things unravel. Entertaining, then, but not spectacular.

How Many Of These Have You Watched? When it comes to Ryan Gosling movies, a few. As mentioned, I’ve seen The Martian as well as Drive, which is an exceedingly tedious movie. I absolutely adore Bladerunner:2049, though, and Gosling’s entertainingly silly in Barbie. A mixed bag, then.

Would You Recommend It? Cautiously. It is good but it’s never better than good. Perhaps that seems like too much to hope for though the truth is, there’s a lot of things this film gets right, and if it could just focus a bit, it could have been really special rather than merely fine.

Take the part of the film where they need to dive Grace’s ship into the atmosphere of the planet so that Rocky can go “fishing” and get a sample of the stuff that can destroy the microbes in the Petrova line. It’s a genuinely tense, well put together sequence for the first part of it, with some great special effects and a real sense that they’re finally achieving something. But then it just goes into very obvious territory – there’s a space accident, Grace is knocked out, Rocky has to potentially sacrifice himself to save the day (just like Grace will do for Rocky later in the movie!), etc etc. It’s all just doled out with plodding predictability, never done badly but never stretching anyone’s brain cells one iota more than they need to be. It’s all just so obvious, and that really undermines what was otherwise an effective sequence.

Grace learning Rocky’s language works similarly. It’s absolutely fantastic that the film takes the time to show how language and communication would work, starting from first principles like mathematics and constructing meaning from that. That deserves to be celebrated as one of the smarter parts of the film. But… I dunno. It doesn’t really convince, somehow. It either takes too long, because it derails some of the momentum the film had built up, or not long enough, because they go from “one, two, three, four” to proper conversations far too quickly. However long they spend on sorting out the communication between them isn’t right and this again speaks to the broken-backed nature of the film. If this was a thoughtful, ponderous film about extinction, then it could get away with really taking its time over the communications issue (like Arrival, for example). And if it was a light knockabout from start to finish, then it could briefly address the language issue but largely gloss over it. Instead, we’re left with a less-than-satisfying middle point.

The conclusion is a little unsatisfying as well. Grace sends four probes with the cure back to Earth (The Beatles “Two of Us” playing on the soundtrack when the four probes are launched. Lol. I’m also assuming that getting the rights ate up about nine-tenths of the budget), then we cut back to them being received on a now-frozen Earth in a scene weirdly reminiscent of the movie Sunshine, which Project Hail Mary shares a weirdly large amount of DNA with (and about the same level of credibility). But anyway, that’s fine, and Grace jets off to save Rocky and then ends the movie teaching rock children.

The way this is shot and delivered, we’re clearly meant to think that Grace’s journey has been completed and he’s learned to be brave when he wasn’t before. But we only just found out he was forced into being on board a few minutes beforehand and there’s no time for this revelation to land before we see he’s already moved past it. How does he feel about being forced on board? Does he feel betrayed by Eva Stratt? There’s a hint there might have been a burgeoning relationship between them but this is steamrollered by the forced-onboard revelation so we never get to find out more about it. Then the film is over. This is the sort of emotional beat that really needs to breathe to convince and it just doesn’t.

And that kind of speaks to the movie as a whole. So many of the component parts are there to make something really terrific. But they’re just not quite assembled in the right way and that’s terribly undermining. If there’s an obvious choice to make, you can guarantee the film will make it. If there’s an easy path, you can be sure that’s the one we’ll be going down. Project Hail Mary is largely entertaining and there are moments of real quality but they’re often lost in a sea of straightforward choices, spoon-fed plot details, and well-worn character tropes. Project Hail Mary is an easy enough movie to like but next to impossible to love.

Scores On The Doors? I’m going with 7/10 because it is entertaining but secretly I think on reflection it’s probably 6.5/10