Movie Review: “Project Hail Mary”
Ryan Gosling’s new film, “Project Hail Mary,” is just what you’d want in a sci-fi lark: two-and-a-half hours of exceptional effects and an abortive homecoming that’s as satisfying as the real thing. Gosling is the reluctant, misanthropic Dr. Grace, who’s drugged and stuffed into an interstellar spaceship, charged with turning the tide against sun-devouring particles. He doesn’t believe he’s the right man for the job, but his opposite number is the frosty Dr. Stratt, who rightly believes that he alone can save earth. When he refuses to cooperate, she mobilizes her goons and he ends up in a hibernation pod heading toward a star called Tau Ceti. As far as anyone can tell, it’s the only entity in the universe that has managed to defend against the life-sucking dots.
There isn’t much more to the plot than that, but the close work is beautiful and Gosling is magnetic, the precise point in space where the goofy charm of Owen Wilson meets the aw-shucks competence of Harrison Ford. He actually does something even better in stretches that foreground real sentiment. When two dead astronauts have to be removed from the ship, he sends them into space in a gorgeous burial at sea, all the while saluting their graces and accomplishments. The first body floats briefly from the top of the screen, effortlessly excreted from Grace’s ship. Speaking as a burial guy, you couldn’t do it better.
This is also, in its way, a persuasive buddy film. The other astro-voyager looking to save his planet is the five-legged creature Gosling names “Rocky.” With the benefit of AI, Gosling deciphers Rocky’s language and they settle into a kind of Odd Couple marriage. Grace is a hot mess; Rocky is prissy and fastidious. Rocky’s look is the kind of thing that many filmmakers get wrong. When Spielberg gave us a look at the aliens of “Close Encounters,” all he could think of was tiny humans, with biggish heads on spindly little bodies. It felt like a failure of cinematic imagination.
Rocky has no face at all except a hard, scarred stone with no features or emotions, and he scrabbles to and fro like a very large tarantula, but different enough so that you stop thinking about spiders. In that way, he’s better than the aliens in “Arrival,” where you never stop noticing that they are exactly like octopuses. I’m just one of those moviegoers who want to see something new.
But if “Hail Mary” gets that right, it gets something else wrong. Like many of its predecessors, it worships lone-wolf scientists who manage to pull humanity from the brink. There’s a gigantic infrastructure of brilliant researchers behind Grace, but the tip of their spear is Grace himself, who improvises his way with verve and imagination. At one point he actually uses cardboard and duct tape, and he is mostly motivated by friendship and adventure.
The threat in “Hail Mary” is not environmental degradation. It’s a band of particles slurping energy from our sun. But it might just as well be a build-up of gasses on our dying, overheated dumpster of a planet. We will likely not be rescued by a charming spaceman, but rather by the collective effort of billions of earthlings who decide to stop treating our planet like a slop bucket. As much as I liked “Project Hail Mary,” I’d like to see a movie like that.