Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

Ryland Grace awakens to find himself bound within several layers of plastic and bombarded with agonizingly simple questions from a robot testing how much brain function he lost during a medically induced coma that lasted maybe weeks, months, or even years. We watch as Grace (Ryan Gosling) stumbles and mumbles about like a baby slowly learning to use their legs and mouth properly, or the first link in the evolutionary chain finding its way upon the shore. With almost uncanny lightness he climbs the walls to find the long deceased bodies of two other people, before staggering through narrow corridors lined with diodes and buttons and the remnants of forgotten life, until, to his awe, a window reveals the vast, unknowable expanse of deep space. While filmed as both beautiful and terrifying, for the audience, the emotion is dulled. We knew this was coming. And we’ve seen it before.

It’s through this trope of temporary memory loss, alternatively brilliant and convenient, that Project Hail Mary allows the viewer to discover the world and its various secrets alongside its protagonist. Of course, some of this sense of discovery has already been ruined by teasers and trailers and the novel the film is based on. We know that Grace is part of mission to save the Earth from a force eating the heat of our sun. We know that he was somehow recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) and that his dead companions are Yao Li-Jie (veteran character actor Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vaynthrub, criminally underused as always). And we know, far more unfortunately, that Grace will meet an alien. From here we also know the basic trajectory of the rest of his story, because we, like Grace, have lived through more than one hundred years of science fiction literature and cinema. Like much of modern, mainstream science fiction, Project Hail Mary doesn’t say anything new or revolutionary. Yet, like much of the best modern, mainstream science fiction, the film repeats familiar themes and beats with remarkable aplomb and polish.

He’s like a baby. A big, bearded baby.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

The most unique contribution of Andy Weir’s previous literary adaptation, 2015’s The Martian, came from the attitude of its protagonist. Mixing gentle wit, endless optimism, and genuine brilliance, Mark Whatney (Matt Damon) made a dire, mostly hopeless situation into an enjoyable experience. The character and performance were so much fun that the story of a solitary survivor stranded on a distant planet and having to grow crops using fertilizer made from his own waste was nominated by the Golden Globes for Best Comedy. Weir, along with screenwriter Drew Goddard, writes Grace with many of the same traits. He has a quick, self-deprecating wit, is unceasingly positive while also being realistic about his circumstances, and has the now-familiar flashes of incredible competence balanced by childish over-reactions and occasional buffoonery. In other words, he is basically every likeable protagonist we’ve seen in the last ten years of big-budget filmmaking. None of this is to say that Grace isn’t an enjoyable presence. Gosling plays the role very well, completely embodying both Grace’s enthusiasm and reluctance, and bringing the right amount of pathos as Hail Mary swings from giddy silliness to absolute dread. It’s just that, after The Martian and several years of super-competent and sarcastic yet relatably dumb (usually white, male) protagonists, we pretty well know what to expect from Project Hail Mary’s focal character. In some ways, this even extends to the alien Grace meets, whom he names for his appearance and not as a reference to a film character.

The relationship between Grace and Rocky is easily the best part of ‘Project Hail Mary.”
Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

Unfortunate as it is that trailers spoiled what was supposedly the narrative’s biggest twist, it’s also easy to see why the studio and producers would want to highlight Rocky, the alien Grace meets. From creature design to voice performance to personality, Rocky is easily the greatest creation of the film. As an individual, Rocky is the perfect companion to Grace, the same combination of expertise mixed with child-like foolishness and enthusiasm, allowing Rocky to rip through Grace’s living quarters in a crystalline ball of his own construction with ridiculous abandon. Despite having nothing that a human could categorize as a face, Rocky’s emotions come through in a masterful performance by James Ortiz, as both voice actor and puppeteer. Rocky’s range of motion, particularly the limited articulation in the fingers, make us wonder how such creatures would handle technology, while engraved details hint at an entire life we can never understand. Above all, we come to notice how lucky the two characters are to be the lone survivors of their missions, if only because any other combination of personalities may not have been as fun. A more stoic member of Rocky’s race, for example, may not be as keen to dress up in a party hat, or as willing to throw out ideas that we know will led to complications both humorous and dire, because that’s what happens in science fiction.

Similarly, the effects throughout Project Hail Mary are wonderful. While Rocky is obviously the standout, sequences of Gosling floating through zero gravity, his ship spinning, and the planet they visit – with its green and orange membrane-like texture – are beautifully visualized. Sound design, particularly the absolute silence of a vacuum and the grinding and cooing of Rocky’s language, add to the film’s immersion, making the situation and the characters within all the more convincing, further allowing us to forget the destination in favor of the journey. The fullness of the picture demonstrates how essential the theater experience is in cinema. This is a movie made for big screens with sharp pictures and surround sound, where the darkness mimics that of space and we’re free to lose ourselves in this world. A world where, dire as the situation may be, there is still hope, because smart people are uniting to address the problem and governments are willing to listen. Both of which clearly mark Project Hail Mary as a work of fiction.

For the last few years people have debated how to sell the theater to experience to younger viewers. Well, with ‘Project Hail Mary,” the theater experience sells itself.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

Fun as it is, there are times when inconsistencies and reasonable doubt break the immersion Hail Mary’s effects work so hard to create. Similar to The Martian, many of Grace’s problems are so easily solved that they seem less like obstacles the character needs to overcome than a checklist of items necessary to appease skeptical enthusiasts of science fiction and scientific fact. Where Grace’s method of recreating Rocky’s language is wonderful, and necessary in order for the narrative to progress, it’s finished quickly and conveniently. There’s a time when the two don’t even require the jerry-rigged machinery which allows translation. Rocky’s sense of sight is also questionable, since he can only see surfaces, and yet somehow watches a screen of what Grace is seeing. Beyond mere verisimilitude, a plethora narrative pitfalls, from massive plot holes to continuity errors, roughen an otherwise breezy journey. It’s understandable that directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller would ignore unnecessary complications to remain light and quick, except that many of the film’s major events come off as unnecessary complications. Even the entire flashback sequence, barring one moment at the very end (which is easily predicted) doesn’t offer insight that couldn’t have been shown in the present tense. While this would rob of us every supporting performance, which is unfortunate, it would also cut down on a runtime that is a little too long. For a film where so much happens, Hail Mary doesn’t offer much that’s new.

Hey look, humanity working together. Then they’re dead in the first scene.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

Yet perhaps the biggest doubt in Project Hail Mary’s narrative is the same that plagues all of science fiction: humanity working together. Perhaps the most pervasive trope in all of SF is the idea that when facing a global threat the nations of world will put aside their political, ideological, and economic interests and work toward mutual benefit, rather than, as mentioned briefly by Stratt, plot to save themselves first and, when that fails, battle over shares of the scraps. Obviously, as a work of science fiction, Project Hail Mary wants to appeal to our better nature, but it’s hard to fully embrace the story when only five years ago the “do your own research” crowd was using ten minutes of Facebook headlines to undercut virologists with fifty years of clinical experience.

More than one hundred years of science fiction highlighting the potential of humanity working together, the benefits of altruistic intelligence, and the dangers of unregulated technology, and we’re still violating agreements on carbon emissions, doubting breakthroughs which have ended diseases, and betting our entire social structure on an algorithmic construct that doesn’t work as well as the human brain. I get it, it’s comforting to think that when a problem threatens our existence we’ll put together our collective resources and expertise and save the world. It’s a nice thought. It’s also wrong, and, worse, it’s dangerous.

‘Project Hail Mary’ is a comforting experience.
Image: Amazon MGM Studios.

Unfortunately we, the people in the real world, are not protagonists in modern science fiction. We can’t rely on genre contrivances and some inevitable global trust of “smart people” to fix everything. Especially when so many in our real world work to demean and discredit the intelligence of experts while many of our dumbest, most gullible proclaim themselves geniuses. Our lives aren’t pre-destined by tropes and cliches. Like Grace and Rocky in the film, our lives are decided by the actions we as individuals take now and in the future. Films like Project Hail Mary want to remind us that we can be better. On its own, Hail Mary is a very well-construction, beautiful envisioned, and enjoyable piece of science fiction. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what it is, fiction. There isn’t some magnanimous group of “smart people,” secret multinational initiative, friendly alien, or other benevolent force from the sky coming to save us. We have to save ourselves.

Unlike Ryland Grace, we don’t have teasers and trailers and an original novel to guide us. We stumble. We fail at agonizingly simple questions. We guide ourselves. And so far the best we’ve done is the stuff of science fiction.

Rating 3.5 / 5