Producers: Amy Pascal, Ryan Gosling, Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Aditya Sood, Rachel O’Connor and Andy Weir Directors: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller Screenplay: Drew Goddard Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub, Priya Kansara, Liz Kingsman, Orion Lee and Aaron Neil Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios
Grade: C+
In 1998 the earth was threatened with destruction—in theatres at least—as a huge space rock raced toward it in not one but two films, Michael Bay’s “Armageddon” (an asteroid) and Mimi Leder’s “Deep Impact” (a comet). In both movies teams were hastily assembled to deal with the menace and—spoiler alert!—succeeded ultimately in averting planetary disaster. Their approaches were different—“Armageddon” was a big action spectacular, “Impact” more serious melodrama—but in one respect they were alike: whatever humor either contained was either juvenile or unintended.
In “Project Hail Mary,” based on a 2021 book by Andy Weir (”The Martian”), the danger is new, a substance called Astrophage, made up of single-cell organisms that siphon energy from the sun; it’s predicted that the process will bring a new ice age to earth within decades and is affecting other stars as well. So, when it’s discovered that one star seems unaffected, a mission is mounted to send a team there to investigate its secret.
Among the crew members is Ryland Grace, a middle school biology teacher with a PhD who, as the many flashbacks scattered throughout the move reveal, had abandoned his early ambitions in the field when his major theory had been cruelly debunked. He’d been approached by burly Steve Hatch (Lionel Boyce), a military man, to consult on Hail Mary, a project headed by Hatch’s boss Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller). As the name indicates, it’s a last-ditch effort to find a way to short-circuit the Astrophage’s destructive activity and save the world.
Grace uses his expertise in microbiology to unravel the process by which Astrophage works its damage—something about carbon monoxide from Venus—but only a trip to Tau Celi, the uniquely immune star, can perhaps reveal how to disable it. Unfortunately, it’s a suicide mission, since fuel limitations would limit the earth ship to a one-way trip; findings could be sent back to earth via small probes, but the three-person crew could not return. And when both the chief and backup science officers are killed in an accident, Stratt forces the reluctant Grace to assume that role.
The film, in fact, opens with a heavily bearded Grace awakening from cryogenic sleep approaching Tau Celi, only to find that his two colleagues (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub) have died during the voyage. He’s alone, but not for long: he encounters another ship, much larger than his, sent by another planet on a mission identical to his own. It too turns out to have a single survivor, a critter made of rock that employs its many flexible joints to skitter about like a big crab. Grace learns to communicate with the creature, a genial alien that he dubs, rather unimaginatively, as Rocky (the lead puppeteer James Ortiz also provides Rocky’s voice), and they become buddies, bonding as they work together to achieve their common goal. It will come as no surprise that eventually they succeed, but in the process their emotional connection has become so strong that when Grace is faced with a choice that requires a personal sacrifice to save his new friend, you know full well what he’ll decide.
Thus, while the save-the-earth underpinnings of the plot never disappear, they come to play second fiddle to what amounts to an increasingly sappy comic interspecies bromance. Moreover, it’s one encumbered by that pernicious crutch of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, the constant references to other movies and classic pop songs. The worst examples are, of course, the shout-outs to the “Rocky” movies—when Grace can’t pronounce the name of Rocky’s mate back home, he says he’ll just call her Adrian—but there are others. Consider the throwaway line Grace says with a wink at a moment of irritation with Rocky—“He’s growing on me—at least he’s not growing in me.” Could this be a reference to “Alien,” which just happens to have been directed by Ridley Scott, who also directed “The Martian”? What Nabokov might have termed allusion golf is perhaps getting too much of a workout here.
And that’s all in addition to the obvious parallels to the 1998 disaster epics, as well as the more cerebral predecessors “2001” and “Interstellar”; remembering the impact of Kubrick’s film, in particular, might make your heart sink as you’re trudging through the two-and-a-half hours of this Disneyfied version of the plot, with its multiple climaxes, the last a cutesy finale that represents the triumph of a redemption arc for Grace that’s also part of the overstuffed screenplay. Yet the filmmakers don’t find time to flesh out Grace’s relationships with other humans, including Hüller’s Stratt (who does, however, get to sing a song in a scene intended, futilely, to add some depth to his colleagues at the project). His connection to Boyce’s Hatch comes off better, primarily because it’s basically comic.
All that being said, the film is lucky to have Gosling. He’s effortlessly likable, from the slapstick pratfalls he pulls off in the opening scenes, where Grace awakens not knowing who or where he is and must make his weakened body function normally again, to his growing camaraderie with Rocky. Of almost equal importance is Ortiz’s contribution, both as puppeteer and as voice actor (the creature effects were supervised by Neil Scanlan).
The other visual effects, supervised by Paul Lambert, are adequate if not outstanding, while both Charles Wood’s production design and Greig Fraser’s cinematography are fine. Daniel Pemberton’s score tends toward the predictable, and Joel Negron’s editing might be called permissive, contributing to the excessive running-time, although he integrates the flashbacks fairly effectively.
“Project Hail Mary” is determined to be a space-age crowd-pleaser, and one expects most will be satisfied by it. But it really does try too hard.