Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller)
Fun fact: Chris Miller and I went to the same high school and the apparently the dog drawn on Ryan Gosling’s white board is a nod to one of our alma mater’s math teachers.
Sad fact: I hated Project Hail Mary, which dramatizes a plot that would’ve been suitable for a Buzzfeed sketch or SuperBowl commercial 15 years ago, but is the sort of sentimental dreck we need to take seriously now that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a best picture winner. The film almost functions like a dare: how do you make the audience care about the relationship between a man and a rock? For the team behind Hail Mary, it’s to cast the ever-consistent Ryan Gosling, and put the weight of the universe on their shoulders in the form of a hulking space epic, a “they don’t make them like this anymore” throwback to everything from Spielberg to The Martian.
Despite the praise Lord, Miller and Co. have received for their relative scientific integrity, much of Project Hail Mary’s premise plays like an afterthought, only compounded by the team’s insistence on deflating every dramatic scene with a winking one-liner, usually from Gosling’s middle school science teacher turned master biologist turned astronaut Ryland Grace or Sandra Hüller’s cartoonish military general with a heart of gold.
Contrivances abound, to a nearly comical degree by the last hour, but none more so than the nonlinear structure, the final punchline of which (that Grace was forced on the mission against his will) lands with zero gravity. Plot details are rarely frustrating to me, but the goal of Project Hail Mary, to introduce a micro-organism into Venus’ atmosphere and save the sun, is so cursed that the film’s insistence on this magic-pill solution plays as delusional. The general optimism feels misplaced, especially the idea that major world powers would combine forces to save the planet. The film doesn’t want you to focus on that though. Instead, it wants you to know that there’s a cute rock named after Rocky that can’t perform a thumbs up and watches you while you sleep. And look! 2001, E.T., and Interstellar! At one point, Lord and Miller even redo the most famous scene from Toni Erdmann, suggesting that himbo Ryan Gosling is what Sandra Hüller needs to reconsider her place in the military industrial complex. Depth! Gimme a break.
Project Hail Mary is distributed by Amazon-MGM and is in theaters now.