Full disclosure: I did not finish the book.
Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary is a great story buried inside what eventually started to feel like an enthusiastic science textbook. Weir pulled the same thing with The Martian, stopping the plot cold every few chapters to walk you through the technical underpinnings of whatever just happened. At least with The Martian, a man surviving on Mars using his wits and the science around him was kind of the whole point, so the interruptions had some organic justification, even if they wore thin. With Project Hail Mary, I kept hitting these walls of explanation and finally had to put it down. It reminded me reading The Hunt for Red October and realizing it was basically military tech porn. Jack Ryan hops on a Harrier jet and suddenly you’re ten pages deep into how a Harrier jet works. Toggling back and forth to textbook mode sucks the thrills out of any thriller.
Thankfully, Project Hail Mary, the film version, jettisons the tech talk breaks.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the good-time Charlies behind The LEGO Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and the Jump Street films have stripped out the bulk of the science lectures. Though, they still ended up with a film that runs over two and a half hours, which tells you something about how much material was there to begin with.
The story follows Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or how he got there. It gradually dawns on him that he’s on a mission to save Earth from extinction. A mysterious substance is draining energy from the sun and Grace is humanity’s long shot. The film unfolds in non-linear fashion, cutting between his slow recovery of memory aboard the ship and the flashbacks that show how a reluctant, self-doubting science teacher ended up being the one sent 11.9 light years from home. It works. The mystery of how he got there keeps pulling you forward even when the science gets dense.
And look, some of the science will slip through your fingers. That’s okay. Lord and Miller tell the story well enough that you always understand the stakes, even when you can’t quite follow the mechanics of how those stakes might be resolved.
Gosling is great, doing what he does so well. He’s playing a man who fundamentally does not believe he belongs where he is. The emotional through-line of the whole film is a man learning to trust himself, and Gosling sells it without ever making it feel like a speech.
Then there’s Rocky. Rocky is a CGI rock. Rocky is also, genuinely, one of the best characters in the movie, and you will feel things about Rocky that you did not expect to feel about a CGI rock. It’s also worth noting that Sandra Hüller shines as the ice-cold project chief tasked with doing whatever it takes to save the world.
EDIT: I learned after publishing this review that Rocky is actually a practical puppet, not CGI. Which makes this even cooler! (And my point still stands. You will feel things about a puppet you haven’t felt since Kermit or Yoda).
Does the movie go on too long? Probably. But I also can’t point to a scene and say that’s where it dragged. It earns its runtime more than it abuses it.
Project Hail Mary is funny, emotionally real, and genuinely thrilling. It’s about friendship, living up to something you didn’t think you were capable of, and what it means to sacrifice, not just for the greater good, but for the people you love.
It’s the first great popcorn movie of the year. See it on the biggest screen you can find.
