Adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, the film strands Ryan Gosling's disgraced astrophysicist 2,000 light-years from home with a quippy alien sidekick. 'The movie is a mawkishly sentimental and at times very funny mishmash of familiar story elements,' writes critic Sean Burns.
Ryan Gosling is so charming you can watch him talk to a rock for two hours and 36 minutes. That’s the main takeaway from “Project Hail Mary,” a strenuously crowd-pleasing sci-fi extravaganza from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller that strands our leading man 2,000 light-years from home with a quippy alien sidekick who looks like a concrete spider.
Adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, the movie is a mawkishly sentimental and at times very funny mishmash of familiar story elements from “Armageddon,” “Silent Running,” “Cast Away,” “Interstellar,” “” and, most conspicuously, “The Martian,” which was itself adapted from an Andy Weir book by this film’s screenwriter, Drew Goddard. Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a disgraced astrophysicist turned middle school science teacher recruited not entirely willingly for a top secret government mission to try and figure out why the sun is getting darker. It seems that every star in the galaxy has been infected by a mysterious alien parasite, and soon the universe will be dimmer than the lighting on a prestige television drama. The only celestial body that appears to be immune is a distant star called Tau Ceti, so Grace and two other astronauts have been dispatched on a one-way trip to the far reaches of outer space to try and figure out exactly why. Except something went wrong during the journey, and Dr. Grace wakes up from cryo-sleep with two dead crewmates and no memory of how he got there. The film’s opening is strikingly similar to that of Claire Denis’ haunting interstellar art film “,” only any existential dread is undercut by an elbow-to-the-ribs deployment of Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and Gosling’s genial humor. He doesn’t star in the movie so much as he hosts it like the Oscars, always cracking jokes to an imaginary audience and making sure we’re having a good time. He’s very good at this.When Grace gets to Tau Ceti, he discovers he’s not alone. There’s an alien ship that showed up with the same idea, so our hero partners with a faceless, yet strangely endearing rock spider puppet to figure out how to save their worlds by doing a lot of complicated science stuff. Nicknamed “Rocky” for obvious reasons and voiced by puppeteer James Ortiz, he’s about as adorable as a creature without eyes can be. The best parts of the film involve Gosling and the alien getting to know each other and palling around. Indeed, if one culled all the clutter, “Project Hail Mary” could have been a classic buddy hangout movie about two guys being dudes on a lonely mission far from home. Alas, we’re burdened with a momentum-killing flashback structure as Grace gradually remembers how he went from being a middle school teacher to humanity’s last hope in a far-flung corner of the cosmos. Every time the story starts building up a head of steam, we skip back to learn more about how we got here, like we’re flipping channels between the movie and its more expensive prequel. “Project Hail Mary” is constantly interrupting itself to answer questions we didn’t ask, spending far too much screen time on scenes of Grace insisting he doesn’t want to go on a mission that we already know he’s on. Some of these scenes are admittedly quite good. Especially the ones Gosling shares with mission commander Sandra Hüller, whose pokerfaced humorlessness provides a perfect foil to his flailing antics. Late in the film, the all-business boss stuns her team by bringing down the house with a karaoke performance of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” a tip of the hat to Hüller’s surprise, showstopping rendition of “The Greatest Love of All” in her breakthrough film “This is one of countless winking movie references in “Project Hail Mary,” which also features Grace watching a certain boxing picture with his new alien friend and the reluctant astronaut tapping out the theme from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” on a window when he’s first trying to communicate with Rocky. All of these in-jokes end up inadvertently underlining the film’s prefab, secondhand aura, especially when we get around to the shameless lifts from “E.T.” But it is the shadow of “The Martian” that looms largest, for obvious reasons. Ridley Scott’s 2015 smash was in many ways the last movie of the Obama era, suffused with the can-do, optimistic idea that if enough smart people put their heads together and work as a team, we can accomplish great things like rescuing Matt Damon and send everybody out of the theater bopping to “Love Train.” It’s telling that 11 years later we’re on a similar mission from an Andy Weir book, where the disaster has already happened and the most we can hope for is figuring out how to mitigate the damage somewhat. Sign of the times, she sang. Directors Lord and Miller started out as animators. Their big breakthrough was 2014’s “The Lego Movie,” which became the standard bearer for a half-kidding approach to advertising that’s become depressingly dominant in the years since: the idea that preemptively joking about selling out somehow exonerates you of it. They were notoriously dismissed mid-production from 2018’s “,” which was retooled by Ron Howard into a serviceable, if entirely unnecessary space Western that became the first “Star Wars” movie to lose money. “Project Hail Mary” has an air of overcompensation to it, as if the two were tirelessly trying to conjure a sci-fi picture grander and more entertaining than the one they got fired from. The movie is so relentlessly eager to please you’re never worried for a second that anything really bad is going to happen.When the movie finally ended, I joked to a friend that I had enjoyed the first seven hours. Mathematically, “Project Hail Mary” is actually not too much longer than your standard bloated blockbuster these days, but the bifurcated, start-and-stop structure makes it feel like it goes on forever. There comes a point where the main storyline is resolved and the movie is clearly over. I was mentally putting on my coat and gathering my things when the film invented an entire new conflict out of nowhere and rebooted itself to go on for another 40 minutes or so. I understand that this is an Amazon movie, and streamers make it a policy to pad out running times so you’ll end up spending more minutes on their service. But it’s worth noting that “Project Hail Mary” runs seven minutes longer than “2001: A Space Odyssey,” and that movie begins with the dawn of man.
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