(Note: this review contains minor spoilers.)
The only pitch Project Hail Mary needed for me was “Lord and Miller.” For those unfamiliar, the directorial duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have captained 21 and 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, while also writing for the immaculate Spider-Verse series. Their work is both heartfelt and hilarious, and their multiversal imagination as shown in The Lego Movie and the Miles Morales adventures certainly qualifies them to tackle a sci-fi blockbuster. Add in Andy Weir, who wrote the novel The Martian, as the author of the source material and Ryan Gosling, who can interweave complex emotion and comedy, as the lead, and I boarded Project Hail Mary with high hopes. And while this film did not reach the same rarefied air as The Lego Movie or the Spider-Verse duology, it is still a spectacular blockbuster well worth watching on the biggest screens.
The film’s defining strength is its script, an engine propelling it at excellent pace, making its two and a half hours feel far shorter. Screenwriter Drew Goddard, who previously adapted The Martian for Ridley Scott, has a way with Weir’s novels, maintaining suspense without creating claustrophobia and balancing high stakes with endearing humor. Unsurprisingly for Lord and Miller, this film is consistently funny; I laughed out loud a lot of times in the theater. But the script is special because it stays weighted, grounding the most fantastical elements of its story through compelling relationships and convincing scientific treatment of the implausible. The most impressive feat of writing is that the characters remain their humorous selves during the most dramatic segments of the film without deflating the situations’ tension or sadness. A one-liner or callback to an earlier joke becomes an attempt to stay afloat amidst inner turmoil or to hold onto a slipping relationship.
Ryan Gosling gives an excellent performance as the astronaut Ryland Grace, moving effortlessly between the exaggerated emotions the comedic scenes require and the pain and introspection demanded in the dramatic moments. Sandra Hüller serves as the straight woman to Ryland’s ridiculousness, answering his expressive comedy with deadpan comebacks and delivering one of the film’s most emotional moments, through a cover of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” no less. But the most impressive performance comes from Gosling’s co-star “Rocky,” who is an alien portrayed primarily by a puppet. Voice actor and puppeteer James Ortiz is credited as Rocky, leading a team of puppeteers to bring the extraterrestrial to life. I have seldom seen an alien creature as believable as Rocky and considering how unorthodox his design is (which I will let readers enjoy discovering on their own), this is a huge testament to the team of puppeteers and to Ortiz’s vocal performance. Rocky is the best part of Project Hail Mary, an outstanding technical achievement and a reminder of the skill with animation that has revealed Lord and Miller as luminaries.
The film’s aesthetics transport the audience into the cosmos, with impressive verisimilitude and splashes of style that elicit wonder. The set, prop, and scenic design are marvelous, making a spaceship’s lab, a sample of star-eating organisms, and a storm-covered gas giant all look and feel real. One cannot distinguish practical effects from CGI here, allowing the voyage to stay immersive. For spectacle, Lord, Miller, and accomplished cinematographer Greig Frasier (Dune, Rogue One, The Batman) surround characters with prismatic surfaces or bathe them in strong, single colors, with the most impressive visual moment being a deluge of infrared light that washes Gosling in a scarlet sea studded with star-like dots. (Gosling’s character even remarks while soaking it in that “I’m having a moment.”) The detail and grandeur of the sets and scenes meet the movie’s “filmed for IMAX” advertising and easily merit paying for a Premium Large Format screen; I watched the film in Dolby Cinema. Daniel Pemberton’s score, reminiscent of the Ad Astra and Man of Steel soundtracks, is gorgeous, enveloping the theater in ethereal choirs.
There are a few aspects and moments in which the film falls a bit flat. Some scene transitions include the camera rotating from an off-kilter angle into the new setting, an effect that impressed me the first time and dizzied me on subsequent uses. There are also shots in which the camera is fixed to the body of Ryland’s ship as it spins out of control over a planet, filming from the ship’s perspective, which would be astounding if it were not a direct rip-off of Interstellar, which uses the same camera technique for this exact story beat. In fact, the action scene in which this camerawork occurs is far less exciting than it should be, likely because of the rapid cutting between different locations on the ship. As the scene features Ryland taking a spacewalk, extended shots following his adventure could have intensified the scene’s stakes and thereby excited the audience. There is also a certain key decision Ryland makes that I understood on a thematic and narrative level but did not believe was authentic to the character. Gosling plays the moment as well as he can, but the script does not build Ryland up to this moment. The character’s arc before and after the decision are very natural, however, so the frustrating moment passes.
These slight reservations do little to dampen my enthusiasm for Project Hail Mary. Lord and Miller reach for the stars and seize them, thanks to the excellent cast, crew, and creature they have assembled. This movie has earned its great reception and is certainly worth your time and money to experience in theaters; few films are this openly ambitious, and landing this ship is a moviemaking miracle.