Project Hail Mary

I was late to this, so I missed it in IMAX, but was able to catch it in 70mm. I guess I'm glad that non-franchise sci-fi blockbusters are still getting made and are doing well at the box office, but the fact that this hurried-yet-overlong, fecklessly optimistic, pre-adolescent feel-good hugfest has been so embraced and acclaimed only goes to show us how low Marvel and its ilk have set the bar for movies of this kind. Based on a novel by Andy Weir, it boasts a screenplay by Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, The Cabin in the Woods, World War Z), whose adaptation of Weir's The Martian suffered from all the same things I take issue with here, though this is more entertaining tand less insulting than The Martian. At the helm are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (creators of the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, and Spider-Verse franchises), and uber-producer Amy Pascal (Paul Feig's Ghostbusters, Greta Gerwig's Little Women, Luca Guadagnino's Challengers, the Venom movies, and the Spider-Verse stuff).

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a former molecular biologist turned science teacher who finds himself the sole survivor of a space mission to discover a solution to a mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. Unlike Matt Damon's Mark Watney in The Martian, Grace doesn't have only himself and a video camera to talk incessantly to (though there's plenty of that), as another star-voyager from another galaxy has traveled to the same destination for the same reasons. Together, they each draw on their specific scientific knowledge and out-of-the-box ingenuity to save their respective planets from extinction.

The film moves at a breakneck pace. I assume this is because Lord, Miller, Goddard, and Pascal are trying to cram as much of the book as possible into a 156 min film. But this zippy pace is totally at odds with the slow, cumbersome, procedural realities of space travel. There's almost no silence in this movie about a guy who is alone on a spaceship for a good chunk of the movie. Once he's no longer by himself, the talking becomes almost non-stop. Like The Martian and so many other sci-fi films of the past twenty-five years, there is a glib, jokey lack of seriousness shared by all the characters (except Sandra Hüller's head of an international task force that conceives of the mission—but her Germanic lack of humor makes her feel like a straight man who is there to set up Grace's ceaseless wisecrackery). The flip attitudes of the characters feel both false, as most scientists I know are pretty serious about their work, and patronizing, as if these movies are aimed at nine-year-olds.

I long for the days when sci-fi movies at least felt like they were made for adults. Watching this film, I can't believe I've complained about the lack of narrative complexity in movies like Contact, Interstellar, and Arrival—Project Hail Mary makes those films feel like reading Solaris in the original Russian. The lack of solemnity, combined with the breeziness, makes this movie about trying to stop the end of the world feel like it has zero stakes. We never feel like Gosling is in real jeopardy; hell, most of the time it doesn't even feel like he's in space. Like The Martian, the narrative structure consists of: problem is introduced, problem is explained, problem is solved, next problem is introduced, next problem is explained, next problem is solved. This happens over and over again, with no situation seeming to require any more time or thought than any other. The whole reason this mission, and the movie, is named for a colloquialism meaning "long-shot" is that this is about a last-ditch effort with very little chance of success, yet everything here comes with such incredible ease. I don't think there's a single thing Grace and his alien buddy try that doesn't work on the first attempt.

At the very minimum, movies like this are ostensibly made to celebrate science, but the endless series of quick and relatively effortless victories depicted here, as in The Martian, are simply not how science works. Science is about constant failure, about enduring countless defeats and wrong hypotheses to arrive at solid, viable solutions. It's not about good-old American from-the-gut audacity and cocky nerve delivered with a smile. Similarly, self-sacrifice (another key theme in this story) is meaningless when the sacrifices never turn out to be sacrifices at all. Yes, I know when it comes to self-sacrifice, it's the intention that counts, but not when every insurmountable problem is this easily surmounted.

As with The Martian, there's a cool premise here that I can imagine, in prose form, might be a real page-turner, transporting readers into the mind and feelings of the main character. This story could have made a thrilling movie that tackles existential themes and conveys what it might feel like for someone dealing with profound, prolonged isolation. But the filmmakers are more interested in cloying sentimentality, empty spectacle, and a wisecracking protagonist who is written and performed to be so "down to Earth relatable" that he doesn't feel like a real person at all. I know Lord and Miller are cartoon guys known for their Lego movies, but this is a major sci-fi picture. It's rated PG-13, yet its goofy tone and comforting storyline feel made for a distinctly under-13-year-old audience. Movies about the possible end of the world need to actually deal with that concept, don't they? They should require their audience to wrestle with that possibility for at least a little bit of their lengthy running times; otherwise, the hyper-optimism of a story like this comes across as a juvenile unwillingness to accept uncomfortable emotions or truths.