You open your eyes and have no idea where you are, or how you got there. You’ve been slumbering so long that when you try to stand, your legs don’t work; you end up wriggling on the floor like a worm. Your beard has reached writing-a-manifesto-in-the-woods length. Because everyone who was with you is now dead, you quickly realize that you are completely alone. Looking out a window, you try to use the sun as a landmark. Then you realize that it’s not “our” sun. You don’t think things could get worse. They do. Because it soon becomes apparent that, having been jostled from a deep, deep sleep, you’re now in deep, deep space, many light years away from home. I’m not an astronaut, you exclaim, despite the fact that you’re on a vessel currently hurtling through the galaxy. This is technically true (despite the fact you once played Neil Armstrong in a biopic, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves). You are not an astronaut. You’re simply the only thing that stands between humanity’s continued existence and its extinction.
This is the cold open that kicks off Project Hail Mary, a rude awakening which doubles as an introduction to the gentleman we’re about to spend the next two and a half hours with. (It hits theaters on March 20.) But we don’t really need an intro. The reluctant interstellar traveler is played by Ryan Gosling, and already, we feel we know him. Gosling is the steadfast matinee idol with a strong jawline and an impish sense of humor, the A-list hero who doesn’t take himself too seriously, the Man Who Would Be Ken. The dude once saved jazz, for God’s sake, so saving the universe should be a snap, right?
Hardly anyone needs to explain how the power of movie stars works at this point in the medium’s history, any more than we need to be reminded that, in the Year of Our Lord 2026, they remain a precious commodity. But there are few actors who can balance the bulk of a sci-fi blockbuster on their protein-shake shoulders — much less attempt to mix heady notions of existential wonder and heartfelt underpinnings about our place in the cosmos, kick an audience’s adrenal glands into high gear, and fondle their funny bones, all via a cross-species buddy comedy. That such a four-quadrant throwback movie was somehow made at all is itself a mystery that would vex Carl Sagan, even when it’s got a directorial duo with a track record like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie), and The Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard once again adapting source material from the mind of author Andy Weir. We’re in comet-sighting territory in terms of rarity.
And still, in its star, Project Hail Mary has found someone who can make all of it truly work. Gosling can actually sell us on an everyman thrust into extraordinary circumstances while still beguiling us with old-school snap, crackle, and pop, and helps animate the idea that it’s still possible to pull off a 1980s-style Spielbergian romp that doesn’t sacrifice smarts or empathy. Hail Mary orbits around him by necessity, but he demonstrates why he earns the right to be at the center of it all. It’s a genuine star vehicle in more ways than one.
His character is named Ryland Grace, but don’t hold the heavily symbolic surname against him. He used to be a well-regarded scientist, until he published a paper about water not being a necessity to sustain life on other planets. Suddenly, Grace was persona non grata among his peers. He now teaches science at a public middle school, where his students all seem to be anxious about the news reports regarding our sun. Is it true that “space dots” are eating the massive ball of plasma that sustains our planet? Yes, Mr. Grace responds, there’s something called the Petrovia Line that has folks worried about a possible extinction event. But we have at least 30 years to figure this out, he reminds them. And the world’s best minds are hard at work on a solution.
Spoiler: The best minds in the world don’t have a clue. They have narrowed things down to a space virus forming a line between the sun and Venus. Why a number of stars, including the big one that gives us life, are infected and possibly dying has them scratching their collective heads. Hence, the sudden appearance of Eva Stratt (Anatomy of a Fall‘s Sandra Hüller) at Grace’s doorstep. She’s heading up an international organization dedicated to solving this crisis. His paper intrigued a lot of the folks in charge. Would he please come with her to a remote aircraft carrier in the middle of nowhere and help them figure out what the hell is going on? Also, don’t be fooled by this “request” being in the form of a question. It’s more like a direct order.
How Grace goes from his quiet life schooling teens on the periodic table to being alone in a spaceship just south of Neptune is something Project Hail Mary keeps flashing back to, slowly building its complicated backstory one vignette at a time. Had Lord and Miller made these narrative episodes back on Earth the main event, you’d still get a lot of blockbuster for your buck, including Gosling and The Bear‘s quiet MVP Lionel Boyce chasing microbes in a lab, Hüller making the most of her administrator’s chilly, Teutonic attitude, and a karaoke showstopper involving Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times.” Much like The Martian, there’s a focus on — not to mention a keen appreciation for — the scientific method and the necessity of big-brain theorizing. Squint a little, and you see a process movie happening underneath all the sci-fi VFX. It’s the product of pro-science advocacy. Given the current administration’s blatant disdain for such proven intellectual approaches to life, this respect also squarely puts the film in the category of escapism.
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Yet Project Hail Mary is, in many ways, a two-hander, with one of those hands being made out of granite from another planet. Grace’s companions, a pilot and an engineer, perished during the hibernation portion of the trip. For the first half, we mostly ride shotgun with Gosling as he goes full Gravity and monologues his way through a solo trip, with the occasional detour through his terra firma past. (Taking a cue from that earlier science fiction drama starring George Clooney, the movie presents an uncannily realistic view of space that feels uncanny, astounding, and pitiless — a final frontier with an emphasis on final.) It’s not until he comes across another ship that his bumbling isolation is interrupted. First contact is eventually made, and, thanks to some truly universal translation software, communication is established. There is other life in the universe, in the form of a three-foot-high pile of sentient rocks. Grace names him — what else? — Rocky.
Rocky’s world is in the same predicament as ours, it seems, and he too has been recruited to find out why a single star has been spared a death sentence. His crew also didn’t survive the trek. Both Grace and Rocky band together in the name of interstellar solidarity. And we were weren’t kidding about this being Spielbergian, as these scenes lean heavily on that director’s ability to find awe in the mundane and the truly marvelous moments involving extraterrestrial personalities. Voiced and operated by puppeteer James Ortiz, Rocky is composed of interlocking space boulders — think Korg from Thor: Ragnarok, but blessed with E.T.’s cuteness — yet feels as flesh-and-blood as his new Homo sapien bestie. You could almost forget you’re watching Gosling act against a special effect, albeit a practical one (a high-five to Ortiz for generating real chemistry with his scene partner)* that could be mistaken for a miniature quarry.
That’s just another degree of difficulty that the three-time Oscar nominee has to navigate. And like a parkour champ, Gosling manages to deftly leap, glide, and bounce off everything the film throws at him. Outrageous absurdist comedy, outright sentimentality, action-heavy survivalism, life-or-death drama, chin-stroking philosophizing, the need to bond with an otherworldly rubble buddy — he can handle it all. Even when you can feel Lord, Miller, and Goddard’s thumbs begin to lean heavily on the emotional-payoff scales, Gosling knows how to keep things from venturing into the sappy and maudlin.
The star is undoubtedly the reason Amazon underwrote the film’s Hollywood heyday–level budget — that, and the fact that the company’s founder likes anything that goes HAM on sending your average Joe into the stratosphere. But look, saving the universe isn’t cheap. Nor is saving a certain type of movie: the kind that understands spectacle needs to serve the story and not vice versa, that knows how to evoke a type of alchemy that inspires a sense of belief in big-screen magic, that courts a mainstream audience without stooping to lowest-common-denominator pablum in order to conquer it. The kind of movie that doesn’t view pop art as an oxymoron. That’s what Gosling and the creative team behind Project Hail Mary are attempting to do. The film’s title doubles as its own description. And the fact that they damn near pull it off is enough to make you feel you’ve also been awakened from a long, deep sleep in which you were forced to settle for large, loud, cine-extravaganzas that forgot there’s supposed to be a human factor in any of it. Rise and shine, folks. You’ve got something to actually see here.
*This review has been updated to note that Rocky is not a CGI-creation, but a practical effect.
From Rolling Stone US
