Writer Andy Weir has a bit of a predictable science fiction style that has already struck box office gold. His novel The Martian was directed by the iconic Ridley Scott and starred Matt Damon as a lone astronaut stranded on the planet Mars. Weir’s stories have a common theme that mankind might find the answers that confound us on Earth out there among the planets and the stars. Fans of that kind of hopeful science fiction won’t be disappointed when they encounter Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of another one of Weir’s hopeful space stories called Project Hail Mary. The duo have been noted for their work in the Sony Spider-verse films and have mostly experience with animated features. Their work on Project Hail Mary should elevate them deservedly in the world of live-action science fiction with this recent release.
“I put the ‘not’ in astronaut! I’ve never done a spacewalk. I can’t even moonwalk.”
Ryan Gosling plays high school science teacher Ryland Grace. As the film begins, he wakes up from an induced coma alone in a giant spaceship far away from home. As he begins to recover, he starts to remember that he was approached by an international group trying to save the planet. There are small black organisms that have been migrating between Venus and the Sun. These little buggers are drawing energy away from our star, and in a few decades it will mean destruction to our solar system if we can’t find out what they are and how to stop them. Grace is willing to help figure out what they are, and working with team leader Eva Stratt, played by played by Sandra Huler, they create a way to isolate and even reproduce the black little squares. He’s not so happy when they plan to send him with a pilot and an engineer to visit the star Tau Ceti, which is about 11 light years away. It seems Tau Ceti is the only observable star in the Milky Way that is not being killed by these creatures. The crew is going to investigate why. It’s a suicide mission. The creatures will provide the energy to get there, but there is not enough time to breed enough to return. They’ll figure it out and send back a probe with the solution. Grace isn’t having any of that, so they grab him, sedate him, and put him on the ship. These guys are not taking no for an answer.
The problem is that the pilot and engineer did not survive the coma-induced suspended animation. He doesn’t know how to work the ship, but now he’s got to complete the mission alone. It appears hopeless until he discovers an object in the stream that connects the star to a planet much like the one between Sol and Venus. It turns out another civilization has sent their own ship for the same reason. After some amusing attempts to communicate, the two explorers find a way to communicate. The alien looks like a pile of rocks, so Grace calls him Rocky. It stretches our imagination a bit that in short form they are communicating quite well, and Rocky has built a kind of hamster ball so that he can stay on Grace’s ship and they can work together. The answers are a little contrived as the relationship builds, but the movie is no longer about the mission, and it’s not why you’ll end up enjoying the film.
The relationship between these two becomes an emotionally touching one. It’s sometimes silly and more than a little corny, but there is something quite endearing about it all. I stopped counting those crazy jumps in logic and found the relationship rather compelling. I don’t know if it was ever the intention, but all of those flashbacks that put the story together for us truly become unnecessary. The characters are compelling, and that’s the story that takes over the film. Gosling builds tremendous chemistry with this creature that is honestly too silly to be as smart as he must obviously be, but none of that matters anymore. The story doesn’t really hold together, but try to take your attention away from this more intimate story and you’ll find you don’t care about the huge plot holes. You’re just having too much fun. If it’s an accident, all I can say is wow. If it’s truly what Lord and Miller planned all along, it’s at times brilliant. The film could be shorter if we cut away too many flashbacks. They ended up serving as a distraction. All I wanted to do was get back to these two astronauts from two very different places in our galaxy. It’s E.T. on steroids. It can’t really be described. You’ve got to se it for yourself. It’s going to catch on. “It’s what you Americans call a long shot … a Hail Mary.”
