Some movies work best — or reveal themselves most honestly — as allegories of themselves.
For instance: Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s “Project Hail Mary” is a sci-fi comedy about an impossibly elaborate, unimaginably expensive, all-stops-pulled-out campaign to save the Earth from certain doom that is itself impossibly elaborate, unimaginably expensive and leaves no stops un-pulled.
Its quarter-billion-dollar mission is to save the big-screen experience from the scourge of streaming (despite it being an Amazon/MGM release) — to provide the kind of throwback, Spielbergian spectacle (and whimsical, Spielbergian humour) that makes going to the theatre not only preferable, but essential. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll believe that Ryan Gosling can fly, or at least float. What good is a crowd-pleaser without a crowd?
On its own explicitly stated terms as a Spielbergian crowd-pleaser, “Project Hail Mary” — adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 bestseller — is effective enough. It’s funny and absorbing and familiar without being derivative; it gets the job done.
But there’s nevertheless something grinding and mechanical about a film that means to be a tribute to the supple, subtle qualities of the human spirit. Gosling’s character, Dr. Ryland Grace, is a reluctant astronaut stranded in deep space without enough time or fuel to get home — a spiritual doppelganger to the protagonist of Weir’s previous sci-fi classic “The Martian” (which was made into a hit movie by Ridley Scott).
Grace is an Everyman with a higher-than-usual IQ and no real survival skills; his stuck-in-the-middle predicament is mirrored in the way the movie hovers weightlessly — and aimlessly — through the void between art and engineering. There’s a difference between tugging the audience’s heartstrings and pushing their buttons; “Project Hail Mary” treats both approaches as one and the same.
Certainly, Lord and Miller know what they’re doing. They’re skilful, zeitgeist-surfing entertainers with a knack for renovating — but not defacing — valuable intellectual properties. Their wry update of “21 Jump Street” used the setup of grown-up cops cosplaying as high school losers to satirize generational tensions and shifting notions of pop-cultural cool. “The Lego Movie” was a smartly deconstructivist blockbuster that anticipated (and remains superior to) the sardonic product placement of “Barbie.”
With “Project Hail Mary,” they’ve decided to mine a set of very contemporary, apocalypse-now anxieties around environment collapse and a doomsday clock counting down to zero — the right move for pranksters drifting into middle age. Their evident desire to get serious, however, bumps up against their congenital goofiness; for all the film’s hushed terror about the end of the world as we know it, we get the sense that the directors feel fine.
The ostensible locus of terror here is an infrared line extending from Venus to the sun, which is apparently having the effect of dimming the latter, to the point that Earth’s ecosystem will be irrevocably devastated in a matter of decades. The precise reasons that Grace is recruited out of a high school classroom to help with the globally co-ordinated initiative dubbed “Project Hail Mary” are both too complex to elucidate here and not worth spoiling. Suffice it to say that he’s a brainiac with something to prove, and that his stoic, German superior Eva (Sandra Hüller) is banking on him proving it.
But when Grace awakes aboard his state-of-the-art starship, he’s confused by what he’s doing there — a memory block that serves as a structural principle. The film cuts between its protagonist’s increasingly bleak predicament (the other crew members have died in hypersleep, leaving him even more lonely and paranoid than predicted) and the sequence of events that brought him aboard the Hail Mary in the first place.
The plot, meanwhile, turns on Grace’s close encounter with an intelligent — if frustratingly enigmatic — life form that’s on its own solo, civilization-or-bust mission. Their tentative attempts at communication across a seemingly unbridgeable linguistic divide provide the film with its best moments of comedy, as well as an organizing metaphor about the importance (between countries, creeds and species) of solidarity.
There aren’t too many movie stars who could do what Gosling has been tasked with here: he’s in nearly every shot of a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and he’s wry and soulful and plausibly haunted for the duration. He inhabits Grace’s flaws with a lack of vanity belied by the fact that he’s one of those actors who simply magnetizes the camera. Not only does he hold his own against the special effects, but he succeeds in making his CGI co-star — it’s enough to say the alien’s name is Rocky — seem like a fully fledged scene partner.
Gosling’s good enough to draw us in to the existential angst of Weir’s story, but he’s ultimately undermined by the relentless, run-on nature of the narrative itself — an incessant inventory of crises and (anti-) climaxes that keep the film from committing to anything like bad (or even ambiguous) vibes.
There’s a lot of talk in “Project Hail Mary” about hope, a valuable (and audacious) commodity that’s easily distilled and rebottled as complacent cliché. By the end of the film, I too was feeling an acute sense of hope — that the directors quarterbacking the action would quit while they were still ahead. Instead, they go long.
