Project Hail Mary

dirs.: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

2026

I haven’t read the book, but I hear it’s a good read, if you’re into that kind of thing. I feel like, perhaps unfairly, Andy Weir’s books are for people who like easily digestible science fiction where something exciting happens at the end of every chapter, and every chapter is only a page and a half.

Probably not true, but we all have our biases. Based on this unfounded set of assumptions, I think that could be one of the reasons why his books translate into flicks so easily. The Martian was hard to hate even if it mostly had one person, being Matt Damon, Matt Damoning his way across Mars and jabbering at us in voiceover for over two and a half hours.

Project Hail Mary similarly has mostly one person on screen for most of its length, with a bunch of flashbacks to Earth, but has the added bonus of a cute alien friend for our main character to chat with.

Also unlike The Martian, while the flick might rest on the shoulders of a scientist type doing science-y things in order to survive (with a confident and calm manner), this time around our main character may be science smart, but he’s a raging, cowardly doofus who bangs around like a pinball in order to make us laugh. The makers really lean in on that shit.

When you’re thinking of someone playing the lead in one of these kinds of flicks, Ryan Gosling wouldn’t usually be where your mind would go. Sure, he can play stoic robots, and dead-eyed psychopaths, but a role like this needs someone who can express stuff. He’s the guy you get when you need a white guy to save jazz, but not usually the one you want to save the world.

Gosling cries multiple times in this movie. I just want to reassure potential audiences, he mostly acts humanly and humanely in this movie, and is not like a glum robot like in most of his roles.

He plays someone whose surname is Grace, so they call him Grace for most of the movie, despite the fact that he has a first name, you know. Ryland. Anyway, this jerk wakes up on a spaceship with a beard and long hair. He has no idea how he got there and doesn’t really know why he’s there. He slowly pieces it together, that he’s on some mission to save the Earth.

The science behind all that they’re going on about is not something I feel like I can judge. I’ve been watching Star Trek in all its forms for years, and in order to go along to get along with it, whatever science type problem they come up with and the solution for it, you can’t think too much about because down that path lies only madness. Once you start quibbling over what qualities anti-neutrinos would possess and how they would interact with tachyon emissions, well, you’re fighting a lost cause.

So if the premise is that some single-celled organism they call an astrophage is eating up not only our sun but lots of stars in our part of the galaxy, I have to nod my head and say “Astrophage, sure, that checks out” and pretend like it all makes sense so that no-one thinks I’m dumb.

All of humanity rests on the sending of this doofus called Grace to a star where astrophages are present but aren’t eating or blocking the sun at Tau Ceti, a system 11 or so light years from Earth. There were other people onboard but they don’t survive, because why would you want them to? We just want to have this thinking woman’s crumpet all to ourselves.

I don’t know how they mastered travelling at light speed all of a sudden but it involves using the astrophages as fuel to power a ship, so again, sure, that checks out. It was only ever going to be a one way trip, anyway, for all our heroes, but especially our main one.

When he gets to Tau Ceti, there’s another ship there, not like his, but with some being onboard who similarly was sent to try to figure out what’s different about Tau Ceti in order to save their planet in the 40 Eridani system as well.

But they’ve done us the courtesy of not just having some guy in a latex suit with ridges on his forehead or pointy ears; the being is a rock crab like chap with five limbs and something approximating fingers. And he’s kinda cute! Grace calls him ‘Rocky’ because of course he does.

There is a kind of joy to be had if you’re a particular kind of nerd when Grace and Rocky try to learn to communicate with each other, that maybe is a bit too easy but I didn’t really want an additional couple of hours as they figure out what shared vocabulary and concepts they have in common. Grace notes at one point that Rocky’s people don’t have a concept for relativity and don’t know about radiation, and yet what they start from is the basis of all knowledge, being numbers / math. After time through the magic of technology everything is streamlined so that they can basically speak to each other directly, with no delay, which possibly isn’t the least plausible part of the whole film.

I really can’t speak to the plausibility of the other aspects, because I’m not an astrophysicist or an astrobiologist. So when Rocky and Grace start collaborating in order to find out what’s keeping the astrophages at bay at this star, well, they have to do some experiments, don’t they, and find something that will let them do a thing and then send the data back to Earth and then presumably save both of their respective species / planets / solar systems.

I won’t argue that that’s secondary, but the real pleasure is meant to come from the growing relationship between the two. Although it’s not always emphasised, given the odds of success being so incredibly low, Rocky and Grace develop a real friendship because they both know that each of them could be the last person either of them will ever see. All sorts of things could go wrong between now and when they figure it all out and have to communicate the solution to their peoples. And to not be alone in the vastness of space, that’s got to count for something.

One could quibble about the characterisations of both Grace and Rocky, in that they come across so cheesily American at certain times that I was convinced they were going to play catch at some point, but I felt like they worked rather well together. This flick certainly leans on the comedic and the emotional rather than the dramatic or the action-y, though it has elements of all, just to make sure it remains crowdpleasing at all times.

But just to give you an idea of how goofy these directors are deep down, and how goofy Ryan Gosling is or at least seems to embrace, there’s a sequence where they’re deciding what Rocky’s simulated voice is going to sound like. They go through a number of computer simulated voices, deciding they won’t do, and need Grace says something like “looky here, there’s a Meryl Streep option, and then Meryl Streep delivers a line of dialogue, clearly her, and Grace sighs and says something like “Oh she’s just so amazing, is there anything she can’t do?”

He’s saying this to Rocky, who couldn’t possibly know who Meryl is, but at least it had me laughing.

Does it make any sense, well, maybe more sense than some of the other nonsense. Solutions are found, danger is avoided, sacrifices are to be made. At one stage Rocky choses to allow Grace to get home by sacrificing his own time getting back to his solar system, but events will become more complicated, yet the point is made. At some stages the ‘mission’ is obviously seen as paramount, but both Rocky and Grace will risk their own lives and the possibility of saving their species sometimes in order to save each other.

It’s funny that the flick goes the extra mile in order to show that Grace, who fundamentally isn’t an astronaut and doesn’t have any of the heroic impulses to save humanity etc, let alone himself, that the lead of such a film is meant to have, is something of a cowardly lion who does nothing out of bravery or anything dangerous if he can avoid it. But the thought of harm coming to Rocky compels him to risk everything, and vice versa as well.

You need to have someone to be brave for, and they find that in each other.

Watching this flick, maybe against many of my instincts and personal preferences, was a delight and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s big budget sci fi without laser swords or pew pew laser guns, and that’s fine. I can enjoy that even if I think the solutions are unlikely and the resolution so pat and neat that it barely captures the sheer impossibility of most of this caper. But that’s fine. Rocky and Grace together make a complete whole, what one lacks the other possesses, and the idea of separating them by circumstance is the only one that makes the audience go “Noooooooooooo……”

Gosling you either get or you don’t as this highly unlikely character, and while he is certainly irksome and irritating in sections, overall he seems like he has a decent handle on the character. When there were scenes early in the flick when he’s working as a school teacher, I thought “all right, so his character from Half Nelson got some rehab and came good in the end, isn’t that lovely?” but then as the situation gets more serious (on Earth) and more keeps being asked of him, he devolves into a lot of slapstick nonsense, which is I guess funny. To some people.

I wouldn’t call it a friendship, but his interactions with Eva Stratt (the great Sandra Hüller), the very Germanic head of an international effort to Save the Sun, are a delight, because she’s so deadpan, and he’s a hyper-verbal goof.

We find out, and I hope this isn’t too much of a spoiler, that she is the one who decided Grace had to be part of the mission to save humanity (and not Grace), because she somehow saw qualities in him that would hold him in good stead in such an interstellar effort. Frankly, I applaud her perspicacity, because other than the fact that of course they succeed in the end, you wouldn’t bet $5 that this guy would be able to tie his shoelaces let alone figure out a cosmic puzzle with almost no chance of success.

But she couldn’t have predicted Rocky, could she? No she could not have.

Sure, putting humanity’s survival in the hands of one goofy Canadian guy seems like a stretch, but it’s a hail Mary pass, after all.

8 times there are worse ways to spend 2 and a half hours out of 10

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“Words of encouragement.”
- “You can't just say "words of encouragement!"
“Words of GREAT encouragement!” - Project Hail Mary

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2732378905/