There are only a select few performers – Tom Hanks, Robert Redford, and Tom Hardy—who possess both the star power and raw talent to hold the screen alone for the majority of a film. Fewer still—Sam Rockwell, Sandra Bullock, Matt Damon—can achieve this on hard mode and pull off the feat in space, far removed from the stimuli of the known world. In retrospect, it was a no-brainer that Ryan Gosling had the charisma and chops to pull this off in “Project Hail Mary.” Still, his joining such rarefied ranks deserves recognition on its merits.
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Gosling’s role as Ryland Grace, a one-time science teacher turned astronaut on an expedition to save Earth from ecological catastrophe, fits him like a glove. He’s the perfect leading man for the Phil Lord and Christopher Miller house style: a slightly spastic comic hero whose earnest desire to be good shines through whatever bumbles he might make. This is peak Ryan Gosling, leaning fully into his innate talents for sincerity and silliness.
He’s so successful at this, in fact, that it becomes a little too easy to forget that “Project Hail Mary” is a movie about a suicide mission. Most of the action unfolds deep into his doomed trip to the outer reaches of space. Though it takes him a while after reawakening to remember his mandate, Grace must investigate why one celestial body has managed to stave off collapsing from the star-eating bacteria known as “Astrophage.” Though he’s equipped to ship the antidote back home, there is no expectation he’ll have enough fuel to come back as well.
Though Lord and Miller’s film takes place in an unspecified near future, this anti-establishment protagonist is a character built for 2026. Grace stands against the stodgy, rigid bureaucratic institutions of government and science alike. His willingness to reject orthodoxy makes him a pariah among his peers in molecular biology. (Thus, he’s teaching science to middle schoolers at the outset of the story.) Yet he does his own research without resorting to outright tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorizing, making him broadly palatable to viewers of any ideological persuasion.
Though Drew Goddard’s screen adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel treats it like a reveal, the reason for Grace’s presence on board is apparent. As the researcher who discovers how Astrophage works, he possesses the skill set and mindset necessary to help humankind innovate its way out of extinction and into contact with alien life. Clad in a seemingly endless wardrobe of graphic tees, Grace is part iconoclast and part smartass – a winning combination when the odds inspire a mission name invoking divine intervention.
“Project Hail Mary” can occasionally suffer from a disconnect between its action on the ground and up in the air. The earthbound flashbacks leading up to the space flight are necessary to understand the story’s circumstances. Goddard has to “yada yada” through a lot of scientific explanation and narrative exposition to keep up with Lord & Miller’s breakneck pace and jocular tone. Consistently excellent comic timing from Sandra Hüller as Grace’s recruiter, an uptight German administrator with a cutting wit, often proves a saving grace in these more leaden sequences.
Fortunately, they do figure out how to limit the time on Earth. While the film would have benefited from a bit more to tie up the various loose ends, its 156-minute runtime already pushes the limits of acceptable length to the breaking point. Lord and Miller clearly made “Project Hail Mary” to let their collective imagination and energy run wild in the cosmos, and they’ve built a movie that maximizes the wonder they can inspire there. This is doubly true for anyone seeing the film in IMAX, where an expanded aspect ratio that persists for most of the duration amplifies the amazement.
Throw a dart back toward any film from the last 40 years to dream about life beyond this planet, and it will almost certainly hit a work that “Project Hail Mary” recalls. Yet somehow the work feels more singular than most space epics, largely because Lord and Miller do not just prostrate themselves before “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The second anything begins to evoke the grandeur of what came before it in the genre, they undercut it with a goofy moment that reminds the audience not to take any of this too seriously.
Be it the vibrant reds and greens of star Tau Ceti, the tactile visual effects work that defies slop-like CGI trends, or the willingness of cinematographer Greig Fraser to get playful with up and down in a gravity-less ship, this sci-fi is definitively and defiantly itself. But even as Grace begins to piece together his solution with some unexpected help outside his species, “Project Hail Mary” surveys no surface as majestic or mighty as Gosling’s own visage. He’s a master of conveying sentiments ranging from the sensitive to the sardonic with just the tiniest twitch of his face. The camera’s affectionate attention to his every move ensures no cosmic concept subsumes the story’s humanity.
The steady accumulation of these small windows into Grace’s soul anchors the film’s more somber tonal shift in the final act. The character’s name ought to serve as a clue that this narrative will contemplate heady and heavy topics. Sacrifice, salvation, and soulful satisfaction become bigger points of discussion than any of the science as the voyage closes in on a grand finale. (Or two or three endings, it does feel.)
“Project Hail Mary” cycles through many phases, including a survival thriller, a buddy comedy, and a sci-fi adventure. Lord and Miller build appropriately toward this more serious pivot, even if there’s some herky-jerky motion amidst the transition. But that scrappy spirit of perseverance through imperfection feels in line with their hero’s own default operating mode. Ultimately, the optimistic duo sticks the landing with a sweetness that matches the scale of their ambitions. [B+]
“Project Hail Mary” opens in theaters on Friday, March 20.
