On the opening night of Project Hail Mary, adapted from the Andy Weir novel of the same name, Ryan Gosling, its lead, said this about movie theaters to his packed audience: “It’s not your job to keep them open — it’s our job to make things that make it worth you coming out.” Gosling’s claims are not completely unfounded in regards to Project Hail Mary; it has surpassed box office expectations. After seeing the film, I am baffled that this is what people want.
Gosling’s sentiment acknowledging the role studios have in keeping theater-going alive is truthful. However, in this instance, he’s referring to a frictionless picture devoid of any response toward the climate crisis that could challenge an audience. Project Hail Mary is more of a malignant symptom of our complacent times manifested into a banal blockbuster rather than a movie worth venturing for.
The climate catastrophe in Project Hail Mary renders humanity blameless. Instead of a byproduct from mankind's actions, the crisis results from microbial space oddities that eat the sun. This apolitical wash is disorienting for a problem currently inseparable from today’s political landscape, and furthermore, is an obvious prop to avoid alienating any ticket-buyers. The re-framing of climate change acquitting its major culprits to maximize profit is somehow less egregious than the film’s exemplification of American exceptionalism, which is more fantastical than the movie’s talking rock-alien creature.
The impending climate apocalypse, which is not the fault of humanity, is resolved through a man-made solution through an international cooperation focused on a science-based approach combined with military-industrial support. The U.S. Navy and all its military branches and logos are slathered through these scenes, making it clear that American interference and influence is productive and innovative. Furthermore, said international coalition fails without the American endpoint of success; when America’s international allies flounder, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is the picture-perfect American who eventually saves the day.
Besides being predictable, Grace’s character and his arc are also representative of another fruitless response toward the climate crisis. His ship is named Hail Mary, and he’s exclusively referred to by his last name, Grace, throughout the entire runtime; the film’s depiction of faith is blatant. Grace and his stagnancy are a metaphor for a response toward climate change that is rooted in a revelatory and almost biblical faith in science without any requirements for self-reflection or self-change.
Grace remains exactly the same throughout the film without any sense of his own agency; he’s simply a tool for his higher-ups. This is explicitly depicted when the international coalition forces him onto the spaceship against his will. Grace is not brave and does not want to go on the expedition, but he is coerced into doing so by those above him. However, Grace is stupidly optimistic and unrealistically unconcerned with his reality once he realizes what has happened.
He refuses to interrogate alternatives to what he’s faced with. His stubbornness mirrors this belief that science and its unfounded truths will provide solutions without the need for personal sacrifice, limits or growth. There is no need to panic because, surely, our best interests are also shared by those in power, and scientific progress will prevail regardless of our inability to change our everyday lives and habits for the better.
Narratively, Project Hail Mary is accurate to Weir’s plot from his 2021 novel, but the film itself is a failed composite of better sci-fi installments. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller borrow visuals from Nolan’s Interstellar and Scott’s The Martian — all employing the lone-man-in-space gimmick, but Project Hail Mary’s homage is simply not as well-done as its inspirations. Greig Fraser’s cinematography is usually gorgeous, but unlike his work in Dune, Project Hail Mary is only rarely a unique visual treat. The story recycles bits of Arrival and Sunshine too but, once more, without any meaningful additions.
All these recent sci-fi space movies are neutered deformities compared to its predecessors; a compilation of works philosophically paler than Tarkovsky’s Solaris and visually uglier than Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Once Lord and Miller add to this copy-of-a-copy chain, the product is a disturbingly inoffensive and flat sci-fi piece, which seems paradoxical. Science fiction is meant to challenge our perception of humanity, but Project Hail Mary reaffirms that the worst human behaviors are somehow inconsequential.
One could argue that Project Hail Mary’s easy digestibility is actually its greatest strength. During these times of grave despair, movies should provide hope without much resistance. Life is already turbulent enough to warrant escapism. Maybe, Project Hail Mary is relentlessly optimistic to a fault, but is that so bad?
I’m less convinced that Project Hail Mary is a hopeful promise than it is as a deluded vision of humanity’s future. There’s no blame, tension or stakes once the film gets truly going; after the 30-minute mark, the picture decides to solely occupy itself in the buddy-comedy genre once Grace’s sidekick alien, Rocky, is introduced. Grace is in a life-or-death scenario, but tonally, he’s cracking quips fitting for a Marvel movie. All of the ineffective jokes are derived from this type of humor — millennial and cheesy. The excessively feel-good tone and outdated dialogue makes it difficult to take the film’s embrace of hope seriously.
Perhaps, if the movie’s humor worked for me like it did for some audience members, I would have at least had a fun time. However, I felt like the comedy was a failed attempt to mask painful exposition dumps and indicative of the film’s strange priorities. Instead of developing a meaningful story with realistic, high-stakes situations and compelling emotional growth within its characters, the screenplay focuses on getting cheap laughs and employing convenient plot devices to endlessly save its protagonist and his sidekick.
As a protagonist, Grace is a decently blank slate for a viewer stand-in, but this makes him a severely uninteresting character. He’s a handsome science teacher with no romantic interests or immediate family, and Ryan Gosling does his best to make this empty vessel charming through his line deliveries and awkward funny-guy demeanor. Initially, his performance is a successful distraction from the script’s shallow writing, but it quickly gets tiring.
Gosling is a great actor, but his recent typecast of hapless, silly guy is too familiar. Notably, this archetype is in his depiction of Ken in Barbie, but more concerningly, Grace is essentially his character in The Fall Guy but in space. These representations of masculinity, portrayed through burlesque slapstick and ironic pop-culture references, are so monotonous. Gosling used to be in roles where he was required to convey an actual range of emotions instead of unconcerned contentedness or superficial sadness; he was in a Terrence Malick film after La La Land, but his role in Project Hail Mary is so devoid of depth in comparison.
Another talented actor phoning it in for Project Hail Mary is Sandra Hüller, who plays Eva Stratt, the head of the international task-force assigned to save Earth from climate catastrophe. Although she may be working with scraps, Hüller does have the most interesting character in the film; a cynical official who does believe the ends justify the means. Her screen time is annoyingly short, but she does have an excellent karaoke scene that is more emotionally profound than any of Grace’s inner turmoil.
Unfortunately, neither of these performances make Project Hail Mary worth its two-and-a-half hour runtime, which actually feels absurdly longer in the viewing experience. All of the film’s dull, quirky humor is depicted through conversations between Grace and Rocky, his alien companion. Their dynamic mutates from appropriately cute to mind-numbingly repetitive as they rehash the same interaction again and again, which makes the already formulaic story feel more tedious.
Aside from the unexceptional story, the film’s structure and form are shoddy in execution, eroding any remaining entertainment value from its content. The film’s editing is disorienting; aspect ratio jumping is frequent to denote flashbacks. At the beginning, the film is spliced with these redundant flashbacks, which are unnecessary expositions spelling out Grace’s past for those incapable of forming connections between basic plot points. Project Hail Mary wants you to have faith in humanity, yet the film has no faith in the viewer’s ability to parse the story.
In its quest to be the perfectly watchable movie, Project Hail Mary is a calculated crowd pleaser in the worst, most artificial way possible, stripping itself of any complexity that could force the viewer to be alarmed. When does a movie’s mindlessness start to be detrimental to the business? It’s clearly damaging to a film’s artistic magnitude, but that concern is trivial to any studio. While the coddled viewer is a guaranteed consumer, there’s only so much that can be sold. Project Hail Mary gives little hope for the future of sci-fi, but perhaps, its irrevocable ability to withdraw from its purpose is worth mimicking in some way. There has to be a future, in theater-going and otherwise, worthy of restitution.
