Project Hail Mary Review

Feature Written By: Juan Drown

The filmmaker duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, known for their films "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" (2009) and "The Lego Movie" (2014), have taken it to space with their latest work, "Project Hail Mary". This marks the 2nd book of American author Andy Weir being adapted into a film, the previous being "The Martian" (Ridley Scott, 2015) starring Matt Damon. 

The film follows Grace (Ryan Gosling), a science school-teacher who holds a doctorate degree, who awakens on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. Gradually, he remembers that an alien bacteria, known as Astrophage, is slowly eating the Sun by absorbing its radiation. Along the way, he runs into an alien, which he names Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz).

The story is not anything particularly special. It treads the path of the usual tropes related to the genre. However, what makes it more than just your average space-fare is the charismatic performance from leadman Gosling, its optimism, and its dual-narrative structure. 

Lord and Miller employ a dual-narrative structure where memories of Grace break up the present timeline to provide context for certain objects and Grace’s overall feeling about this task. To differentiate between these timelines, they change the resolution for the memory scenes, which creates black borders on the top and bottom of the screen to give the sense of a subjective perspective. 

Gosling infuses the film with an undeniable charm, with his down-to-Earth personality and his reluctance to carry out his Atlas-esque responsibility. He is completely out of his depth, and Gosling captures this feeling of helplessness combined with determination as the film progresses. 

The film does not fall into a doomer-esque feel as one would expect, but rather, with Rocky and Grace, it manages to find a fun, optimistic identity. Two individuals from different worlds coming together to save their respective worlds creates a theme of cooperation despite differences and optimism even in the face of a planet-extinction event.  

These qualities of the film allow it to be more than just a standard “ordinary man tasked with saving the planet” movie. It is also one of those few movies that was made for the theater-going experience. Experiencing it on a small screen would be doing a disservice, not only to the team behind "Project Hail Mary", but to yourself, too.