City of stars, are you shining just for me?
Growing up, I understood “hard sci-fi” as a genre with a double meaning: “hard” as in rigorously plausible constraint-based problem solving as the main dramatic focus, but also “hard” as in bleak. The struggle for solutions was inseparable from the struggle for survival, which was inseparable from grimness. But the last fifteen years have seen a boom in what you might call “nice-core” hard sci-fi, stories where the conflicts are still rooted in physics and engineering but the tone stays cheerful without sacrificing stakes. Becky Chambers blazed the trail with her charming, Hugo-winning Wayfarers series, coining a niche sometimes called “hopepunk.” The biggest breakout of nice-core hard sci-fi, though, has been Andy Weir, whose 2011 web serial The Martian became a bestseller on the entirely reasonable premise that dorky engineers with tech degrees need beach reads, too. Ridley Scott turned it into an Oscar-nominated blockbuster. Weir’s third published novel, Project Hail Mary, became a COVID-era smash in 2021 and immediately entered the Hollywood pipeline.
Phil Lord and Chris Miller might not be the obvious directors for a space survival adventure. Their only live-action features to date are 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street, buddy cop comedies grafted onto high school comedies. But it makes more sense than it might appear: the two Spider-Verse movies, which they envisioned and produced, have a relentless and well-calibrated sense of humor that’s kin to Weir’s breezy science-geek tone, and their animated work has always carried a sense of colorful majesty and expansiveness that maps neatly onto the grandeur (and gravity manipulations) of space travel. They’re also exhaustively detail-oriented and fast-paced filmmakers whose movies are, simply and consistently, a pleasure to watch.
And so it is not a huge surprise to me, but still a great delight, that Project Hail Mary works very well. Lord and Miller have a terrific grasp of how to make the story engaging, and the choice to lean into the offbeat buddy comedy over nuts-and-bolts survival (a tonal choice that has been one of the film’s few divisive points among critics) is almost entirely a good one as far as I’m concerned. The result has less tactile survival tension than Scott’s The Martian, to the point where you might downgrade it to “hard-ish” sci-fi. (Firm sci-fi? Pliable sci-fi? Squishy sci-fi?) But it has more color and personality than The Martian, and definitely more laughs.
Part of the fun of the film is gradually learning the film’s premise as it unfolds at the same time as its amnesia-ridden protagonist, middle school science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling). We meet Grace when he wakes up stranded on a spaceship very far from Earth, his memory foggy, and the only surviving crew member. Before long we get the rough sketch of a mission to discover a cure for sun-eating microbes, and not long after that, Grace encounters another spaceship, one not from Earth.
Gosling is the film’s anchor, and he is the exact right actor for this. His charm, physical comedy, and vulnerability carry enormous stretches of what amounts to a solo performance, and his screen presence keeps the movie afloat even when the script over-explains or the pacing sags. The obvious comparison is Matt Damon in The Martian, or Tom Hanks in Cast Away, but it’s a quirkier performance than either of those because Gosling’s charisma has a slightly more neurotic edge than Damon or Hanks that the movie fully embraces. Gosling is, at heart, a little goofball. He cut his chops in movies like Lars and the Real Girl, and he brings a real streak of that weirdo energy to this material. It’s both an original performance and one that locks in his status as a genuine star, if it was even remotely unlocked.
The rest of the cast is good, too. Sandra Hüller is wonderful in a supporting role as a no-nonsense government agent in the flashbacks; her character could easily have been a downer or a cliche. She grounds the Earth-set material in the apocalyptic seriousness of the scenario, keeping the film from getting too light when it needs stakes to pack its full emotional punch. Despite a totally different demeanor, she has great chemistry Gosling, even when their interactions hit some dark points. She even gets an emotional payoff in karaoke rendition of Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” that was reportedly not in the original script and semi-improvised, for a group of characters on the verge of a life-or-death mission. It’s frankly as touching a scene as any of the more heavy-hitting emotional beats later in the film.
But the real breakout performance, if you count it as such, is Rocky. James Ortiz provides both the puppetry and the voice for a faceless, five-legged rock alien who nonetheless generates real expressiveness, comic timing, and emotional investment. Lord and Miller’s decision to keep Ortiz’s on-set voice rather than replacing him with a celebrity was extremely sharp; it gives the character an authenticity and strangeness that a famous, ADR-ed voice would have smoothed away.
The craft here is top-shelf for a blockbuster when one’s eyes are tempered for superhero browns and grays. Greig Fraser’s cinematography is outstanding, working with Lord and Miller’s direction to create a real sense of space and build some innovative set pieces. The biggest swing comes in nearly-abstract swirling greens and oranges of a climactic planet harvesting sequence. Fraser applies sensational IMAX-native photography that makes clever use of rotated anamorphic lenses to show shifting gravity. (I was lucky to see this on the biggest IMAX screen in Virginia, just a few hundred yards away from Space Shuttle Discovery.) The film has a lot of innovative shooting and production, with none of the typical use of green or blue screen keying and compositing: All backgrounds were practical or shot against solid-color backdrops with VFX layered in afterward, and the tactile weight of the sets shows.
Daniel Pemberton’s score, meanwhile, is inventive and striking, built from organic and unusual sources: steel drums, wood blocks, hand-claps, choral vocals, and, according to the composer, a sampled squeaky faucet. It has a bit more edge and personality than the typical sweeping big-budget epic, and it’s a perfect match for the film’s atmosphere.
The screenplay by Drew Goddard hits the mark in terms of making the dense science accessible without dumbing it down, and he effectively translates the novel’s memory recovery-as-flashback structure. We learn the backdrop and stakes of his mission at the same pace Grace recovers his memory, and the cadence of reveals is satisfying.
Where the film stumbles, and it does stumble, is mainly in its third act, which is bloated to the point that I found my cynicism starting to curdle as the credits approached… or, at least, as I thought they approached. Project Hail Mary blows past three obvious ending points and still keeps going, like this is Return of the King, and while I’ve gathered that the issues are endemic to the source material, Lord and Miller show little ambition to streamline or trust in the audience to accept ambiguity or suggestion: they apparently even expanded the ending a bit. The runtime of 156 minutes is taxing, almost backbreaking, and soured me to the point that I am tempted to bump the score you see below down a notch. Much of the expository dialogue and repetitive beats could have been trimmed in addition to a smoother sign-off. Tonally the film has a few moments that don’t land, and I don’t mean the comedy: Lord and Miller indulge in a little bit too much emotional manipulation: we get so many “goodbye” and/or near-death scenes for Rocky that they start losing impact by the end, and the writing tilts a bit towards over-explained. (Although, to be fair, this aligns with Weir’s procedural, step-by-step prose style.)
But even in the strained sections, Project Hail Mary is a damn treat, funny and flavorful. I try not to hold against it the instinct of erring on the side of generosity to its characters and its viewers. Even with an eye-popping runtime, it honestly never drags; it is a fun movie from start to finish, and occasionally even inspiring. And that might be the biggest praise you can give nice-core sci-fi: even as it overstays its welcome, you walk out both entertained and looking to the stars.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.