Why Project Hail Mary Misses the Mark
Read this review or else
The release of Marathon (read my review here) has put me in a sci-fi mood. This week I watched Life (2017), an enjoyable Alien ripoff that’s at least worth seeing once, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), a wonderful and established classic, which I’m honest enough to admit to never having seen before. While looking for new sci-fi films, I found one in theaters titled Project Hail Mary, so I said what the hell and bought a ticket.
(Weekday matinees are great, by the way. You usually have the theater to yourself. And if anyone else is there, they’re usually nice old white people. Not the kind of people who are going to talk loudly during the movie.)
I didn’t know anything about the movie, other than that it garnered positive reviews (8.4/10 on IMDB, 94% on Rotten Tomatoes), starred Ryan Gosling, and might have aliens in it. Had I looked up the directors (Phil Lord and Christopher Miller), I would have seen that their filmography features stuff like The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street – not exactly my cup of tea. (The latter gets credit for curing Kanye West of his anti-Semitism.)
Project Hail Mary begins with a particularly unkempt man named Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) waking up in a spaceship. He’s confused. His memory is foggy – he asks, “How do I know this?” regarding something scientific, but not foggy enough to prevent him from knowing where to find his crewmates’ beds. Some are empty, others are filled with dead people. Something went amiss during his hibernatory sleep, leaving him the sole survivor.
Then come the flashbacks. Grace was a school teacher before finding himself in space. During a classroom scene, he tiptoes around questions from his inquisitive students regarding the fate of the solar system. We learn that the sun is dying, and that the future of humanity isn’t looking great. When a stern woman representing an international task force arrives to speak to Grace, we learn that before he was a school teacher, he was a respected scientist – until he tanked his credibility by autisticly lashing out at someone important. (He would fit in well on right-wing Twitter.)
It turns out that the sun is being killed by astrophage, a lifeform that consumes energy from stars. (It’s in the name: star eater.) Scientists observe a lengthy span of astrophage extending from the sun to Venus known as the Petrova Line. During the flashbacks, Grace works tirelessly to discover the nature of astrophage and prepare an expedition to Tau Ceti, one of the few stars unaffected by astrophage.
Grace was not originally intended to be part of the expedition, on account of not being an astronaut. But from the beginning of the film, you’re aware that he somehow makes it to space. You only learn how toward the end of the film. This small twist was well executed, and it did a good job of linking the flashbacks to the present timeline.
Back to space. Grace recovers his memories, perhaps a bit too quickly, and does his best to complete the mission. While in space, he encounters a massive, mysterious object. Is it an asteroid? A ship? A weapon? Something else? We learn the truth soon enough. Without giving it away, Grace’s solitude comes to an end.
The scene where Grace discovers the mysterious object serves as a microcosm of Project Hail Mary as a whole. It captures what the movie does well and what it does wrong. Grace’s first encounter with the colossal object is awe-inspiring, with great music and impressive visuals. But that feeling of awe immediately ends with Grace awkwardly bouncing around the ship. (You’re supposed to laugh, it’s funny!)
Project Hail Mary, despite being a well-made film, ultimately fails the vibe check – at least for me. From the very beginning, the dialogue is intentionally awkward and quirky. It felt like every few seconds there was some cringeworthy attempt at humor. Like it’s a children’s movie or something. But I wanted a serious movie about space and aliens.
One example: After joining the task force, Grace asks Carl, the black guy who I guess is a secret agent with the task force, if their project has an expense account. The black guy looks at him calmly and says no. Grace is dejected. But then the camera pans back to Carl, who says, “But I do.” Wow, you really got me there.
What follows is a completely retarded scene in which Grace and Carl go shopping at a hardware store (Grace wishes to reconstruct Venus’s climate to discover why the astrophage is heading there). Feel-good music plays while the two grown men joke around, go bowling with duct tape, and throw a bunch of Skittles into the shopping cart. It’s like they’re on a date. Carl says something to the confused cashier about being with the government. She asks which one. “All of them,” he replies. (This is really funny.) It was hard to watch. But that type of humor – that quirky, silly mood – defines the entire film, even the tenser moments.
It just isn’t for me. And I’m honest enough to admit that this is pretty subjective. Of course, all media criticism is subjective, but only to a point. I’m capable of recognizing a masterpiece even if I’m not the target audience. Once I accepted that, I warmed up to the movie a little more. But then I found myself thinking, “Well, who is this movie for then?” The answer: women, children, dads who want to take their kids to something that isn’t totally juvenile, and redditors. It has a strong “I fucking LOVE science vibe” – not because it’s science fiction, of course, but because of its quirky vibe.
