There’s something you realise early in viewing PROJECT HAIL MARY, that what elevates it from a great movie to a future classic, is not the technical achievement but a much needed Sign for the Times.
Based on the best selling book of the same name by Andy Weir, the movie is the story of a scientist Dr. Ryland Grace ( Ryan Gosling) who gets involved with a top-secret mission to save Earth’s dying sun. You don’t require an advanced degree to understand what’s happening, the movie doesn’t get bogged down in scientific jargon or explanations, just enough to make the plot and characters seem credible. Despite the film’s frequent deployment of humour, the stakes are dire, if PROJECT HAIL MARY task force team cant save the sun, all life on Earth will start to die out. By allowing you to get to know who he was on Earth and who he becomes under pressure of being his only surviving crew member, it creates a compelling story of unlikely heroism. That said, Grace isn’t truly alone in space.
I like the cleverness of the film’s dual timeline, which results with Grace waking up in space with amnesia after an induced coma. As it unravels , we learn why Grace is there, and why his journey isn’t as straight forward as you might guess. E.T. and Elliot, Kirk and Spock, Chewbacca and Han Solo..we love a good science fiction story where humans and aliens buddy up. Like Major Tom floating in a tin can, he’s jettisoned into space where he meets a loveable alien, that he nicknames Rocky who is on a mission to also save his planet Erid. Adapted by Drew Goddard, it features a lone wolf in space trying to survive a hostile environment using scientific problem-solving and humour. This space rhomp directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller has serious plots to think about like morality, sacrifice and ‘why me’? There’s lots of scientific terms but we are only concerned with one, Astrophage, a micro organism that chomps on energy like a space Pac-Man. Similar to mold, it grows on a starts surface, dimming its light. As it munches on our yellow dwarfed star, the Sun, the Earth cools, and in 30 years, we will be sharing an Ice Age with the Woolly Mammoth, Smith and Sabre-Toothed Tiger.
Enter the second scientific term to remember– Taumoeba. Scientists found that not only can Astrophage accelerate humanity’s demise but the organism works as an accellerant that might power the HAIL Mary spacecraft and push it to near-light speeds. So while you ponder why a Middle School science teacher teaching kids about sound waves, we learn he was a molecular biologist whose ideas were considered too fringe for mainstream scientific community. That’s exactly why high-ranking international official, Eva Stratt( a perfect ice-cold Sandra Huller) seeks out Grace because she needs someone who thinks outside-the-box with good old fashioned ingenuity. The film disects the question of free will and whether its moral to hiject someone against his free will for the greater cause.
Gosling has quite a task but makes it look like a cake-walk… err.. space-walk with flashbacks offering jagged and incremental insights into his character’s back-story that rests heavy on his screen presence and acting chops, both of which he doles out in heavy heaps. Now, let’s get into the alien Rocky, a geoform alien that looks like a daddy long legs made of rock. Gosling acting opposite a puppet creates a relationship that isn’t confined by physicality or emotion. The film is less interested in exploring the cosmos than it is in dissecting the power of storytelling–a hefty 100-minute runtime.
The movie is an intergalactic homerun. We ven in its most outlandish sequences there is an authenticity that makes the movie consistently engaging
