Review: PROJECT HAIL MARY

 by Rob DiCristino

It’s Ryan Gosling and a friendly space rock. Buy a ticket.

The sun is dying. Wait, sorry. Not the real sun. Well, maybe that one, too. I don’t know much about the real sun, but everything else sucks, so I wouldn’t be surprised if something’s going on there. Regardless, let me start over: In Project Hail Mary, our sun — and hundreds of other suns in hundreds of distant galaxies — is being devoured by a body of space bacteria called Astrophage. As anyone who saw Danny Boyle’s Sunshine will recall, the sun dimming even ten percent will cause a catastrophic global ice age on Earth within just a few decades. Only one local star, Tau Ceti, is immune from the Astrophage plague — let’s call it the Astroplague — and Earth’s governments have convened to discover why. They’ve developed a way to use Astrophage as interstellar fuel and built a spaceship — the Hail Mary — that will travel to Tau Ceti and unlock the secrets of the Astroplague. Three astronauts are recruited for a suicide mission. One dies in training. His replacement? A middle school science teacher named Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling). Go!

Yes, despite the impenetrable density of its source material — author Andy Weir’s (The Martian) hard sci-fi bestseller of the same name — that’s all an eager theatergoer really needs to understand Project Hail Mary, the latest from action/comedy maestros Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Waking from an induced coma without a clue as to who he is or how he ended up alone in deep space, Dr. Grace must shake off his amnesia, remember his mission, and execute it before the Earth turns into a popsicle. Luckily, he has help: A scientist from the planet Eridani — which is also dying of the Astroplague — is nearby! Trouble is, he’s a faceless rock spider about the size of a toaster oven who doesn’t speak English. Or any language. He doesn’t even have a mouth. This is an Andy Weir joint, however, so Dr. Grace will Science the Shit Out of the Problem until he and his pint-sized partner — whom he dubs “Rocky” (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz) — establish communication, cure the Astroplague, and, wouldn’t you know it, become best friends.

Even on the page, Project Hail Mary has the makings of a superb springtime blockbuster: it’s a big, expensive unit of studio entertainment that engages with its audience’s intelligence without overwhelming it. Screenwriter Drew Goddard streamlines all the relativistic astrophysics of Weir’s novel so that we never lose the heart of the piece — the real universe-saving mission was the friends we made along the way — and flashbacks to Dr. Grace’s time on Earth give us important context for his journey to martyrdom. The real fun of Project Hail Mary, though, is in the execution: Familiar faces like Lost’s Ken Leung, The Bear’s Lionel Boyce, and Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller give the flashbacks a nice emotional grounding, while a canny mix of practical and digital effects lend the space sequences a tactility that most actioners of this scale wouldn’t bother with. Chris Dickens’ editing is smooth and upbeat, making even the most tense moments of Project Hail Mary feel like a joyride. A cold, dark, airless, joyride in space, perhaps, but a joyride nonetheless.

None of it works without Ryan Gosling, of course, who’s here in top-tier Nice Guys flibbertigibbet mode. Clad in a rotation of nerdcore t-shirts and cozy hoodies — and, to my delight, tucking his glasses under his chin like Daniel Craig in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — Gosling unleashes a self-effacing charm assault that few leading men of his ilk have the confidence, or indeed the opportunity, to deploy. Dr. Grace was ostracized from the scientific community for his controversial ideas on biology — hence the middle school teaching job — and teetered on the edge of despair until the Astroplague made those ideas look like a reasonable alternative to, you know, passive acceptance of our collective extinction. Still, Dr. Grace is no thrill-seeker, and Project Hail Mary spends far more time developing his relationship with Rocky than on the fate of humanity. This costs the film some dramatic tension later on — we’re never quite as concerned for Dr. Grace’s survival as we are for, say, Matt Damon’s in The Martian — but it never matters all that much.

So while nitpickers will pick their nits at some of the more notable omissions from the novel — most of which amount to pages of inscrutable molecular biology — Project Hail Mary is a winning crowd-pleaser that gives far more to its audience than it asks from it. It’s another exceptional vehicle for Ryan Gosling, who continues to lend his star power to engaging mainstream projects that somehow still manage to hang just left of center (The Fall Guy is weird and good, actually). James Ortiz’s work with Rocky is seamless and delightful, recalling the E.T.s and Yodas of puppeteering golden eras (era) past. More than anything else, though, Project Hail Mary solidifies Andy Weir as the most prominent and exciting voice in popular science fiction entertainment, a working-class answer to the abstract science fantasy of Christopher Nolan and the lush, prestige spectacle of Denis Villeneuve. You don’t need an advanced degree to appreciate the enduring brotherhood between a Canadian hunk and his Pokemon sidekick, do you? Of course you don’t, silly.

Project Hail Mary hits U.S. theaters on Friday, March 20th.