Movie Review: PROJECT HAIL MARY is a fantastic and hopeful sci-fi crowd pleaser

When I saw Project Hail Mary a few weeks ago, I went in not knowing much other than it’s a big space movie starring Ryan Gosling. I didn’t know about the book by Andy Weir or that Weir wrote The Martian. It’s a film, and I see them. I was excited about seeing a new film by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Their track record as directors and screenwriters is a pretty high batting average. Both 21 Jump Street movies, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, and the two Spider-Verse movies gave me a certain level of excitement to see what they could do with a big tentpole movie with a movie star.

The film begins with Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace awakening confused in a spaceship that reminds you a bit of 2001: A Space Odyssey, not knowing who or where he is. Ryland and the audience are in the same boat, and I feel directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, along with screenwriter Drew Goddard, were geniuses to start the film that way. They tell this story about humanity’s long-shot plan at saving the Earth from a space microorganism known as “Astrophage,” that’s slowly eating the sun, causing the world to cool and leading to the death of all life on the planet.

Gosling, of course, holds most of this film together with his performance in his scenes on the spaceship as he tries to figure out what’s going on. The film balances flashbacks to the recent past on Earth and how Grace got involved in the project. Here we have a very strong cast with Sandra Hüller playing Eva Stratt, the woman in charge of Project Hail Mary, basically the task of saving the world. Hüller’s stoic yet warm performance works well with Gosling’s Grace’s more over-the-top, lovable science guy performance.

A large part of the film is about Grace’s friendship with an alien who has a similar mission, dubbed Rocky after the movie character Rocky Balboa. The five-legged alien that looks like a living rock ends up being Gosling’s main co-star. Gosling gets to perform with an actual puppet performed by James Ortiz, who also does the vocal performance. This friendship drives a lot of the action, and as an audience member, I ended up caring a lot about Rocky. The puppet performance is fantastic, and it helps that a real thing is walking around the ship and interacting with Gosling. Their friendship is trying to solve the issue of figuring out how to stop the astrophage. Here, the movie gets into a lot of science talk, and while it is complex, it’s never too much to confuse the audience.

Some of this is parallel to the flashbacks and Gosling’s scenes with Lionel Boyce, of the Beat and Loiter Squad fame, as Carl, a government agent assigned to Grace. There are many amazing scenes where Grace brings Carl along his experiences on Earth with understanding the astrophage. The duo display wonderful comedic chemistry on screen and feel like they are friends. Grace is still an everyman, even if he’s a genius, and his overcoming his fears and flaws to be a hero still is the core of the film version of this story.

The movie moves at a great pace, where you don’t feel how long you’re sitting there. The way the film moves from flashback to current problem and big setpiece surprised me. It wasn’t something you were clocking, “Oh, we’re at this point, explosions are imminent.” The stakes stayed high but never overwhelming. There is a point where I thought something might detract from the viewing experience but it didn’t. The filmmakers had complete control over my emotions in regards to the characters in this movie.

Lord and Miller picked the right project to reemerge as directors into the mainstream. They handle making a big movie amazingly, which feels like some of their recent animation hits, while easily taking control of live-action special effects spectacle. Ryan Gosling continues to be one of the best real movie stars we still have to see in the theater. Along with a great supporting cast and a hopeful outlook on saving the world despite our current woes, this movie just might be the right thing to hit theaters this spring that might just jumpstart the summer movie season early.