Photo: Jonathan Olley/MGM/Everett Collection
Project Hail Mary is an entertaining, if perplexing, film. A big-swing science-fiction adventure about a last-ditch attempt to save the Earth, it often plays like an anxious puppy dog of a comedy, eager to be liked. Theoretically, this makes some sense. The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who made the side-splitting 21 Jump Street pictures and the brilliant LEGO Movie and have produced the excellent (and funny) Spider-Verse animated films — are experts at comedy. And yet at times it feels like Project Hail Mary deploys humor like a coping strategy to keep its apocalyptic tale from getting too dark. There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.
Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Ryland Grace, a recovering molecular biologist turned middle-school teacher who is enlisted out of the blue to help figure out why a bizarre band of star-eating organisms, called Astrophage, are consuming the sun and threatening all life on Earth. The film starts with Grace waking up out of a multi-year coma on a spaceship in another galaxy, unsure of why he’s there or even who he is, since the extended interstellar hibernation period has resulted in temporary memory loss. So the story flashes back as Grace slowly recovers his past: He remembers how he was enlisted by the domineering Eva Stratt (a wonderfully dry Sandra Hüller) to take part in this desperate, multinational effort; how they discovered that Astrophage could be used as fuel; how they found a distant star that seemed to be impervious to Astrophage; and how they organized an ambitious one-way journey to go observe why.
Or, as Grace puts it to Stratt: “So you want to build an interstellar spaceship, and take it farther than any human has ever traveled, and visit a star, just to see what’s up?” It’s lines like that — pat exposition crossed with quippy banter — that occasionally threaten to undo the movie, undermining its intelligence and sincerity with awkward, Marvel-y snark. Grace’s slow realization of the gravity of his situation should transfix us. When it dawns on him that this is a suicide mission, it should gnaw at us the way it supposedly gnaws at him. All that wouldn’t just be more emotionally honest, it would also probably set up some of the story’s later developments more effectively. Instead, these darker ideas are just some things we briefly reflect on between jokes. The movie at times seems to be afraid of itself.
The film is an adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, and to be fair, much of its sensibility comes from the book’s conversational, constantly winking prose. It’s a remarkably faithful adaptation for the most part. But the novel, written from Grace’s perspective, has an effective stream of consciousness that the film by necessity has to externalize, turning the protagonist’s endlessly goofy and confused thoughts into actual dialogue that often feels like it’s working overtime to make us laugh. It’s a surprising blunder, because Gosling is such a comically gifted actor: His face made him look like a melancholy brooder in his youth, but now it gives him a delightfully dim-bulb, deadpan charisma. In some ways, Project Hail Mary is another attempt by the star (who also produced) to reconcile his action-hero side, his soulful side, and his funnyman side. He succeeded marvelously at this with 2024’s The Fall Guy, so it’s certainly not impossible. And we do buy him as the initially klutzy, out-of-his-element Grace. But he’s been burdened with too much talk; he’s the chattiest doomed man at the ass end of the universe. Sometimes we just want to yell at him to shut up.
At the same time, Lord and Miller do infuse the story with the requisite sweep and wonder. Weir’s charming book is filled with insights into evolution, biology, physics, astrophysics — it’s a big and bouncy space yarn that feels like it was written by your favorite science teacher — and one of its great strengths lies in how the things Grace witnesses at this remote corner of space are like nothing any human has ever seen. The movie mostly delivers on that promise. Its explosion of colors and patterns really do place us in a receptive mind-set, giving us a sense that anything is possible out here in another galaxy. When Grace encounters an alien spaceship (this is not a spoiler — it’s in the trailer), it looks like an infinite starburst of rods, and the alien itself, a spider-shaped and Labrador-size mass of articulated stone that our hero dubs Rocky, offers an intriguing vision of how evolution might have developed on another world. In keeping with the film’s try-hard cutesiness, of course, Rocky gets a slightly high-pitched voice (courtesy of James Ortiz, who is also the creature’s lead puppeteer) that makes him sound like a wide-eyed youngster. So that as Grace and Rocky work together to figure out how to save their respective planets, the alien comes off like a talking, hyperintelligent pet. The reasons for such choices are understandable, but it’s still hard to shake the drippiness. I wondered if all this might have been less cloying had the film simply been animated.
So Project Hail Mary is sometimes funny, occasionally annoying, definitely too long, and wavers constantly between intriguing science and absurd oversimplification. It pulls at our heartstrings in familiar ways, at the expense of anything that might make us feel something new or slightly less comfortable. In the past, Lord and Miller haven’t just been jokesters, they’ve been tricksters: In their best work, their steadfast irreverence breaks the rules of genre and form. But in Project Hail Mary, their sensibility is rooted not in irreverence but in flattening, childlike simplicity. At heart, this is a kids’ film in the guise of a 156-minute sci-fi adventure. It doesn’t want to awe us so much as it wants to awwww us. For better and worse, it succeeds.
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