‘Project Hail Mary’: Across the Ryanverse

After producing and writing for the fun, creative, irreverent Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have got back into the directing business with Project Hail Mary. For wise-cracking hero they have traded in Chris Pratt — who they directed in The Lego Movie — for Ryan Gosling. But rest assured, there is a whole Lego tie in to Project Hail Mary including the first ever Gosling Lego figure.

In Andy Weir’s third novel Project Hail Mary he went back to what had worked for him so well with his debut The Martian. Namely, an individual, all on his own, has a sequence of life-threatening problems to solve — each of which is spellbindingly tense and, as a whole, tense and significant. Since the plot was less compelling for Project Hail Mary than The Martian, and the excuse even thinner, he whacked up the stakes — it’s not just the survival of one man now, but on each small engineering task or riddle solved rests the ENTIRE FUTURE OF HUMANITY.

Maybe that’s what attracted Lord and Miller. There’s the potential for real emotion here, “BILLIONS OF CHILDREN WILL DIE” as the little black dots of “astrophage” gradually eat the sun. Scientists realize that the astrophage is actually eating a whole bunch of stars in a pattern. With imminent threat of the sun cooling and the Earth freezing, a “Hail Mary” rocket is sent out into deep space to a sun in the pattern that is not being eaten. Perhaps humanity can work out how the sun is protected and import that immunity to Sol. Three astronauts are fired up in an emergency rocket but two do not survive the induced travel-coma sleep of the journey leaving Gosling — sorry Ryland Grace — as humanity’s only hope out in deep space. Suddenly entirely alone and with the weight of all history on his back, the jokey middle-school science teacher (and stellar biotech academic) persona gets a serious sentimental backdrop.

Project Hail Mary ★★★(3/5 stars)
Directed by: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Written by: Andy Weir and Drew Goddard,
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce
Running time: 156 mins

Without too much sacrifice of the book’s rigor or tension, Ridley Scott turned The Martian into a perfectly workable movie. In doing so, he solved a lot of formal problems like how to turn a solitary problem solver into an engaging movie protagonist. Lord and Miller smartly steal a few of those tricks: Mark Watney’s video diary in The Martian becomes Grace’s video diary in Project Hail Mary.

But, unlike The Martian, Project Hail Mary has serious flaws as a book along with truly fascinating explorations of what it is to be in the presence of absolute strangeness. Grace doesn’t know who he is for a long time at the beginning of the book and movie but the movie has to curtail that strangeness after a few short minutes because the wondering about identity works better in prose. Lord and Miller settle for a few minutes of cosplay followed by some biographical reveals later in the movie.

Oddly, too, in a very unWeir-like move, Grace behaves cavalierly in the midst of life-threatening deep space and bizarre exosystems. And, for a third egregious example of having fun instead of respecting the situation, when Grace does meet the Eridian representative, it retains little alterity but is rapidly absorbed into the Ryanverse as the latest in a long line of cute aliens who are half a step away from adorable spinoffs: like ALF, ET, or Groot.

Look, Gosling saving the world and wise-cracking across the other side of the universe with a sentient rock spider who has learned to speak (kinda) solely by talking to Grace is super-fun. It turns into a buddy film between Grace and Rocky. The two and a half hours are entertaining mush, but it’s a waste of strangeness and epic scale. It could have been a livelier 2001: A Space Odyssey but, even without Pratt, it becomes a slightly less daft Guardians of the Galaxy.

Between Gosling and Reynolds, the Ryan-verse now stretches from Barbie-Land, to Wrexham, through Deadpool and all the way to the planet Erid. It’s a cheerful thought that there will be snappy dialogue in whichever part of the Milky Way you happen to find yourself. But, despite the oft-repeated stakes, Project Hail Mary has the emotional depth of Ted.

With one exception. Sandra Hüller (Hedwig Höss from Zone of Interest most recently) threatens to steal the show as Eva Stratt, who is running the international effort to combat the black dots. Stratt is deadpan and dark, competent and insightful and Hüller’s performance is outstanding. But, with that exception, the lack of depth to the strangeness of what should be strange dogs the film.

On intellectual, emotional, and simple engineering levels, there’s a lack of the rigor that made The Martian so compelling. The storyline is already reliant on a couple of big deus ex machinas, it should not make the audience doubt the plot as it proceeds. It’s far afield, it doesn’t need to be far-fetched too.