It might be a little early to call, but Project Hail Mary will very likely be the most popular movie of the year, and the time leading up to my initial viewing, I was unsure why.
Maybe it stems from the directors Phil Lord and Chistropher Miller, who throughout their careers have always made films that define cinema for an entire generation of teenagers and young adults, with credits on 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse– not the filmography you’d expect from directors going into an existential blockbuster space movie, but you have to give them credit for how much they’ve done thus far. We take for granted how easily The Lego Movie could have been an hour and a half of phoned-in, corporation-mandated intellectual property, and still, Lord and Miller pushed this concept to its absolute fullest extent through pure, unfettered creativity.
Although tonally Project Hail Mary is a departure from anything the pair has attempted before, vibrancy and wonder emanate from their directing, highlighted especially by the cinematography of Greig Fraser. Having recently shot both Dune and Dune: Part Two (and, funnily enough, will be replaced for Dune: Part Three by Linus Sandgren, just coming off of filming Wuthering Heights), he carries his visual language into Project Hail Mary, where you can see some visual parallels, but simultaneously gives it such a singular, futuristic look. Fraser is throwing light refractions throughout the film, painting the screen with iridescence, which on paper should be distracting, but instead it adds so much personality and exuberance to bleak scenes in bleak scenarios. More on that later.
Project Hail Mary’s success could also very well be a testament to the resurgence of Ryan Gosling in recent years, since the last time I can remember this much mainstream buzz surrounding the rollout of a movie is the ‘Barbenheimer’ moment in 2022; on top of that, this is the first time in forever that my mom mentioned a movie before its release, as she referred to it as the ‘Ryan Gosling Space Movie.’ Gosling is tempering his performance from Barbie, but he’s continued to carry this goofy persona through this stage of his career, which, for the most part, works for this character of a nerdy science teacher. Some of the best scenes in Project Hail Mary come from his opportunities to interact with Lionel Boyce and Sandra Hüller, who both take full advantage of their screen time, using their natural presence to offset the goofiness of Gosling.
Since the essence of this space drama relies on Gosling being in complete isolation for the majority of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime, I can’t confidently say I bought into his performance for the entirety of the film. It might just be personal preference, but at times, the minutiae of his Marvel-esque comedy became grating, and towards the latter end, he also veers into similar Marvel issues of straddling the line between earnestness and humor in the heartwrenching scenes- but these are all pretty minute criticisms in what is otherwise a very impressive central performance.
It’s likely that another film adaptation of an Andy Weir novel factors into the popularity of Project Hail Mary. The story of author Andy Weir, who was a programmer before finding success as an author, is fairly inspiring- but I guess not enough to push me to read his novels. I want to tread carefully into covering the actual storyline as it relates to the novel, so I spoke to a friend who both read and watched the film. He told me, “I think they did hold up side by side, (and) I liked how they adapted the scene where they collect the predators and thought the way they changed the ending was interesting” (Max Dean).
I’m not sure if this is felt in a readthrough of the novel, but the more I think about Project Hail Mary, it becomes more apparent that the plotline is pretty thin, which is good and bad. It is a testament to the directing of Lord and Miller that I was pretty thoroughly entertained throughout the entire film, and their choice to employ this subdued, character-focused approach was both bold and lent itself well to the plot. The downside of this is that I don’t feel as if I took much of anything from the film, or if it conquered a lot of ground thematically. If anything, I left feeling a deep sense of sadness, constantly submerged in loneliness and hopelessness, both in space and on earth. Not to give too much of the ending away, but what is supposed to be a moment of triumph is still pervaded with solitude, and a resolution still promising little to no hope for humanity. I’m not against a downer ending, but upon first watch, it feels unintentional.
Despite what I realize feels like a pretty negative review, as a whole, I really did enjoy Project Hail Mary, and although I can’t pinpoint the reason for its success, I’m happy it’s this movie that’s seeing it. There’s so much technical innovation and creativity on display here, but more than anything, there’s so much care put into it. This is not only the type of film that will be widely successful, but the type of film that can light a fire under the younger generation watching it- and that’s more than worthy of your time.
★★★★☆
⅘ Stars
