It takes no genius to see the parallels between Project Hail Mary and The Martian. Both movies are based on novels by the same author (Andy Weir). Both have the same screenwriter (Drew Goddard). Both feature men who spend a lot of time talking to themselves because they’re all alone in space and it’s how they keep from going insane. Both have faith in science and human beings. However, only one of them is coming out this week. Maybe Project Hail Mary’s starry-eyed optimism is out of step with the culture, or maybe it’s what we need even more than we did in 2015. I don’t know which, but it’s more than entertaining enough to justify its ticket price and maybe even an upcharge for a premium format.
Like the novel, the movie begins with our man (Ryan Gosling) regaining consciousness on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Eventually, his memory returns in flashbacks that reveal that he’s Ryland Grace, a crackpot academic and middle-school science teacher. Some mysterious space microorganisms called astrophages are absorbing enough of the sun’s energy to endanger all life on Earth, so Ryland has gone on a mission approximately 12 light-years away to the star Tau Ceti to find out why it seems to be the only nearby star unaffected by the astrophages.
Ryland’s laboratory experiments with the astrophages on Earth make him the first human to contact an alien lifeform, but he makes an even bigger discovery at Tau Ceti: a faceless, five-limbed, short-statured being from an exoplanet orbiting Sirius whose world is facing the same mass extinction as Earth. The creature’s rock-like appearance leads Ryland to name him “Rocky,” and much of the movie is these two organisms trying to figure out how to communicate and work together to save their respective worlds.
Ryland is often talking to this creature when he’s not talking to himself, but if any star can make this look easy, it’s Gosling. The co-star of Barbie is comfortable stumbling around on his spaceship and banging his head on the scientific equipment, but then he can also conjure the necessary gravitas when Ryland eulogizes the two astronauts (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub) who undertook the journey with him but died en route. His charm is precisely what the film needs.
Your mileage may vary regarding Weir’s sense of humor, which I liken to a physics professor joking about tachyons at open-mic night. However, one thing the filmmakers here share with him is a willingness to drill down into the science of it all. Ryland’s expulsion from academia and his recruitment to the project both stem from his papers about the possibility of life without water, so he’s quite chagrined when he pokes an astrophage with a needle and finds it’s mostly made of water.
“It turns out I was wrong about the one original idea I’ve ever had,” he says.
Much of the movie’s 156-minute run time is all about the trial and error that goes into science, with Rocky eventually building a polyhedral cube that allows him to survive and move around aboard Ryland’s ship. Ryland then figures out how to translate Rocky’s vocalizations into English via his computer’s speech software (voiced by James Ortiz). He experiments with putting Meryl Streep’s voice onto Rocky’s words and marvels, “She really can do anything.”
The directing team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have engineered huge hits in both animation (The Lego Movie) and live action (21 Jump Street), and here they pull off the difficult task of making comedy in outer space, as Ryland first sees Rocky’s much larger ship and is alarmed to find it mirroring his own ship’s movements. The setting creates both laughs and visual beauty that we haven’t seen in Lord and Miller’s previous films. When our protagonists reach an exoplanet of Tau Ceti’s, Ryland sees blue, green, and red swirls on the planet’s surface.
The flashbacks that take place on Earth don’t have the same pull, despite Sandra Hüller’s presence as the program director. The revelation about how Ryland came to be on this mission that’s likely to end with his death in space doesn’t have the impact that the filmmakers seem to think it does. Regardless, Ryland comes to realize that he can’t survive on his own, and I’m glad that Rocky is neither a demigod with superior knowledge nor a sidekick who’s there to be cute. Our main characters’ persistence in working together to save their civilizations is what gives Project Hail Mary its honest uplift.
Project Hail Mary
Starring Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Written by Drew Goddard, based on Andy Weir’s novel. Rated PG-13.
