Author Andy Weir has single-handedly shaken up how moviegoers imagine astronauts. For a wide swathe of sci-fi movies, from 2001: A Space Odyssey to The Right Stuff, Gravity, Apollo 13, Interstellar, and First Man, the business of going to space in the movies has been serious stuff.
Then came Matt Damon as a charmingly goofy botanist in 2015’s The Martian, adapted from Weir’s award-winning novel. Director Ridley Scott and screenwriter Drew Goddard turned a novel about growing potatoes and doing calculations into a crowd-pleasing comedy that even impressed critics. Now, Weir’s work is back on the big screen with Project Hail Mary, which once more has Goddard penning the adapted screenplay. But this time, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The LEGO Movie) take the helm, and it’s Canadian movie star Ryan Gosling (The Fall Guy, Barbie) who’s stepping into the spacesuit. Still, this sister film has a satisfyingly similar energy and thrust to its unserious astronaut tale.
Imagine The Martian meets Half Nelson meets E.T., and you’ll get some idea of the mirthful mash-up that is Project Hail Mary.
Project Hail Mary offers a world-ending threat.
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace and Sandra Hüller is Eva Stratt in “Project Hail Mary.”
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Based on Weir’s 2022 novel of the same name, Project Hail Mary centers on Ryland Grace (Gosling), a junior high school science teacher with a background in molecular biology. While he is one of the sharpest minds in his field, his people skills are — let’s say — lacking. Grace is impulsive, passionate, and prone to making jokes that cause his stern science peers to bristle. So, instead of making groundbreaking discoveries, he’s patiently explaining news reports that an unknown form of electromagnetic radiation is eating our sun to his students. If this continues, the whole world will be uninhabitable in 30 years.
What’s to be done? Cue stone-faced Eva Stratt (Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller) turning up to firmly pressure Mr. Grace away from the schoolyard and into a testing facility for the titular Project Hail Mary. All the scientists and governments from around the world are combining resources to launch an exploratory mission to understand this sun-eating “Astrophage” so mankind might stop it.
Grace is chosen to be an astronaut on this journey. However, upon waking from an induced coma on the ship, he suffers from memory loss that makes his already complicated mission even harder. But in a cosmic stroke of luck, Grace finds an ally in the stars. Specifically, he meets a brilliant alien who looks like a spider made of rocks, who he thus nicknames “Rocky.”
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Ryan Gosling has great chemistry with an alien puppet in Project Hail Mary.
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace in “Project Hail Mary.”
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
The first hurdle Grace and Rocky have to conquer is how to communicate. They build a bridge with Grace’s dance moves and the alien’s ability to spin webbing that’s basically like his own personal 3D printer. But soon, each of these unusual astronauts uses their respective’s ship’s resources to innovate a better means to speak to each other. From there, Rocky’s voice is human, in English, and performed by James Oritz, who is also the puppeteer behind the rock-based alien’s movements.
Now, it’s easy to say something like, “Ryan Gosling is so charming he could have chemistry with a rock.” And look, that is true. But truly, Oritz’s performance of Rocky is so dynamic and alive that such a cheeky description would undercut his skills here. Grace and Rocky are great together, bouncing off each other with sharp comic timing and an unapologetic silliness and earnestness.
On a first watch, they’re very funny. On reflection, the filmmakers have built a clever character development into this friendship through its comedy dynamics. On Earth, Grace is a genius but also a screwball who can’t take himself seriously. Asked to help on the mission, he bellows at Eva that he’s “not an astronaut.” He stands out in a room of suits and scientists, not only because he favors a cozy cardigan with animals knit within its design, but also because his energy is eruptive, while they are all dedicatedly composed.
In space, however, he transforms from a buffoon to the straight man. Rocky, who is a fish out of water among Grace’s pop culture references and quips, is the wide-eyed stooge. So, each joke that Grace makes has a one-two punch. The first hits the audience as Grace intends, as we’ll catch his references to the movie Rocky, or observational humor about the ways of mankind. The second is Rocky naively misunderstanding such jokes, lost in translation even with super-advanced translating tech!
Through this humor, and their urgent, eager desire to collaborate, both astronauts grow in their abilities scientifically, socially, and psychologically. They become friends, and Grace begins to understand the world — and himself — in a new way. Creepingly, the film becomes about who we can be if we take the risk of meeting others where they are. And while I’m reviewing this movie in a chronologically straightforward way, Project Hail Mary is more temporally slippery in its narrative. The timeline slides back and forth between Earth and space, with Grace trying to remember what led him here as he recovers from the memory loss. Beyond that, this device builds in a jolting surprise that breaks and broadens our idea of the film’s hero at a pivotal moment.
Ryan Gosling offers a career-best turn in Project Hail Mary.
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace in “Project Hail Mary.”
Credit: Amazon MGM Studios
Gosling has played an astronaut before, in First Man. But his performance in Project Hail Mary is stellar. He shrugs off the austere astronaut attitude, sliding into the rumpled educator angst from Half Nelson. The comical exasperation he brought to the buddy-cop comedy The Nice Guys is folded into the earnest wonder of Barbie‘s Ken as he discovered Century City. Then, gently, Gosling works in a fragile pathos of self-doubt, one that transforms Grace from a quirky astronaut into a flesh-and-blood man, battling his worst fears to give hope to a new friend. In this atmosphere, every laugh and gasp hits right in the solar plexus, rattling our tender hearts with absolute intention.
Gosling is perfectly cast as this fearful, funny astronaut. And Oritz is a phenomenal co-star, breathing life into an alien unlike any the movies have awed over before. With Weir’s incredible story, Goddard has built another astounding crowdpleaser. Lord and Miller craft sci-fi spectacle that is awesome and emotional, while making sure the movie science is easy enough for the layman to follow without getting snagged in the details. Admittedly, the film’s final act loses momentum. But overall, the journey and the destination of Project Hail Mary are sensational stuff. Simply put, movies like this demand to be seen in theaters.
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters and IMAX on March 20.
