American Scientist

Project Hail Mary is such a genre mash-up of a movie that it practically dares the viewer to contemplate its ancestral elements. It’s Interstellar meets Short Circuit! It’s an extraterrestrial version of The Odd Couple! It’s like E.T. crossed with Outbreak and, uh, 21 Jump Street!

That last comparison gets to the heart of what Project Hail Mary really is, and why it is such a genial, fun, and occasionally frustrating science-fiction romp through space. In theaters March 20, the movie is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who also directed The Lego Movie and (yes) the film adaptation of 21 Jump Street. They fully apply their crowd-pleasing sensibility and love of witty banter to the source material, a 2021 novel by Andy Weir, the sci-fi author who also wrote The Martian and Artemis.

Weir’s book, also called Project Hail Mary, is set in a near-future time when a mysterious phenomenon is dimming the Sun. The culprit appears to be a space-faring, light-absorbing alien microbe, dubbed “Astrophage,” that is migrating between Venus and the Sun. If the Astrophage continues unchecked, Earth will soon freeze and most, if not all, of its inhabitants will die. Astronomers soon discover that other, nearby stars are similarly infected—with the intriguing exception of the Sunlike star Tau Ceti. A lapsed biologist named Ryland Grace is put in charge of the effort to understand the extraterrestrial plague; he ends up joining a 12-light-year interstellar voyage to Tau Ceti in search of a cure. The mission is considered such a desperate long-shot that Grace likens it to a “Hail Mary” pass in football.

These plot elements don’t exactly sound like the stuff of a goofball buddy comedy, yet that is exactly what a large part of Project Hail Mary turns out to be. It helps that Ryland Grace is played by Ryan Gosling, an actor of such easygoing charm that he breathed warmth into a Ken doll in the Barbie movie. It helps, too, that Gosling knows his way around playing a lonely spaceman, having delivered a touching performance as Neil Armstrong in the Apollo 11 flick First Man. Here, he’s given the formidable challenge of carrying large parts of the movie essentially on his own. The story begins with a somewhat frantic opening act in which Gosling wakes up as the only survivor aboard the titular starship, Hail Mary, unable to remember who he is or how he got there. The tone turns lighter and more self-assured in the second half, when Gosling finally gets his co-star—but even then, his co-star is just a puppet.

About that puppet: One of the movie’s clever twists (no spoiler to anyone who has seen the trailer) is that Ryland Grace is not the only space adventurer going to Tau Ceti to save his dying world. An ammonia-breathing, rocklike alien from a planet around 40 Eridani has also traveled there with the exact same mandate. (That’s an in-joke to science fiction fans; 40 Eridani A is the Vulcan homeworld in Star Trek lore.) After fumbling his way through his attempts at First Contact, Grace establishes a friendly collaboration with his extraterrestrial counterpart, whom he nicknames “Rocky.” It is a joy to see a movie alien who does not look like an overgrown insect or a hapless Hollywood extra wearing bad forehead makeup. Nor is Rocky a shiny blob of CGI, but an expressive, physical creation of effects specialist Neal Scanlan.

Grace and Rocky have such a natural on-screen chemistry that it’s easy to forget you are watching a human acting opposite a chunk of mobilized cloth and wire. Their scenes together have a goofy magic that, at its best, has the kids-of-all-ages feel of a Steven Spielberg classic. When the camera pulls back, the exterior shots of the human and Eridanian spaceships performing balletic maneuvers aspire to, and nearly achieve, 2001-level majesty.

Unfortunately, this movie wants to be many things, not just one thing, and its tonal eclecticism repeatedly gets in its own way. The human-alien buddies, after all, are trying to save their respective species from extinction, and one or both of them may be on a suicide mission. Even the Gosling charm fades in the face of the darker elements of Project Hail Mary’s plot. An action sequence in which Grace and Rocky attempt to collect a sample from one of Tau Ceti’s planets, and nearly die in the process, comes across as more chaotic than thrilling.

The bigger glitches occur in the Earthbound part Project Hail Mary, told in flashback, as we learn about the Astrophage and about how Grace became our planet’s designated savior. In this more familiar, somber setting, the movie’s plot falls into the uncanny valley between pure fantasy and cerebral science fiction. To their credit, Lord and Miller treat the Astrophage as more than a plot device. Unfortunately, the movie promptly ducks its own pointed questions about how the alien microbes could survive on the Sun, even though they are said to be water-based. Then the plot requires that they are able to concentrate energy far more densely than an atomic bomb for . . . reasons of some sort or other. I quickly regretted paying close attention to the details.

More disappointing, for those of us watching from a scientist’s perspective, is the cartoonish way that Project Hail Mary portrays the research process—especially surprising given that the movie team collaborated with NASA advisors. Rather than sharing information openly and encouraging people to collaborate in large groups, an international task force has kept information about the alien microbes a secret: Good luck with that! Then this shadowy group drops a befuddled Ryland Grace alone into a lab, watching him from a balcony to see if he can instantly understand these alien organisms with no contextual information. When Grace later makes a rather obvious discovery (the microbes are migrating to Venus because they flourish under the conditions on Venus), he is treated as a unique genius, almost a Harry Potter–style Chosen One. That is not how science works. That is not how human nature works, for that matter.

Speaking of human nature, the movie’s explanation of how Grace woke up as an amnesiac on the spaceship betrays another weird misunderstanding of human psychology. I don’t want to give away the whole plot twist, but I will say: If I were managing a go-for-broke mission to save the planet, I would not entrust it to an unwilling, disoriented participant—even if doing so did allow Gosling to do some of his signature hangdog mugging.

What’s frustrating is that many of the elements are in place for Project Hail Mary to be the thoughtful meditation on curiosity and self-preservation that it clearly aspires to be. It comes up with not one, but two imaginative alien life forms. Its environmental crisis mirrors the world’s genuine, far less unified, efforts to confront climate change. Grace and Rocky’s interspecies relationship is a sweet showcase of compassion and logical problem-solving. Sandra Hüller (playing Eva Stratt, head of the Astrophage-fighting task force) projects the solemn intensity of someone who understands that the fate of the world lies in the balance. In one wrenching scene, she turns a simple karaoke performance into an emotionally conflicted expression of both hope and despair for humanity.

Somewhere along the way, though, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller seemingly abandoned the complexity of science-rooted, hard science fiction in favor of a playful adventure tale. That tale is plenty engaging on its own. But a more deft blend of the two sides could have been a mash-up for the ages.