All hail Project Hail Mary, a rousingly wonderful, beautifully strange sci-fi epic with Ryan Gosling and an enchanting pile of rocks at its center.
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller nailed their adaptation of Andy Weir’s blockbuster book, respecting the manuscript in a way that should please fans of the novel. (I count myself among those fans; Weir also wrote The Martian.) As for those who haven’t read it, well, you are in for a fantastic time, with surprising twists and turns—and the film is also a buddy comedy like no other.
The film starts where the novel does, with Gosling’s scientist and schoolteacher, Ryland Grace, waking up on a spaceship, after a multi-year coma, with no memory. As his memory slowly returns, he realizes he’s on a mission to save the Earth from a sun-gobbling microbe that is dimming our star. If he fails, in the coming decades, the Earth will freeze, and humans will go extinct. The future of the planet is in his hands.
The mission has sent him light years away to another solar system to find a solution, a system that at least one other alien civilization has located and traveled to looking for answers. Cue Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), a five-armed, spider-like animated rock formation that immediately befriends Grace as they set upon trying to save their two worlds.
Amazingly, Rocky is mostly of feat of practical puppetry, with only slight help from digital makeup. Ortiz was on set doing that puppetry himself, Kermit-style, which partially explains how authentic, real and sweet the relationship between Grace and Rocky is. Gosling and Ortiz had real interactions full of laughter (the movie is funny), with adlibbing that makes it into the film. There’s nothing artificial-feeling about their time together onscreen; it’s very organic.
Grace’s time back on Earth is told with chronological flashbacks—essentially his memory coming back to him—further explaining his mission and how he wound up being the one fighting for the planet’s salvation.
The great Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) brings dimensions to the character of Eva Stratt that aren’t present in the book. Stratt is the person tasked with putting the last-hope mission together, and it requires her to be pretty ruthless. She’s very cold and calculating in the novel. In the movie, she’s as cold as she has to be—but she also has some heart. A karaoke moment added for the film provides a nice touch.
The stakes are obviously high: Two worlds will die if Grace and Rocky don’t come through, and the film plays out in a way that is thrilling, scary and unpredictable. And credible—the science that Weir put in his book is presented with depth in the movie.
Yes, some of the book’s sequences have been dropped for time, but this does nothing to harm the story. For those who have read the novel, just pretend that everything in the book happened, but Grace’s amnesia in the movie is a bit stronger than it was in the novel. That helped me.
The folks who built the sets and lit the scenes deserve high praise. Too often, movies set in space or dark places require a large degree of eye strain to see what’s going on. Despite taking place in space, with lots of action in the dark on board the ships, the film is always a bright and easy watch. It was digitally shot, but it looks like it was shot on real film. It’s an all-around technical marvel.
I think this will be a massive hit. I also think it will change the biological ecosystem, because Rocky is similar to a jumping spider, and millions of spider lives will now be saved as moviegoers opt not to squish them due to their similarity to the movie hero. All the flies will disappear! Cobwebs everywhere!
Project Hail Mary is the sort of event movie theaters really needed. Take the kids; get ready to buy them Rocky action figures; and prepare to be charmed by Gosling in one of his very best performances. The film is gigantic; it’s funny; it’s smart; and it’s very much worth your while.