Ryan Gosling’s pretty face and inoffensive goofiness will keep your mind off the billions of deaths happening offscreen
It’s the kind of clever switcheroo you only notice in hindsight. After leaving the theater with a spring in your step, feeling uplifted about the survival of a faceless rocky alien spider (a flawless masterpiece of puppetry that should get its own Oscar category), you start piecing together the plot pieces that Project Hail Mary frustratingly left scattered between flashbacks, and it finally dawns on you: Hey, the buddy comedy was fine, and Ryan Gosling is always a delight, but wasn’t the human species supposed to be facing extinction while we were having wholesome, family-friendly fun in space? Didn’t that mysterious German lady talk of losing something like a quarter of the world’s population in the best case scenario?
When the movie starts and our hero Ryan Gosling Ryland Grace wakes up with amnesia, his ship has already been traveling for several years since the discovery that the Sun was losing brightness; the wars over food must have devastated Earth in the meantime. The script merely alludes to the stakes and promptly shifts its attention to Grace teaching his new alien pal to dance and bump fists. The quick pacing of the scenes in space doesn’t give us time to reflect on the mass panic and the disintegration of society that must be going on while, a dozen light-years away, Grace sings karaoke. The movie is very effective at what it’s doing. It’s its choice of what things to do that lands as strange.
The problem Grace is trying to solve is that some strange microbes are eating the Sun, and with the diminished energy output, human agriculture is doomed to collapse. It turns out that other stars within the visible portion of the universe are being consumed too, except, for unknown reasons, the star Tau Ceti, which still keeps its normal brightness. The only hope (the titular “Hail Mary”) for the survival of life on Earth is to send a ship to Tau Ceti to figure out how it’s avoiding the plague of star-killing microbes. But while the ship gets there, which even with a miraculous superpotent fuel is going to take some years, Earth is left to fend for itself as best it can. This is a profoundly intense drama that the movie inexplicably insists on looking away from. Don’t think of the entire nations fractured by starvation—hey, isn’t this spider alien cute?
For roughly half of the runtime, we watch Grace deal with his amnesia and the unexpected presence of a second ship sent from a planet facing the same problem. Here we have potential elements for great character work, but the movie is so obsessed with making us feel good that we don’t see the full impact of the situation on Grace’s psyche. We eventually learn he was forced to come on this trip without enough fuel to return to Earth, effectively killing him in the hope that he’ll find a way to save the whole species. This could have provided a prime opportunity to explore important questions, like the universal human experience of disorientation at our state of thrownness into the world, and the comfort it brings us to find fellow travelers to figure out this mystery with, but this movie is too afraid of thinking sad thoughts. The unmissable allegory for the human condition (i.e. we open our eyes without any instructions, destined already for death) is swept aside for the good old art of visual spectacle.
On that front there’s nothing to complain about: Project Hail Mary looks breathtaking. But there’s a noticeable disconnect between the parts of the plot that desperately pull in opposite directions, the background tragedy of a world falling to pieces and the foreground coziness of a likeable guy learning to make a friend. There’s a bare outline of character growth, going from an initial state in which Grace was against going on the mission because he didn’t feel goodhearted enough to sacrifice his life for anyone, to a culmination state in which Grace has met someone he’s willing to sacrifice himself for. But the magnitude of that growth gets lost amid the movie’s anxious hyperfocus on vibes.
Project Hail Mary ought to carry itself with more weight, be more aware of the complex themes it has on its hands. But every time it starts getting too close to seriousness, it runs back to the reassurance of just having a good time at the movies. You’re not here to think too deeply about the obvious implications of the story; you’re here to watch the impossibly handsome Ryan Gosling give you one of his trademark comforting smiles. Here, have another joke. Forget about the hard truths of cosmic loneliness. Just gape at how gorgeous the stars look. Are you not entertained?
Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.
POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.
