Despite its reputation of being a cold, yawning, silent void packed with pinpricks of light we will never get to visit, space has always been a prime location when it comes to examining all things human. In fact, plonk a bunch of soft, vulnerable homosapians in one of the inhospitable environments ever known and you’re bound to see the species thrive or fall depending on the genre. Yes, Space may be a place where no one can hear you scream, but it’s also a place where individuals can come together to prove the mettle of an entire planet and furnish hope for the rest of us.
With this in mind, Project Hail Mary initially sets a very familiar course which, on first hearing, seems dangerously derivative. After all, when you mention intergalactic mercy missions to save mankind, chances are films such as Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar or Danny Boyle’s Sunshine immediately spring to mind. But with Ryan Gosling in place, a novel by The Martian’s Andy Weir as source material and Phil Lord and Chris Miller at the helm, prepare to set a course toward something incredibly special.
Ryland Grace awakes to a rather surreal experience. Seemingly lying in some sort of med-bay and sporting more hair than late-era John Lennon, he has absolutely no idea how or why he’s here despite a computerised voice explaining that he’s been put in a medically induced coma. Worse yet, as he drags his underused muscles out of bed to explore his environment, he makes a rather terrifying revelation – he’s in space. Quite a long way into space actually – 11 years in fact – but after discovering that the other two members of his crew has passed on, he has to suffer the realisation that he’s all along while light years from home.
As his memory gradually returns, we discover that Grace is a school teacher that once was a disgraced scientist who was recruited by stoic government agent Eva Stratt to be one of many chosen to examine the recent phenomenon known as the Petroval line – a specific frequency that stretches from Venus to our sun that’s causes it to dim. Finally recalling that he’s now on a mission to save the Earth and it’s dying sun, Grace understands that the project (named Hail Mary) is a last ditch, one-shot mission to travel to distant star, Tau Ceti, to discover why its the only star in the known universe to not suffer the same decay as our sun.
While this would be a gargantuan task for even the most self confident scientist, Grace has to overcome his huge feelings of insecurity if he’s ever going to figure this out. However, despite his deceased crew, the out of place spaceman isn’t actually alone as he spies another spacecraft outside his window that definitely isn’t human in origin. With his entire species in peril, his memory still returning in clumps and an actual suicide mission ahead of him, can Grace charm an alien lifeform he names “Rocky” to help him save both their worlds?
While their mission is chiefly to spread hope, a lot of space mission movies tend to be pretty cold and tense for the most part. While undeniably beautiful to look at and containing moments of raw humanity deployed at vital moments to break through the numbing emptiness of space, a lot of this ilk of film excell in focusing mostly on desolation, emptiness and mortality before injecting some last minute hope to fully drive that emotion home. However, typical to form, the directing team of Lord and Miller choose to take something of a different route and fully embrace the hope 100% much in the way that Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian did. Taking a similar approach to “science is fun!” that that film did (its no coincidence that both were adapted by Drew Goddard), Project Hail Mary takes the emotional weight of a literal world being on someone’s shoulders and turns in the most fun, charming and utterly human experience I’ve seen in ages.
Dumping us in the hapless shoes of Ryland Grace as he wakes up from an eleven year induced coma, Project Hail Mary smartly skips any preamble to put us (and Grace) in the same situation as we both have no clue what is happening and why, only dipping into the expansive backstory where and when our lead remembers it, which immediately bonds us to him. It also helps that Grace is played by an on-fire Ryan Gosling who, despite being one of the most watchable actors working today, somehow manages to put in arguably a career best performance that sees him balance humour, pathos and perform a winning double act with, what is objectively a faceless rock spider. Few actors can make you laugh and feel sad at the same time, but that impeccable comic timing and big soulful eyes of Gosling’s manages to keep it up for an impressive two and a half hours which rarely sees him off-screen, be it the background expanding flashbacks or his space-bound buddy movie.
Ah yes, the buddy. We’ve had endearing, enduring, friendly extraterrestrials before, but there’s been nothing quite like Rocky, a featureless stone being that has virtually no way to emote in a traditional way and yet somehow proves to be one of the lovable, relatable sidekicks in recent memory. In fact, while watching both Grace and his stoney support learn to communicate before even dealing with galactic conundrum at hand should slow things down to a crawl – as should the copious flashbacks – but Miller and Lord, filmmakers who are innovative enough to help shape The Lego Movie and the Spider-Verse films into jaw dropping instant classics keep the huge story light on its feet and consistency funny which all adds to the warmth that radiates from every scene.
The movie comes packed with frequent blasts of beauty too, be it morally as Grace and Rocky become inseparable in their task, visually as they approach the bold, swirly, multicoloured atmosphere of Tau Ceti, or emotionally as we witness Sandra Hüller’s emotionally reserved official breaking character to sing a heart rending rendition of “Sign Of The Times and it’ll mean your tear ducts will be working overtime as you’ll have reliably moist eyeballs for the majority of the film.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller have once again taken a subject matter that’s well traveled and revitalise it in a way that’s absurdly charming. It’s consistently funny, yet knows how to carry emotional weight; it’s loaded with science talk and yet is never dull or labored; and it gives us yet another Gosling outing for the ages that flat out confirms that he’s one of the most versatile leading men working today.
A blast of science fiction wonder that hits every single note it shoots for, Project Hail Mary proves to be the brand new bar set for any movie willing to float into the inky black of space, looking to mine drama. But while there’s plenty of tension and visual pizzazz, it’s that strong pulse of hope that’ll really set those waterworks off. All hail.
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