"Project Hail Mary" review — Grace saves the world at the hour of our death
“Amaze, amaze, amaze.”
The Earth is dying. We all know it’s dying. News of human-wrought climate change has been a common topic in the past decades, prophecies of doom for our species and our world. For many, it’s a very familiar ache. The overwhelming, existential threat of climate change pushes people in extreme directions: grief, denial, or a desperate need to help. In the alternate present of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary, the Earth is dying not from the horrors of climate change, but because the sun is being devoured by a single-cell alien life form called astrophage (Latin for “star eater”). The world isn’t at risk of heating up; it’s at risk of cooling down. Within a few short decades, food supplies will be depleted, and millions will die. And if the parasite doesn’t slow down, the sun will, eventually, completely die out, ending all life on Earth. What’s worse is that the astrophage is spreading across the cosmos, devouring stars throughout our corner of the Milky Way galaxy. Except for one: Tau Ceti, a star twelve light-years away from Earth, whose seeming resistance to the parasite might just hold the cure for our future.
Despite its apocalyptic set-up, Lord and Miller’s Project Hail Mary — based on the novel by Andy Weir, who also has a producing credit on the film — manages to escape the doom-and-gloom of other narratives of its ilk, and even pushes ahead into optimistic territory. Anchored by a strong, dynamic leading performance from Ryan Gosling, supported through gorgeous design, visual effects, and sweeping orchestrations, the film is a hope-filled letter of defiance against giving up, even if the road to perseverance is fraught with danger. Here, the end of the world isn’t an excuse for wallowing in the inevitability of the end, even if the odds are stacked against our reluctant protagonist, but as a vehicle for exploring the strength of the human spirit and the best of modern puppetry. It’s a rather simple film in its design, without the survivalist instincts of previous Weir adaptation The Martian or the philosophical ambition of other films in its filmic niche, but it’s hard not to be swept away into its overwhelming sense of imagination and adventure.
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| Photo via Amazon/MGM. |
Light years from home, middle school science teacher and failed academic, Dr. Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), finds himself stranded on the Hail Mary, an experimental spacecraft hurtling towards Tau Ceti. Grace is plagued with severe memory loss and muscle atrophy, having emerged violently from cryosleep. The rest of the crew is dead, he’s hurtling at near light speed, and his ship is almost out of fuel. Oh, and he still needs to figure out what’s going on with that pesky astrophage that poses a threat to the entire universe if it’s left unchecked. Despite the extensive scientific knowledge that’s slowly coming back to him, he realizes quickly that whoever he was before he went to sleep doesn’t know how to pilot the ship. Without his crew, he’s going to have to learn to be three people in one, and get real comfortable, real fast with how to keep himself and the ship alive. If things couldn’t get any worse as he approaches the distant start of Tau Ceti, he soon discovers that Earth isn’t the only planet that sent an astronaut to investigate the parasite.
Told over two timelines — one with Grace aboard the Hail Mary and a series of flashbacks showing his contributions to the project back on Earth — the film slowly unravels the mystery of the astrophage, explores Grace’s attempts at first contact with sentient and adorable extraterrestrial life, and how in the world he ended up onboard this ship in the first place. In the present, Grace tries to communicate with the new alien lifeform and while trying to figure out why-oh-why Tau Ceti isn’t being devoured like the rest of the stars. Back in the past, he is pulled against his will into a secretive U.N.-backed investigation into the nascent astrophage and the strange infrared “Petrova line” of the stuff that connects the Sun to Venus. The two timelines play off of each other well, with each revelation impacting the other storyline, as the audience and Grace are together rebuilding his memory.
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| Photo via Amazon/MGM. |
Ryan Gosling’s performance as Dr. Grace is the crux of the entire film, a performance that has him channelling both strong comedic impulses and solid dramatic beats, which allows him to effortlessly carry the film on his back. His emotional breadth and performance agility are on full display, capturing Grace’s interiority and quick-thinking while selling Drew Goddard and Andy Weir’s humorous, bouncy dialogue. While Gosling is incredibly impressive, he’s not entirely alone in the story. The flashbacks have him supported by Sandra Hüller’s no-nonsense Hail Mary project head and Lionel Boyce’s security guard-turned-impromptu lab assistant, and the present-day, Hail Mary-set drama sees Grace team up with the five-armed “Eridian,” whom he nicknames “Rocky.” The supporting cast is small, but mighty. Boyce’s role is small, but he shines in a particularly fun section of scientific investigation early on in the film. Hüller’s dead-serious Eva Stratt is an excellent foil to Grace’s inability to take any conversation seriously. Hüller is making her Hollywood debut in this film, after her monumental one-two punch of performances in Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest.
Rocky (voiced and primarily puppeteered by James Ortiz) is a particularly delightful addition to the story. Hailing from the real-life 40 Eridani A, and is refreshingly designed with as few human-like characteristics as possible, the creature is brought to life with a beautiful mixture of puppetry and CG effects. The result is marvellous: a first contact story that prioritizes the possibility of collaboration and togetherness over hostility and paranoia. Instead, Rocky and Grace have to combine their very unique understandings of how the universe works together to solve the problem of the astrophage. While Gosling makes the emotive core of the story work, it’s his very non-human scene partner who remains the film’s most memorable component. Weir’s fiction has clung to the identity of “practical science fiction,” with his stories rooted in real-world physics, biology, and engineering. In both of the film’s alien species, the sun-devouring parasite and the Eridians, the film showcases how an informed understanding of science actually opens the door to more inventive sci-fi storytelling, rather than making it more constrained. The galaxy isn’t populated by humanoids, but species that have evolved in strange ways due to their unique interstellar conditions.
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| Photo via Amazon/MGM. |
Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller make every effort to sell the grandeur and terror of Dr. Grace’s space adventure. The film’s pacing is light on its toes, quickly moving back and forth between Earth and space, jumping from one set piece to the next. The tactile production design and stunning effects work are captured in beautiful detail by the cinematography of Greig Fraser, the man behind the camera of Dune and The Batman, bringing space to life in a colourful and beautiful way. The film’s cinematography, in particular, draws visual inspiration from the art of space photography, which highlights just how magnificent space can be. The film’s use of sound design, particularly the absence of sound in the vacuum of space, is incredibly effective at selling the isolation Grace experiences aboard his ship. The film’s cosmic odyssey manages to keep the tension between the supreme majesty and the infinite hostility of the vacuum of space, perhaps best encapsulated in one particularly transcendent moment set in the upper atmosphere of an exoplanet orbiting Tau Ceti that quickly turns into a terrifying battle for survival.
Lord and Miller have assembled a crack squad of collaborators to make the project work as well as it does. The screenplay from writer Drew Goddard — who penned The Martian, as well as episodes of TV’s Lost, The Good Place, and Daredevil — makes the largely internal tension of the original story into something playable, with expert character writing and clever problem-solving from Grace and Rocky. The score by Daniel Pemberton is stunning, full of, dare I say it, spacey pads, haunting vocal arrangements, plucky percussion sections, and bright synths. It is a sonic delight to listen to, both in the theatre and in the car. It’s not just Pemberton’s original score pieces that make the music of the film so engaging; it’s also the brilliant soundtrack curated by music supervisor Kier Lehman. It’s rare that a film’s soundtrack makes me this excited, but Lehman’s internationally-minded mixture of American, South African, Argentine, and Māori songs makes the soundtrack a constant reminder of the world Grace is fighting to save.
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| Photo via Amazon/MGM. |
The comparisons to other “solo astronaut flies through space, plumbing the depths of the human soul” are certainly inevitable, but Project Hail Mary firmly makes its own space in the steadily growing sci-fi sub-genre. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, James Grey’s Ad Astra, Tarkovsky’s Solaris, Kubrick’s legendary 2001, and even Ridley Scott’s aforementioned The Martian all spring to mind as other tales within this film’s orbit. This film works as a rather hopeful countercurrent to what can be a very heavy, lonely genre. It doesn’t have the sort of overt preoccupation with man’s place in the cosmos, fate, destiny, family, loss, and the divine that some similar tales do. Instead, Project Hail Mary lands as an optimistic, often light-hearted rebuttal to the darkness, even if it takes Grace a long time to realize that he has the strength to save the human species. Perhaps the film’s tone shouldn’t be a surprise, given that Lord and Miller’s previous directing efforts include The Lego Movie, among other high-profile producing and writing credits, including the recent Spider-Verse films. It blends the comic and serious beats with ease, creating an incredibly emotionally effective film. It’s very palatable, with broad, blockbuster appeal, but that doesn’t stop Project Hail Mary from being a remarkably effective story of perseverance and survival.
In the electronic words of Rocky: “Amaze, amaze, amaze.”
Project Hail Mary is now playing in theatres.
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