Ryan Gosling is a star in ‘Project Hail Mary’ – Detroit Metro Times

I had an epiphany while watching Project Hail Mary. Ryan Gosling could have played Marty in Marty Supreme, but Timothée Chalamet could never have played Ryland Grace in Project Hail Mary. There’s an effortless charisma to what Gosling does here that feels like a future Best Actor nomination, without question. It’s a movie star performance reminiscent of the kind we got with Tom Hanks in Castaway and Sam Rockwell in Moon, but with the slapstick physicality of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. It’s a performance Gosling will be remembered for a hundred years from now. 

He plays Grace, a molecular biologist whose infamous academic papers forced him into a career as a middle school science teacher. Told non-chronologically, the story follows Grace from his recruitment by the European Space Agency to his awakening from a coma aboard the Hail Mary with temporary amnesia. There, he discovers he is the sole survivor of a desperate suicide mission to save earth from a rapidly dimming sun and an imminent ice age. 

While the trailers for Project Hail Mary haven’t been very shy about giving away quite a bit of the plot, it’s still a blast watching as the film switches back and forth between Gosling on earth as he feverishly works out a way to save the planet and then jumps to him in space, wondering how and why he ended up there when he has absolutely zero training as an astronaut and even less inclination to be a hero. 

This isn’t much of a spoiler since it’s central to the film’s marketing, but Grace eventually meets a faceless, stone-appearing, spider-like alien he dubs Rocky, who is also trying to save “his” planet. While the film delivers an exciting space odyssey with massive stakes and stunning effects, its greatest success is as warm-hearted “competency porn” — deeply investing the audience in the friendship between Grace and Rocky.

What makes the film such an optimistic piece of sci-fi speculation isn’t necessarily the budding friendship between human and alien, but rather that Grace is the ideal human being for first contact. Though initially frightened, Grace’s love of science and knowledge turns that fear into profound excitement. He immediately begins working with Rocky to save their respective civilizations. It’s easy to imagine a version of this story (especially in our current political climate regarding science) where the astronaut freaks out at the sight of Rocky and shoots him like a bug in Starship Troopers. 

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller wear their cinematic influences on their sleeves with Project Hail Mary, at times aesthetically and tonally resembling sci-fi classics like Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, E.T., and 2001: A Space Odyssey, without necessarily feeling beholden to any of them. I’m not science or mathematically minded enough to know whether the film is accurate with its astrophysics, but as a blockbuster sci-fi movie, it’s transportive and charming and I am shocked at Lord and Miller’s ability to make me care so deeply about an alien without anything recognizable as a face. 

The film isn’t perfect, as the non-chronological storytelling sometimes takes away from the tension and flow of the narrative. As we get deeper into the film’s 156-minutes, every time we flash back to Baby Goose science-ing on earth, I just wanted to get back to him and Rocky bro-ing out on the Hail Mary. Also, as lovely and immersive as I found several moments of Daniel Pemberton’s otherworldly score, it also felt so omnipresent to wonder if Lord and Miller didn’t trust audiences enough to let them sit in the silence of space with our heroes for a minute. 

I haven’t read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (despite enjoying The Martian), but my more literate companions called it “faithful to a fault.” That tracks: you really do feel the entire two-and-a-half-hour runtime and the film has more endings than Return of the King, which seems more literary than cinematic. Still, in a sold-out IMAX auditorium with flawless projection and face-melting sound, I was once again reminded of the joys of watching movies on the big screen with an audience full of strangers. Project Hail Mary is one of those giant, crowd-pleasing event movies that justifies the existence of movie theaters by being so gorgeously lensed that it demands audiences see it on the biggest screen possible. The film’s gentle and good-natured humanism feels like a balm in our current moment. Let’s see if its brand of open-minded curiosity actually catches on.

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