If the world is going to end, you couldn’t do worse than send Ryan Gosling to save it. The Canadian movie star has enough charisma to wring joyful whoops from a rock. That’s exactly what he does in Project Hail Mary.
The sci-fi comedy directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – previously of The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street and its sequel – stars Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher who has discovered why the Sun is dimming, which will cause catastrophic global cooling in the future. A microorganism called the Astrophage is at work.
Space mission head Eva (Sandra Huller) persuades a deeply reluctant Grace to be part of a squad that will fix the problem, but at the cost of their lives. Although Grace survives the mission, he’s stranded in space. But he isn’t alone.
A spider-like alien made up of rocks – and immediately christened Rocky – is out there too. Rocky is the only survivor of his destroyed planet. Grace and Rocky join forces to figure out how the Astrophage is to be tamed, and how Earth and Rocky’s home are to be saved.
The geeky entertainer is stuffed with humour, tenderness and irreverence but also overstuffed with indulgence. Drew Goddard’s adaptation of the Andy Weir bestseller of the same name is so chuffed with its skill at simplifying the complex science in Weir’s novel that it simply refuses to return to base.
Overly lengthy at 156 minutes, Project Hail Mary is held in place by gorgeous visuals, cheeky comedy and Gosling’s bottomless charm. Rocky, a cross between E.T. and Wall-E and just as cute, competes for attention too. Sandra Huller, the brilliant German actor from Toni Erdmann and Anatomy of a Fall, is precise, economic and compelling as the flinty Eva.
Daniel Pemberton’s jaunty background score is laid over a visual effects-heavy script that cheerfully sends up the cliches associated with the last-ditch space mission rescue movie. But there’s no stinting on the wondrous production design or the hard work that has gone into breathing life into Rocky.
The film’s inevitable anthropomorphisation of Rocky leads to numerous moments of levity between the alien and Grace. Ryan Gosling keeps the banter coming, smoothly handles the emotion-heavy moments and makes the difference between engagement and boredom. Caught between a literal rock and a hard place, Gosling’s Grace never loses his sang froid even when it appears that all is lost.
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