Directed by: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.
Written by: Drew Goddard.
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz.
Runtime: 156 minutes.
A rock puppet (and Ryan Gosling) will steal your heart in ‘Project Hail Mary’
What if Ryan Gosling’s Ken job were astronaut?
That is, more or less, the premise of “Project Hail Mary,” except he’s got a pet rock that will make you cry.
Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes from a coma to find himself alone in the far reaches of space. His crewmates are dead, and he has no memory of how or why he, a middle school teacher and disgraced molecular biologist (not that he can remember that part, either), came to be there. With the clock ticking, Grace has to figure out not only how to survive his current predicament, but how he got into it in the first place, or else how can he fulfill the objectives of a mission he can’t remember accepting?
Adapted from Andy Weir’s best-selling book by screenwriter Drew Goddard – who received an Oscar nomination for his adaptation of Weir’s other best-selling survival novel set in space, “The Martian” – “Project Hail Mary” shares a lot of DNA with its predecessor. Once again, the story centers a lone hero, an everyman with the impossible ingenuity to survive the unsurvivable. Once again, said hero is stranded in space and it will take a miracle (and quite a bit of math and engineering) to get him home.
But unlike its predecessor, “Project Hail Mary” is fueled by the unrelenting humor and expansive heart of directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“The Lego Movie,” “21 Jump Street”), who wisely lean into Gosling’s comedic strengths. He may not literally be playing Ken again, but Gosling is drawing from the same well that made that performance (and performances like his turn as an out-of-his-depth private eye in “Nice Guys”) sing on screen, a kind of goofball slapstick mania, leading man by way of Looney Tunes. If spaceships were fueled by charisma, the movie would have been over in half an hour.
But spaceships aren’t fueled by charisma – and in “Project Hail Mary,” they’re fueled by something called Astrophage. Gradually, the puzzle pieces start coming together for Grace: He’s a scientist and earth’s sun is dimming due to a newly discovered microorganism (said Astrophage). Without intervention, earth will face catastrophic global cooling and billions will die. A team was sent to investigate a distant star that appears to be unaffected by the Astrophage, hence Grace’s current predicament.
So far, so familiar. Another dude saving all life on earth. If that were all there were to “Project Hail Mary,” it would be a fine enough excuse to eat popcorn and look at Ryan Gosling for a couple of hours.
What really makes this film something special is Rocky.
Grace, it turns out, is not alone in the vast expanse of space. Another planet, also under threat of extinction as Astrophage consumes its star, sent an emissary to investigate, a rocklike creature with no discernible features who inhabits a different atmosphere from Grace. At first, the two can’t communicate, can’t even breathe the same air, yet their shared mission and the loneliness of space force a working camaraderie that begins to look like friendship.
Voiced and puppeted by James Ortiz, Rocky is a magic trick – a faceless, expressionless, incomprehensible pile of moving rocks that will have you fighting back tears as the perilous mission grows more dire. He’s reminiscent of WALL-E, a squat little robot with only a pair of eyes to emote and a vocabulary several words long who through pure movie magic makes us believe he has a soul embedded in all that circuitry.
Rocky, who doesn’t even have the eyes to work with, likewise makes us believe there’s a soul embedded in all that rock worth saving from extinction – and helps Grace to remember his own neglected soul, long atrophied on earth.
And if you’re not made of stone like him, Rocky will help you tend your own soul, too.
Barbara’s ranking
3.5/4 stars
