"Project Hail Mary" Scores

"Project Hail Mary" is the closest thing to a movie that I was guaranteed to enjoy.  It's comedic science-fiction, a genre I adore.  It's Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directing, with a Drew Goddard script based on the Andy Weir novel.  It stars Ryan Gosling as a perpetually scruffy middle school science teacher named Ryland Grace, who got himself kicked out of the scientific establishment years ago, but is now being recruited to help save the world.  A bunch of microscopic space critters called astrophage are feeding on the sun, you see, and causing it to dim.  The loss of energy spells doom for life on Earth unless they can figure out how to stop it.  But though the stakes are high, the movie is anything but glum, making great use of Gosling's comedic talents, and a boatload of fancy special effects.  And if you don't want any spoilers for the movie, you should probably stop reading here and go watch it.

Still with me?  I read Weir's Project Hail Mary a year ago in anticipation for the film, and enjoyed it.  The movie is a very good adaptation that left out a lot of the science, but surprisingly kept in almost everything else.  This means that the pacing is a little rough, particularly the sped-up ending, but there are also a few nice additions, like humanizing Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), the implacable task force leader in charge of Project Hail Mary.  The biggest change is that the movie focuses more on the relationship between Grace and the alien he meets light years away from home, a faceless rock-creature that Grace names Rocky (James Ortiz).  The narrative is split between Grace in the present day on the Hail Mary spaceship, and his muddled but gradually returning memories of his work on Earth, and how he ended up on this mission.  Smartly, the filmmakers decide to skip most of the early introductory stuff in the book and just get straight to Grace and Rocky meeting, learning to communicate, and becoming best cross-species science bros.  

The Golden Globes got a lot of guff for classifying the last movie based on an Andy Weir book, "The Martian," as a comedy.   I don't want to hear any of those complaints about "Project Hail Mary" when this inevitably happens again, because it is absolutely a buddy comedy, without question.  The movie has its moments of spacefaring awe and wonder, but what keeps it so engaging is watching Grace and Rocky interacting on a personal level, and figuring out how to help each other in their shared missions.  Gosling's Ryland Grace leans heavily on goofy humor as a defense mechanism, which Lord and Miller enable wherever they can.  The slapstick is fun, but it's the subtler stuff that really got to me.  Grace's collection of dorky knitwear and thematically appropriate T-shirts is perfect.  

Rocky is already iconic, a cinematic alien that looks like no other.  He is essentially a mobile pile of rocks that is configured like a five-legged spider.  Rocky has no face, but is very articulate with his multiple arms, insectoid digits, and musical vocalizations.  Eventually he is given a human voice via Grace's translation program, but the most important part of his performance is physical.  He gestures.  He dances.  He mimics.  He gets across a wide range of emotions from happiness to fear to deadpan exasperation simply with body language.  Rocky was reportedly mostly performed with puppets and animatronics, which likely contributed to the very effective screen chemistry that Rocky shares with Ryan Gosling onscreen.  

"Project Hail Mary" works great as an optimistic, feel-good space adventure, and arrives at a time when audiences are very receptive to it.  And I think it's the optimism that's the important part, as someone who loves science-fiction but has been weary of the overabundance of dystopian fiction in recent years.  The more cerebral parts of the book mostly end up in the margins of the movie, which is probably for the best.  One thing about the film that caught my attention was that its pop culture references were pretty dated - "Rocky," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and the Beatles.  But then again, that is also fitting, as "Project Hail Mary" successfully evokes the spirit of that age of space exploration where we didn't automatically believe that the aliens were bad, or the mission was hopeless.  And we could certainly use more movies with that mindset going forward.         

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