If – and it’s a big “if” – there is one white American male I would want to be accidentally holding the future of humanity in his manly hands, I would want it to be Ryan Gosling. I am a fully paid-up Goslinger, or Goslevik, or Goslady, or whatever his overly invested female fanbase is likely to call itself (I have never Googled it. Too scary). Whether it’s Barbie or La La Land or Crazy Stupid Love, I find him unfailingly likeable, charismatic and funny; except when he’s sad, like in Blue Valentine, or mean, like in Drive, or weird, like Lars and the Real Girl, which he’s also good at. In Project Hail Mary, a new sci-fi-comedy-action-family-adventure-type-deal directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, I got my wish. As is always the way with wishes, one should be wary of them.
Jonathan Olley
Based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir, in Project Hail Mary Gosling plays the nominatively-determined Ryland Grace (not the Ryland bit), a middle-school teacher who sits on the edge of his desk and looks sexily over the top of his glasses and likes nothing more than to inspire his preternaturally engaged students. But Grace has an important secret – he’s also a disgraced scientist whose previous area of study might hold the key to understanding a deadly threat from outer space: mysterious black particles that are causing the sun to cool.
This news is conveyed to Grace by the excellent Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall), whose presence in this film is as encouraging as her baggy womenswear is expensive-looking and highly covetable. Hüller is playing a mysterious government operative called something sharp like Stern, or Strict (OK I did Google that one, it’s actually Stratt) who tracks Grace down at his school with a view to recruiting him for a suicidal space mission to save the human race, whether he’s into the idea or not – which, weirdly, he isn’t.
We know that she will be successful, however, and that Grace ends up on the spaceship, as the teacher bit is a flashback, the movie having opened with atmospheric scenes of Grace waking up from a long induced coma – bearded, shaggy-haired, muscles strangely un-atrophied – and trying to make sense of who and where he is, and how he got there. (One immediate downer: all his colleagues appear to be dead. On the plus side: he seems to have packed some awesome T-shirts.)
Any notion that this might be a contemplative white-American-male-in-space movie in the vein of Gravity or The Martian (the originating novel for which Weir also wrote), or, yes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, does not last long. It turns out that Grace is not the only sentient being on a mission to stop the black particles, which are actually alien microbes that live off stellar energy. In fact, they’ve been attacking other stars in other galaxies, and other beings – aliens! – are roaming space to try to stop them, too.
But don’t worry! These are cute aliens, not scary ones – and in fact there’s only one, who makes its presence known to Grace by pulling up to his space bumper and connecting to Grace’s ship via a long probe-slash-tunnel. He (and it’s never clear how it comes to be decided that he is a he at all, given his only recognisable “down there” equipment is a bum hole) is a jittery, five-legged spider made out of rock. It soon becomes clear this alien isn’t looking for a human host to inhabit, like a xenomorph or Venom (“which,” says Grace, “was a concern for a little while”). In fact, he’s a bit of a sweetie. And because he appears to be a five-legged spider a made of rock, Grace names him – will he, will he, yes he will – Rocky.
It is here, like Rocky scuttling out of his spaceship-connecting Ferrero-Rocher space tunnel, that Project Hail Mary reveals its true form. It is not, in fact, a philosophical enquiry into the intrinsic horrors of existence and the nightmare of infinite space, but a human-meets-alien buddy movie. Rocky and Grace – in both general life and outer space – are lonely and alone; and though, yes, yes, Rocky appears to be a spider, could they prove to be each other’s lobster? (As a side note, a serious movie about a lonely astronaut and a space-spider has been attempted fairly recently – Adam Sandler’s snoozy Spaceman – so perhaps a different tack here is no bad thing.)
There’s one big comparison that the film is of course begging for us to make: E.T. phone copyright lawyer! (They’re actually not that similar, though Rocky does have a weird knobbly index finger.) But perhaps because Gosling is a grown man and not an 10-year-old boy, as Henry Thomas was when he starred in Steven Spielberg’s bona fide masterpiece, the films that most spring to mind are the man-animal comedies of the Seventies and Eighties, such as Tom Hanks (plus dog) in Turner & Hooch, or Clint Eastwood (plus orangutan) in Every Which Way But Loose.
Gosling’s efforts in this movie are valiant, as they tend to be: he does comedy prat falls, trepidatious space walks, and delivers as best he can the not especially hilarious script, which is bogged down further by excessive exposition of pretend science and plot rationale. And he really wants us to feel – desperately feel – the way Grace does about his new friendship with a CGI creature who looks like the lovechild of Makka Pakka from In The Night Garden and a fidget spinner. (The fact that Rocky doesn’t have the soulful eyes of Hooch the French Mastiff or Clyde the Orangutan – or, in fact, any eyes at all – certainly doesn’t help.)
I know I’ve made the point already, but really, I’m as shocked as anyone not to have been won over by this film. When it comes to Gosling, there is not an SNL monologue or a surprising-Eva-Mendes-on-her-birthday Jimmy Fallon appearance or a viral interview with a journalist stranded in the desert that I will not watch and be utterly charmed by. And yet, even with his magnetism set to hyperdrive, Gosling can’t make this wannabe-feel good film dazzle the way it wants to. It pains me – desperately pains me! – to say it, but in my eyes (sorry to rub it in, Rocky), Project Hail Mary is a well-intentioned miss.
Project Hail Mary is previewing on 14 and 15 March and out in cinemas and IMAX on 19 March