If you believe humans are bound to discover extra-terrestrial life, you probably fall into one of two broad camps. Either you think we’ll come across space bacteria, maybe on Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Or you suppose first contact will be with another intelligent species, someone we can talk to.
Project Hail Mary gives you both. Based (very closely, I might add) on the novel of the same name, it imagines that something microscopic is eating the sun, causing it to cool. If nothing is done to stop it, all life on Earth will be extinct in a matter of decades.
But how do you vaccinate a star? Well, it turns out that all the stellar bodies near our sun are suffering the same fate — except one, about 12 light-years away. Humanity, driven by the need to survive (and under the leadership of a no-nonsense C.D. Howe type, played by Sandra Huller), crafts a spaceship to visit this system and hopefully find a cure for what ails our sun.
It arrives to find another ship there already, from another solar system in trouble.
Earth’s representative is Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling. He was supposed to be one of three crew of the good ship Hail Mary, but his colleagues died while in suspended animation. Ryland wakes up with a faulty memory and a mission. When he meets the lone crew member of the alien ship, who looks like a cross between a cuttlefish and collection of stones, they agree to work together. Ryland names his new friend Rocky.
James Ortiz provides the voice (but not the body) of Rocky the alien in Project Hail Mary.
Project Hail Mary is a kind of spiritual sequel to 2015’s The Martian. Both are space-set science fiction stories featuring a lone astronaut (Matt Damon in The Martian) in trouble. Both are based on science-heavy novels by Andy Weir, adapted by Drew Goddard.
And both feature mental rather than military problem-solving. Ryland tells his ship “shields up” at one point, only for it to inform him it doesn’t have any. Damon’s character famously said he had to “science the shit” out of his predicament.
Certainly, the studio would like this to be another Martian, which made more than US$600 million and was the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2015, and first among movies that were not part of an existing franchise.
Co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie) take their time with this movie, which clocks in at just over two and a half hours but never lags. They deftly cut back and forth, from Ryland and Rocky learning each other’s language and working together, to earlier events on Earth that led to Ryland’s unlikely addition to the Hail Mary’s Crew.
A shout-out to both the choice of songs in the movie and the film’s own score. On the former front, we get perfect needle drops of numbers like Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down by Kris Kristofferson, Pata Pata by Miriam Makeba, and Two of Us by the Beatles, with its wistful line: “We’re on our way home.”
The score, meanwhile, is the work of composer Daniel Pemberton, who has worked on movies by Guy Ritchie, Danny Boyle and Ridley Scott (though not The Martian) and crafts some powerful emotional beats while not being afraid to sometimes let silence speak. (He also builds in a clever homage to five famous notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.)
But speaking of emotional beats, all hail Ryan Gosling, who manages some deeply felt moments while acting opposite a computer-generated creature that doesn’t even have a visible face.
Rocky also gets some nice lines, performed by actor James Ortiz, after Ryland flirts with having the ship render his words in the voice of Meryl Streep. At one point Rocky says he has a mate whom he desperately wants to see again. “One hundred eighty-six years is not enough,” the long-lived alien adds, and I dare you not to tear up at such a plaintive proclamation of love.
For cineastes keeping score, Project Hail Mary also marks Huller’s second awkward karaoke number, with Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times. (In 2016’s Toni Erdmann she belted out Whitney Houston’s The Greatest Love of All, worth looking up even if you don’t watch the whole movie.)
And we have a space race. Damon starred in The Martian and played a stranded astronaut in Interstellar, while Gosling played real-life moonwalker Neil Armstrong in First Man. Damon headed to a space station in the 2013 sci-fi thriller Elysium. But Gosling has a starring role in Star Wars: Starfighter, due out next summer, while Damon’s next role is decidedly down to Earth in this summer’s The Odyssey. It’s not a space odyssey. Gosling may yet win this race.
Project Hail Mary opens March 20 in theatres.
4.5 stars out of 5