Project Hail Mary

Dynamic duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller return to live-action filmmaking after years of giving us some of the most crowd-pleasing animation storytelling in recent memory. You can clearly see the animation-filmmaking fingerprints from the producers, co-writers, and creative engines behind both the Spider-Verse films and Netflix’s terrific The Mitchells Vs The Machines all over the utterly delightful new space saga—Project Hail Mary. Think Interstellar meets Arrival meets The Martian (which is itself based on a book by Andy Weir, whose 2021 book Project Hail Mary this film is adapted from).

Films are never exactly about stories, but there’s nothing like a film with a refreshingly original one. As paradoxical as it might sound, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary (based on Andy Weir’s book of the same name) solidified this belief of mine. Its second lead is not even human, and yet I got to witness what we famously call a human story. In a world where uncertainty is the only constant, where technology and greed threaten to upset the balance of society, what we need and deserve is a ray of metaphorical sunshine, and this film, starring Ryan Gosling, provides this in spades, albeit in a very unexpected way.

At one point, in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary, someone asks if they know when a hug ends. “You just know,” comes the response from Dr Ryland Grace, a scientist from earth, trying to devise a way to save the Sun. After the film, my first thought was if Lord and Miller’s film knew when to stop mollycoddling its audience. Why else would a competent film adapted from a bestselling novel of the same name by renowned author Andy Weir, starring an immensely watchable Ryan Gosling (playing Ryland Grace), triggering laughs and tears feel almost immediately forgettable after leaving the theatre? A film can be ‘good’ by any number of metrics, but it’s a certain degree of serendipity galvanising good films, elevating them into an authentic and a moving experience. Even the tears in Project Hail Mary feel like the result of a large assembly line, which is never a good sign.

Based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir (of The Martian fame), Project Hail Mary is a mixed bag. It promises a lot but doesn’t quite deliver. The film relies more on the charm of its lead actor than on the screenplay by Drew Goddard, which reportedly remains very faithful to the book.

You just begin.” This line, at the end of The Martian, released 11 years ago and packing in the kind of repeat-value watch few films have managed to over the last decade, struck home then and is particularly resonant in the times we live in. It was part of a speech that Mark Watney (Matt Damon) delivered to a roomful of aspiring astronauts when asked what kept him going alone in a capsule on Mars when almost all hope had faded away. Watney’s speech, and the film’s optimistic message: that you just get to work, solving one problem after another, figuring it out step by step until you have finally changed things for the better — feels relevant in every step of the world we live in now.

What if you have no one to die for but are put on a mission to save everyone… and in a sense, everything in the universe? Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) of Project Hail Mary finds himself in such a predicament. Actually, he doesn’t even know he is. When he wakes up from an induced coma, Grace finds himself in a spaceship light years away from home. With his crew dead and his memory inching back to him due to the retrograde amnesia, Grace has to figure out why he is in the middle of space floating in a ship headed to Tau Ceti, a relatively nearby star to the Solar system–just 12 light years away (Didn’t I say relative) from home. Grace slowly remembers himself as a school teacher, a nerd, a loner, and a norm-defying molecular biologist, but what he doesn’t seem to understand or believe is why he would sign up for this one-way trip to save the world when he doesn’t even have one soul to care about.