REVIEW: Project Hail Mary

The elements in Project Hail Mary are all mostly straightforward and build to a fairly familiar end: drop an average Joe into an extraordinary situation where he is required to be extraordinary also, and watch extraordinary things happen. This is proven territory.

And I spent most of the time drafting this review trying to decide whether that was a point for or against the film, helmed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller--and whether that made a difference for a non-franchise piece like this, the exact kind of film we need to succeed at the box office in order to have a healthy landscape. I think the answer to that question is honestly bigger than any one film, even a reasonably well-done one such as this.

But I will say that a movie like Project Hail Mary gives me some hope, and it's my wish that the film continues to find people who will receive it with zeal. And I hope that the people who do will continue to search for other films that they can also embrace in turn.

The film follows a middle school science teacher, Ryland Grace, who gets inducted by international authorities to assist with the greatest global crisis the world has ever faced: some alien entity is feeding off of the sun, and in thirty years, the world will face catastrophic consequences. As circumstances, escalate, Grace becomes the only one who can complete the mission, and so he blasts off on an interstellar mission to find a way to save the planet from devastation.

I only read the book once, and some time before the promotion started, but I had a bullet-point recollection of the story, and from all I can recall, this was a fairly close translation of the Weir novel.

The science talk gets condensed for a cleaner runtime, but you still feel how the decisions Grace and the team are forced to make all hang on the judgments and gambles made by the smartest people on the planet. They could have been talking about midichlorians for all I know and it probably would have sounded the same to me, but I can appreciate the effort involved, and I'm certain there will be audiences who savor this attention.

But underneath the scientific coating, the movie's parts are very discernible even to novices like me. This is a movie about human ingenuity facing off against the cold hard realities of science. And science is always looking for an excuse to eliminate the world's unluckiest schoolteacher, as well as all mankind. The answer to all these problems is always couched in some science problem, but really the solution is humans making human decisions.

And thus we get continual reminders that sometimes the best way out of an impossible situation is a little bit of fun. I'd describe this as a movie with a sense of humor before I'd describe it as a "comedy." None of these characters are endeavoring to be funny, and most wouldn't know how if they tried, but the absurdity of the situations speaks for itself and makes for a very entertaining watch.

That responsibility falls almost entirely on Ryan Gosling, who appears in almost every scene of the 2-and-a-half-hour film, and who straddles charisma and accessibility to create an engaging everyman who has to rise to extraordinary levels in order to save the world. He's not necessarily smoother or more socially adept than his scientific cohorts, but Ryland Grace is a little more at home in the spontaneity and chaos of the situation. This also makes him come off a few shades less smug than he did in the book, which went a ways to endear me to him as our story's captain.

His closest human partner is Sandra Hüller's Eva Stratt, the head of Project Hail Mary and the sort of spokesman for the cold hard reality that Grace is facing. We'll give her points for coming off as empirical rather than callous.

Grace's real companion, however, is the alien rock spider he encounters in outer space. Rocky was both puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz, and the film succeeds in creating a being of pathos out of something with no face. Within no time at all, we look at this rock spider as having a spirit, even a personality, and the friendship between Rocky and Grace becomes the film's main drive.

And that's the story's real stealth-agenda. For all the scientific puzzles we get to solve, sometimes the greatest "hail mary" we can attempt is putting our trust in some foreign entity and trust that there is shared humanity in something that might not appear to fit our definition of "human."

--The Professor

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