‘If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct. Including us’.
Ryan Gosling takes to the stars in Project Hail Mary, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s film adaptation of Andy Weir (of The Martian fame)’s sci-fi novel of the same name. Gosling is on charming form here as Dr. Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher plucked out of his normal life and thrust into outer space on a mission to save our dying Sun.
If this mission, humanity’s last Hail Mary, goes awry, the Earth’s temperature could dip by up to fifteen degrees (which, depending on Celsius or Fahrenheit, could really spell trouble).
After a slightly groan-inducing Amazon Studios logo, complete with a grainy, retro MGM card that seems to promise something refined, we meet Grace as he crawls out of a comatose state, suffering from severe amnesia. He’s the last man standing on the Hail Mary, his ship, but his dead crewmates are a mystery to him.
The film initially leans heavily into the loneliness of its space setting, Grace dwarfed by the vast expanse on the other side of the glass. As time passes and he regains some sense of himself, it’s the ship’s holographic sphere in which he finds his comforts, resting on a virtual beach, running his hands over the projected sand.
It’s a rather slow, contemplative start to this two-hour and thirty-five-minute story, with a lot of time dedicated to extended flashbacks that catch us (and Grace himself) up to speed on the path that led him from a frantic classroom game of The Beanbag is Lava to The Final Frontier. Anatomy of a Fall’s Sandra Hüller is his rather tight-lipped guide, whose reservedness leads to some funny moments, but I would be lying if I said that these scenes didn’t strike me as rather dull – most of the jokes spoiled, as is so often the case, by the trailers, which you’ll have seen if you’ve been to the cinema at all in the last few months. They’re serviceable enough and naturally necessary for establishing everything to come, but I was glad to see things step up a notch in a daft yet deft sequence that played into ramshackle ‘held together with gaffa tape, paper clips and a dream’ science tropes while also developing the threat at play.
Once the gears switch here, they really don’t ever switch back, which sets things off fantastically for the remainder of the film. It’s hard to know what to tell you and what to leave you to find out on your own. As I said before, it feels as though these trailers have been everywhere. But as the film leans more and more into the idea of bonds new, old and unexpected and the potential those bonds hold, Grace’s journey and the story itself finds its feet, then breaks out into a run.
I knew more than I wanted to about the story going into this, but I never expected to find the central dynamic at play here so engrossing. It really snuck up on me in a way that felt almost like a direct mirror of the growing relationship between the two characters – hesitant at first, then incredibly earnest. I’d had my fair share of reservations up until that point, but soon enough, I was laughing at the gags and the film’s cineliterate sci-fi references and, come the emotional heights, was moved in a way that caught me off-guard.
The film continues to shift back and forth between the past and the present, but as the themes become clearer and more defined, there’s a greater value to finding out more about Grace’s life back on Earth, his relationship with Hüller’s Eva lending itself to one of the stand-out scenes (surprisingly, set on an aircraft carrier rather than one of Project Hail Mary’s gorgeously colourful solar backdrops). There’s almost a mystery element behind Grace’s inclusion on the three-person team and while it isn’t tied up with the neatest bow in the world – one choice had me raising an eyebrow – it manages to justify the inclusion of the device overall.
Things are really at their best when we sit back from the time-hopping flux capacitor and let the central relationship speak for itself. It’s an adorable friendship between Gosling and his co-star, James Ortiz, and you do get the sense that these two characters would go to the ends of the Earth and then some to look out for one another.
Gosling has a long history with the source material here and it informs his performance to great effect without ever feeling overly-telegraphed. After feeling rather on the fence about Project Hail Mary during the first act, I was genuinely surprised by how engaged I was in its central story by the time the credits rolled (and for the second week in a row, we end with the perfect choice for a needle drop) and, as should be the case for any book adaptation worth its salt, I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the original novel very soon.
Wuthering Heights, meanwhile, gathers dust on my shelf.
BBFC: Rated 12A for moderate threat, rude humour, drug references, implied strong language.
Project Hail Mary is in cinemas 20 March, with previews 14/15 March.
