There are clichés that critics go back to, and when I realize I’m guilty of overusing one (sometimes once can be too often), I’ll vow never to use it again. Here’s one I did that with: lauding something as “the movie we need right now.” That’s a phrase so cringe I’m ashamed I ever used it. The reason I bring this up is that “Project Hail Mary” is a cosmic adventure that feels diagrammed, if not programmed, to be The Movie We Need Right Now.
It’s a lavishly scaled feel-good environmental outer-space thriller, starring Ryan Gosling as a science geek who is sent many lightyears away to save Earth. So it’s a movie that recalls such lone-astronaut-in-the-void hits as “Gravity” and “The Martian.” (It’s adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, who wrote the book “The Martian” is based on.) The film was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who started off as animators (“The Lego Movie”) and have the skills to turn the mysteries of space into a catchy techno fantasy. Gosling, who has already anchored one space-travel movie (Damien Chazelle’s unfairly maligned 2018 Neil Armstrong drama “First Man”), makes the hero, Ryland Grace, a charismatic space bro, sheepish and funny and relatable. And the movie, which turns on Ryland’s relationship with an alien who joins him onboard, is like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” remade as an intergalactic buddy movie. “Project Hail Mary” wants to be the kind of great escape we need right now, and I have no doubt that many will hail it as one.
So forgive me if I say that it’s not a very good movie. There’s certainly an abstract commercial grandeur to it. I saw it on an IMAX screen (it will open on many of those), where it becomes the kind of bedazzling warm bath your eyeballs can sink right into. But here’s the rub. “Project Hail Mary” is way too long (two hours and 36 minutes), because there’s not much variation to it. It’s baggy and incredibly derivative of movies you’ve seen before — like “Interstellar,” from which it lifts the premise of a space voyage as the last chance for human survival (in this case, the sun and other stars are dying, which means that we’ve got to travel to the lone star that isn’t in order to figure out why).
More crucially, everything to do with the onboard alien is far too cute and formulaic. We don’t think so at first, because his spacecraft is a daunting dazzler (it looks like a giant oil rig made of pick-up sticks), and the creature doesn’t have one of those beguiling faces. In fact, it has no face at all. It’s made of rock (it looks like the Thing recast as a five-legged spider), with a flat slate where its features should be. How will Ryland and the alien, who he nicknames Rocky, communicate? By mimicking each other’s body poses. Then by hooking the alien up to a computer, which translates his thoughts into one-liners that, within half an hour, are adorable enough to be sitcom-worthy. I should add that there are hugs. Too many of them. “Project Hail Mary” never stops figuring out ways to make you fall in love with it.
The film opens with Ryland waking up in the spaceship, after decades of lying in an induced coma; he’s got greasy long hair and a beard, and doesn’t remember who he is or how he got there. But it will all come back to him. His two colleagues, including the ship’s captain, have both died in hypersleep. The film then flashes back to Earth, where we’re given the elaborate “Interstellar” setup (in this case, it’s global cooling), and we get to know Ryland as the antic misunderstood genius he is.
He’s a middle-school science teacher in nubby sweaters, because his research as a molecular biologist was rejected by the establishment as too radical. But it turns out that he was right about everything. When the sun begins to lose heat, he’s recruited by the powers that be in Washington, represented by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), an official of stoic Euro command who’s the head of the Hail Mary project to save Earth. A mysterious line has been found linking Venus and the sun. It’s dubbed the Petrova line, and Ryland discovers that it’s made up of single-cell organisms, called Astrophage, that can be used as rocket fuel. That’s how they’ll be able to travel to Tau Ceti, a thriving star about a zillion miles away. Ryland is only supposed to be a consultant. That he ends up as part of the onboard mission hinges on a twist of desperate treachery.
Gosling’s performance in the Earth sections is quite winning, because he plays Ryland as an anxious brainiac who’s in over his head. But one of the key flaws of Drew Goddard’s screenplay is that once Ryland is on the ship, that neurotic aspect of him isn’t sustained. It kind of melts away, so that he’s just Ryan Gosling, icon of witty golden-god valor. (He has no flight training but masters the ship in no time.) The film feels padded, whether it’s stopping in its tracks for Eva to do a full-blown karaoke version of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” or spilling over into a finale that doesn’t know where to end. The sentimental dilemma of whether Ryan, at one point, is going to go forward with the mission or turn the ship around to save Rocky is string-pulling of a very generic order. “Project Hail Mary” will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now — or, really, anytime — is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.
