Joyride: Film Review of Project Hail Mary
★★★1/2
Illustration by Michael DiMilo
By Geoff Carter
Movies can be art, movies can be social commentary, movies be instructional, but mostly—in reality—movies can be, and are, entertaining. They have to be, at least in this country because the film industry is a business, and feeling good is where the money is. Most viewers don’t want to spend their hard-earned money on a movie that’s depressing or provocative. They go to the movies to laugh and to have fun, to escape for a little while.
Of course, movies can transcend any of these definitions. Steven Spielberg is a master of making incredibly entertaining films that can make us think or increase audience awareness but still have happy endings. Lincoln, The Color Purple, and Saving Private Ryan are vastly entertaining movies with resonant social messages. Even Schindler’s List, as disturbing as the subject matter is, has an optimistic and hopeful conclusion. Wes Anderson, the Coen Brothers, and Robert Eggers, among many others, manage to find an acceptable balance between the captivating and the profound.
Project Hail Mary, the sci-fi thriller adapted from the novel by Peter Weir, and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, manages to find the almost perfect balance between the amusing and the sublime (with a healthy dose of science instruction thrown in).
As the film begins, an astronaut is awakened by his spaceship’s AI from an induced coma. He has no idea where he is or why is there and flees the robots attempting to tend to him. After freaking out and discovering the other members of the crew are dead, he begins to remember who he is and why is there
The film flashes back to a scene where middle-school science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is approached by Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), the head of an international organization to find a solution for stopping a new species “the astrophage” that is consuming our sun, and all the other suns in the universe—minus one. Because Grace had published a controversial paper claiming life is able to exist without water, he is buttonholed by Stratt for his expertise to help understand and kill the species destroying the sun.
After isolating the species and determining their intent, Statt recruits Grace to be part of her team that determine that all the stars are being preyed upon by the interstellar parasite—except one. Hoping to save the Earth before the sun dies in thirty years, Statt arranges for an expedition to go to the Tau Ceti star system to find out why its particular sun is immune.
Through a series of flashbacks, the origin of the mission and its development is explained. In present time, Grace finds himself approaching Tau Ceti and is surprised to find another spacecraft already there. The alien spacecraft approaches and forces contact. Grace meets the fellow astronaut, an alien life form he dubs “Rocky” and discovers his planet is on the verge of destruction by the same threat Earth is under. The two work through their linguistic and cultural differences to try to forge a solution to save their worlds.
Incorporating elements of the buddy film (a la The Sting or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), alien encounter flicks (E.T.), and the heavy science milieu of The Martian, Project Hail Mary delivers and entertaining, thoughtful, and challenging narrative. As in The Martian, Weir’s use of science in the story is complex, detailed, and realistic, and translates well from the page to the big screen.
On the other hand (to my eye, at least) some of the characters seemed immature, goofy, and juvenile—which was perhaps the point. Grace’s freak-out at the beginning of the movie is understandable, but the scene where he is analyzing the astrophage parasite in the lab and eliciting whoops and hollers from the group of international scientists and military men seems a bit over the top—and more than a little annoying, like one of his thirteen-year-old students.
Later, as his character arc develops, Grace develops into a more believable and palatable character, even though during the scenes at the beginning of the film of him teaching his class paint him as a creative and innovative communicator. It is all the more jarring when this character descends into a brand of silliness probably generated to create laughs, but that is the type of to be expected in a film meant to be enfoyed. This is what one critic termed “an old-fashioned popcorn movie” with a ton of laughs, action, sentimentality, and dazzling special effects—and more than a touch of Disneyesque cuteness.
Rocky, the alien, is played for laughs, too. Planted somewhere between a Toy Story character and an adorable (but very smart) puppy, it seems designed to appeal to the children in the audience, which is all fine and good, but raises questions about cultural dominance and appropriation. During the developing relationship between Grace and “Rocky”, it is the human who takes control. He engineers the laptop translator, it is the Earth ship where all the research takes place, and it is Rocky who adapts to human culture, not the other way around. This happens without discussion or dispute, as if it’s an organic process. It seems automatically assumed that Rocky will gravitate to human culture, even though the alien culture is at least as technologically sophisticated.
The acting is very good. Gosling’s Grace is the center of the movie and while the early cute earnestness and humility might seem a bit overdone, Gosling pulls it off, especially during the latter half of the movie. At that point, he becomes absorbing, charismatic, and heroic. It is an arc development that is perfectly executed, if not very well-written.
One of the high points of the film is actress Sandra Huller, who plays Eva Stratt with a straight-line toughness and simplicity that many actresses would be afraid to take on. It is a performance without bells, whistles, frills, or jim-jams. It is bare bones. While the character is minimalist, the performance is not. Huller, whose extraordinary work in Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall pulled her into the international spotlight a few years ago, is a revelation
Project Hail Mary harks back to the days of the great fun films like Indiana Jones or Star Wars or other fast-moving eye-popping entertainments. It is a great family film, (although Mom or Dad might have to explain the science afterwards), chock full of fun, friendships, sentimentality, surprises, humor, and acts of derring-do. Predictable and sometimes lame jokes aside—and forgiven—it is still good entertainment.
By those metrics, Project Hail Mary would be a good, almost great, film, but this movie has a gravity (sorry) weighted in scientific knowledge, logic, and problem-solving that uses thought and not firearms. It transcends the simple action or buddy film; and I for one am very glad to see science glamorized in our culture again. But for all that, there is very little new ground covered here. It’s a story—or stories—we’ve all seen before, but that doesn’t seem to matter much. Project Hail Mary is too much fun.
See Project Hail Mary, and, if you can, see it on the big screen.
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