Project Hail Mary joins the class of classic space movies

Historically, movies like Apollo 13 or Close Encounters Of The Third Kind built up a very healthy audience by their innate watchability and never being off TV.

By all accounts, Project Hail Mary is going to join this club of famous space movies.

Project Hail Mary is the exact midway point between The Martian and Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and that description alone is going to have science fiction fans making a beeline for their nearest cinema.

Based on the novel by Andy Weir (who also wrote the book The Martian was based on), Project Hail Mary combines the scientific ingenuity and humour of The Martian and the sense of discovery and awe of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.

Ryan Gosling plays a humble science teacher who is tasked with saving humanity from extinction, and the film is a fantastic showcase for the specific brand charisma that Gosling does better than anyone else.

When the script gets a bit too into the weeds of the scientific process, Gosling’s innate charm carries the film.

The genius of Project Hail Mary is that Ryan Gosling isn’t by himself for the entire movie; he makes a friend in the form of a spider-like rock creature that he dubs Rocky.

The film shines when Gosling’s character and Rocky are attempting to communicate and learn from each other, and there is a fantastic blend of wit and curiosity in those scenes.

Any great science fiction movie should either explore humanity’s place in the cosmos or have them meet a weird or interesting creature, and we have both factors in play here.

As Gosling’s character and Rocky learn from each other, they develop a shared vocabulary and a sense of trust; Gosling is such a fantastic performer that you forget he is talking to a rock-like alien.

Gosling’s performance is reminiscent of Bob Hoskins’ in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, where the viewer doesn’t clock that Hoskins isn’t acting opposite a human for most of the movie, yet he makes it entirely believable.

In this case, a dedicated team of puppeteers bring Rocky to life (another argument for why practical effects beat digital any day of the week), but even still, Gosling’s performance here ranks among his very best.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller were booted off director duties from 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story for veering too far off-script and trying to make Han Solo’s origin story more of a comedy; with this film, they managed to make their funny, swashbuckling space cowboy movie.

Lord and Miller served as producers on the Spider-Verse movies, and they have taken their lessons from those visually complex, intricate productions to make a space movie that leaps off the screen.

The greatest compliment we can give Project Hail Mary, alongside the terrific lead performance from Gosling, is that the film has a sense of scale and visual imagination that has been sorely lacking in recent Hollywood movies.

Project Hail Mary has a budget in the $200 million range, on a par with a typical Marvel film; those films have all the visual panache and imagination of an episode of Coronation Street, yet this film looks and feels expensive.

If there are green screen effects in this film, we didn’t spot them; every set in this film looks like people spent a lot of time building and setting them up, and for a space movie, tactility goes a long way to making it feel believable.

In movies like Apollo 13, you believe that Tom Hanks is floating around in a rusty tin can and in The Martian, you buy that Matt Damon is really stranded on Mars; in this movie, you really think that Ryan Gosling is by himself on a cramped, sweaty ship.

In recent reviews, we’ve discussed whether films are worth seeing on the big screen or if you can wait until it hits streaming; we can say that Project Hail Mary provides a lot of bang for your buck, and seeing this film in IMAX is strongly recommended.

Lord and Miller have a great grasp of the technology and fill up every inch of the screen with details and trinkets you wouldn’t catch on your TV or laptop at home.

Hollywood used to reliably make a spectacle-laden film like this every year, like clockwork, and now we have to celebrate when we get a new version of it.

The film falls down when it has to explain the stakes of the film; like the novel, the film is told in a non-linear order, which means we don’t get the traditional sense of a reluctant hero being talked into an adventure or what Gosling is leaving behind on Earth.

The decision to follow the non-linear order of the book is a mistake that drags the film down from great to very good.

Anatomy Of A Fall star Sandra Huller plays Gosling’s boss back on Earth, and the film doesn’t give Huller much to do; Huller’s motivations for sending Gosling into space are entirely predictable, yet the film treats it like a clandestine secret.

Huller’s role in the movie is like when Manchester United signed Veron when they already had Scholes, Beckham, Giggs and Keane in midfield; they are simply redundant and get lost in the soup.

Huller’s performance is good, of course, but the character is entirely perfunctory and could be cut with little to no consequence.

In Interstellar, you understand that Matthew McConaughey is going into space and leaving his family behind because he is saving what’s left of the world, and in The Right Stuff, you know that the test pilots are risking life and limb for their country; the motivation here is paper-thin.

The runtime is also a slight issue; at over 2 hours and 30 minutes, it packs a lot in, yet it could also stand to cut 20 minutes.

Some substantial misgivings aside, this is the kind of film that is worth making a trip to the cinema for; it is the definition of a crowd-pleaser and has a bit of something for everyone.

Deep down, everyone has a soft spot for the kind of film that reminds them of the first time they watched Star Wars or Indiana Jones and as a culture, we are still trying to capture that high and sense of wonder.

A film like Project Hail Mary makes a convincing argument that you can get away with blatantly ripping off the great science fiction movies if you have the heart to go with it.