When we first meet Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), the molecular biologist turned middle school teacher turned astronaut in Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street) adaptation of Andy Weir’s (Artemis, The Martian) 2021 science-fiction novel, Project Hail Mary, he’s joining an illustrious, if borderline cliched, group of fictional characters, awakening on a spaceship headed towards the Tau Ceti system without a single memory as to who he is or how how got into his present predicament.
Borderline cliched as it might be, but the “character awakening with amnesia” plot device remains a potent one, immediately connecting character and audience as the former endeavors to find answers to the most meaningful questions of identity, purpose, and desire. For Grace, though, talking, let alone walking, take precedence over everything else: He’s been in an induced coma for so long that he can barely gurgle out a response to the ship’s onboard AI or stumble to his feet when he immediately falls out of bed, disheveled, long-haired, and in obvious need of a shower.
Over-faithfully adapting Weir’s sprawlling, tech-heavy novel, Lord, Miller, and screenwriter Drew Goddard (High Potential, The Martian, The Cabin in the Woods) interweave preflight Earthbound flashbacks with Grace’s fumbling attempts to acclimate himself to life aboard the title’s “Hail Mary,” a state-of-the-art, interstellar spaceship specifically designed to transport Grace and the now dead crew members, Yao Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), to investigate and hopefully solve the mystery behind our sun’s dimming and the Tau Seti’s sun resisting the same problem, a new lifeform, dubbed an “Astrophage,” responsible for our sun’s dimming and, in just a few decades, the end of biological life on Earth, including humanity.
In the aforementioned flashbacks, Project Hail Mary introduces not only a pre-flight Grace, but also Eva Stratt (Oscar nominee Sandra Hüller), the head of the European Space Agency assigned to lead the project to save the world. It’s Stratt who plucks Grace, a semi-disgraced, ostracized molecular biologist with a PhD from middle school, and gives him a chance to redeem himself and the views (i.e., life can arise from non-organic, non-carbon forms) that led to his ouster from academia.
Grace repays Stratt’s confidence in his abilities by discovering the hows and whys of the Astrophage, how it’s negatively affecting the sun, and possibly how to stop it before it’s too late. How exactly Grace joined the three-person crew, however, remains a flashback withheld well into Project Hail Mary’s over-indulgent third act.
Saving the world is a heavy burden for anyone to shoulder, let alone a molecular biologist with minimal astronaut training, but that doesn’t last long film-wise: Another ship, completely alien in design, quietly slides alongside the Hail Mary, first sending out thermos-shaped containers to establish communication and later, once Grace has sent back two or four of his own, an umbilical cord connecting the two ships and the two lone occupants, Grace and a multi-limbed, faceless, rock-shaped alien engineer Grace naturally dubs “Rocky.”
Together, they begin an unlikely, if not unexpected, friendship built on mutual needs and wants, saving their worlds from encroachment by the ever-proliferating Astrophage. Grace and Rocky begin with simple repetitive motions meant to express non-threatening friendliness, and thanks to the magic of cinema, communication via an ultra-advanced version of an LLM (Large Language Model), allows Grace and the literal-minded Rocky to converse about life, the universe, and everything, including a solution to the problem of saving their worlds.
Returning to feature-length live-action for the first time in over a decade, Lord and Miller handle the outer space sequences, especially a mid-film spacewalk set piece meant to be experienced in large-scale, high-end screens (Dolby, IMAX), with a self-assured deftness that undercuts any claim that they might be too rusty after so much time away. They’re not. Far from it. Individual scenes and set pieces match anything found in classics of the genre like Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even The Martian.
On their own, they’re more than enough to recommend Project Hail Mary for moviegoers looking for an experience filled with the requisite amounts of awe and wonder. Where Project Hail Mary stumbles, though, is where Goddard, treating Weir’s novel as the equivalent of a biblical text, hews too closely to the source material, cramming every incident, no matter how minor or tangential, into the cinematic mix.
Project Hail Mary also over-relies on easy, lowest-common-denominator humor, a frustrating experience for audience members hungering for something more elevated or loftier thematically and narratively. For everyone else, though, Project Hail Mary puts the “pleasing” in “crowd-pleasing,” turning Grace and Rocky’s friendship into a determinedly inoffensive buddy comedy, enjoyable in their moment-to-moment interactions, but all but forgettable once the end credits roll more than two-and-a-half hours later.
Project Hail Mary opens Friday, March 20, only in movie theaters, via Amazon MGM Studios.