‘Project Hail Mary’ REVIEW: Houston, We Have a Blockbuster
‘Project Hail Mary’ REVIEW: Houston, We Have a Blockbuster
Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary | Still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Project Hail Mary doesn't need your prayers to be successful. It stars Ryan Gosling, a beloved, bona fide movie star enjoying a post-Barbie second wind. It's helmed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the creative duo behind the Spider-Verse films, and whose Jump Street films rank among the best American comedies of the 2010s. It's adapted by Drew Goddard from a high-concept sci-fi novel by Andy Weir, whose previous work, The Martian, Goddard also adapted into a blockbuster hit. I could spend all day here listing the resumes of all the creative forces who worked on this film, just naming big movie after big movie. It's the dream Hollywood package. And yet, in a film landscape that has largely been dominated by franchise entertainment for the last decade, the simple, old-fashioned math of adding a star, skilled creatives behind the lens, and a best-selling novel together feels like somewhat of a lost art.
The film is determined to push blockbuster filmmaking forward into the next frontier by working its way back to a time before everyone caught the franchise and streaming bugs. We might be asking for too little if all we want is to bring back those bygone, halcyon days of, like, 2015, but they look pretty good down here.
Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up from an induced coma aboard the Hail Mary, a spaceship hurtling on a one-way trip toward an objective that he cannot seem to remember, only that the fate of the world depends on it. Worsening matters, he is the lone survivor of the trip, leaving the future of humanity entirely in his hands. As his memories slowly come back to him, he recalls that several years earlier he was a high school science teacher recruited to join a top secret global taskforce led by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), working alongside the leading scientific minds around the world to figure out why the Sun is dimming and how to stop it before the world is plunged into apocalyptic catastrophe. In space, he stumbles upon a five-legged alien with a rock-like appearance that he nicknames Rocky. He learns that he and Rocky are alike, sent out on the same mission, both sole survivors of their trips, and they decide to put their heads together to save their worlds. The vastness of the universe and the gravity of the mission are terrifying, but it is less so with a buddy along for the ride.
Rocky (voiced and puppeteered by James Ortiz) in Project Hail Mary | Still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
Undeniably, Rocky is the heart of the film, and how much you enjoy it rests on how winning you think he is. He reminds me of Baymax from Big Hero 6, another cutesy sidekick speaking in a neutral, computerized tone, wearing a blank "face" incapable of emoting – Rocky doesn't even have a face so much as a front-facing side — yet still capable of affecting a wide range of emotions. The mix of CG and puppetry to bring Rocky to life is very impressive, never feeling like Grace is talking to thin air. And like Baymax before him, and a laundry list of other non-human characters who've endeavored to win over audiences' hearts over the last decade or so, Rocky is destined to go viral, perhaps even engineered to be that way. He's a cute little guy, and he's also hundreds of years old; he's extremely intelligent and bossy, but moves and talks like an inquisitive child bouncing around the room, hopped up on sugar.
Grace tries to teach him anthropomorphic expressions that, due to Rocky being made of, well, rocks, get a little lost in translation, resulting in quirks like his "thumbs up" being a "thumbs down" instead. Grace builds the best translation device he can to communicate with Rocky, but it has its limitations; when Rocky wants to express "Amazing!', it comes out as "Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!". For the terminally online such as myself, it borders on a kind of intentionally rudimentary, "Heckin Doggo" way of speaking that's intended to elicit awws, but might be a smidge too wannabe adorable for its own good.
Rocky might be a bit annoying, but it's a real achievement that he feels alive at all. Sci-fi blockbusters have seemingly walked back from the early accomplishments of, say, Jurassic Park, whose CG dinosaurs still look and feel like they have real, tangible weight to them, especially compared to the ones seen in last year's Jurassic World film. There was a time when bringing the fantastical to life felt truly wondrous. You can keep trying to make bigger, scarier dinosaurs, but when I watch the blockbusters of today, I always end up thinking, "Haven't we seen this all before?" Project Hail Mary is no doubt indebted to Sci-Fi giants like Interstellar – someone sitting behind me compared it favorably to 2001: A Space Odyssey as soon as the credits rolled – but it pulls off enough new things, Rocky chief among them, to feel fresh in an otherwise stale landscape. The film puts before it the incredibly difficult task of getting you to care for a pile of rocks without a face, and it succeeds. Where franchise fare feel the need to one-up themselves with bigger special effects showcases in each succeeding installment, Rocky proves that bigger isn't always better.
Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary | Still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
If Rocky doesn't work on you, you've got Gosling, who is a very winning star. He's entered the movie star territory of not so much playing a character anymore as he is playing his own persona. Grace feels only marginally different from watching Gosling on the press tour. Long gone are the days of stoic Refn films and brooding Marlon Brando impressions. You get Gosling now because he's charming and funny, which stems from a total willingness to be goofy and silly (how many other actors have a signature pained shriek), and how that plays against his leading man looks. He's so good at playing someone semi-above-it-all, slightly in over his head, harboring a hidden sincerity and sentimentality. He's not just Ken, but he's only a few paces away from his characters in The Nice Guys, La La Land, and The Fall Guy. That's not necessarily a bad thing. For a guy who – for a time at least – was most known for his quietest roles, he's become quite the chatterbox, which is exactly what Project Hail Mary needs.
Gosling may not be the most believable high school science teacher, but if you need someone to do Cast Away in space, there are few movie stars more inherently watchable. Ryland Grace is a deceptively tough role. You have to be able to deliver all the science talk, be entertaining to watch on your own, and act alongside a special effects alien. Gosling makes the movie star stuff look easy, nailing everything, down to the specific way he dangles his glasses off his face. He always has chemistry with everyone, too; Rachel McAdams, Emma Stone, Russell Crowe, and now, rocks.
Like many films with this scope and budget, Project Hail Mary is being framed as a theatrical "experience", part of the ongoing industry effort to revive theater-going and bring the global box office back to pre-pandemic levels. Check out the trailers for the biggest movies of last year, or the blockbusters coming out this year, I'd bet that they all mention "filmed with/or for IMAX" or "In Premium Formats". These films are being sold on the idea that their big images are best enjoyed on the biggest screens possible, harkening back to the days when widescreen and special formats like CinemaScope and Cinerama were introduced to compete directly with the popularity of television.
What this means for the kinds of films that get theatrical releases is a piece for another time, but what makes Project Hail Mary stand out, at least among the big-budget crowd, is that it's not really a massive, grand, technical showcase. The real spectacle is Gosling hanging out with a puppet-CG hybrid creature. Some of the best stuff in the film is just the two of them palling around the spaceship, watching movies together, enjoying the breeze of a simulated digital beach, learning about each other's worlds and cultures, like a couple of roommates growing comfortable with one another.
Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary | Still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
That being said, cinematographer Greig Fraser, probably most known for the Dune films, featuring the kind of big IMAX images I'm talking about, alongside the VFX team, does deliver the goods here. They really nail the sense of scale in the showstopper sequences. It's fun and terrifying to cut from a tiny Grace in wide shots, floundering around in space, tethered precariously to his much larger ship, to shots from his perspective, placing him against enormous backgrounds that can't be contained by the frame, bringing us into his experience, the mind numbing awe and fear of seeing your legs dangling over a truly endless sea of stars. Lord and Miller's vision of space is largely bold and colorful — there's a shot of Grace floating in front of a giant, neon green, gaseous planet that's bound to become a popular screensaver — but they also know when to cut out sound and light, portraying space as the vacuum that it really is.
The screenplay's structure alternates back and forth between the past and the present, revealing Grace's backstory on Earth as a teacher and his involvement in the Hail Mary mission leading up to the spaceship's lift-off, while in the present, he tries to fulfill the mission and remember exactly who he is. It is difficult to tell how much Grace remembers. The structure implies that whenever we cut back to the past, Grace is remembering that moment, but it doesn't really register in any of the present-day scenes. He still knows all the science he needs to carry out the mission, and he's just as under-qualified to be an astronaut as he would be even if he remembered everything about his past.
The flashback structure is less a character device and more of a narrative one, allowing the story to jump right into the exciting space stuff without having to go through a first-act setup that we'd probably know all the beats to already. It is nice not to have to watch a film pause itself for five to 10 minutes just so the hero can do a "refusal of the call" for a bit. The film still hits that beat, but not quite where you'd expect it to.
Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary | Still courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios
But the Earth-bound scenes are also surprisingly more than just setup. I found them to be just as, if not more compelling than the outer space ones because they're reminiscent of the best parts of The Martian, showing characters trying to "movie science" their way out of their problems. As fun as it is to see Grace and Rocky together, I'm not sure if the film gets any better than when Grace is on Earth, MacGyver-ing experiments with the help of Carl (Lionel Boyce), a security officer on the project, using materials from a Home Depot to determine the nature of an alien substance. I love when the film is about process and discovery, which it oddly loses sight of once Grace and Rocky team up.
Be warned, the film tries very hard to make you cry. If it were shorter, perhaps it wouldn't feel so excessive, but the final 25 or so minute stretch really hits as many tissue-pulling beats as it can, seemingly reaching an emotional climax before coming back down and hitting you with another one shortly after. It is diminishing returns each time the film tacks on scene after scene that's made to feel like the ending. You really have to hand it to Steven Spielberg for ending E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at the moment E.T. and Elliot bid their goodbyes. Then again, I teared up twice. I don't mind my heartstrings being tugged at now and then, even if it's with all the force of Earth's gravitational pull.
‘Project Hail Mary’ is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
