Project Hail Mary Review: A Sci-Fi Dazzler with Nostalgic Charm
This Ryan Gosling vehicle is immensely likeable and technically impressive, even if it carries the whiff of top-shelf nostalgia. Project Hail Mary does not signal especially happy days ahead for film culture, as some of the greatest skill and effort is funnelled into giving a modern film the illusion it was released in 1979. Does this covertly reinforce the idea that analogue filmmaking is an artefact of the past, rather than something that can be integrated into a more contemporary style?
A Buddy Comedy Across Galaxies
Here is a film that is about as effervescently likeable as it can get. In it, Ryan Gosling becomes best buds with an alien, as they put aside all cultural and linguistic barriers to save their respective planets from a sun-gobbling threat. It is an alchemically perfected blend of past sci-fi greats, with a good dose of Spielberg and Kubrick – familiar without feeling exhausted.
There is a yellow raincoat costume that designers David Crossman and Glyn Dillon made for Gosling's character that is as distinctive and easily replicated as Marty McFly's orange puffer vest. The science is pitched at a level that is digestible but makes you feel smart for having digested it, similar to how Sam Neill demonstrated wormholes in Event Horizon (1997) by stabbing a pencil through folded paper.
Directorial and Cinematic Excellence
Spider-Verse's Phil Lord and Christopher Miller direct from a script by Drew Goddard, who previously adapted The Martian (2015) from Andy Weir's novel. Project Hail Mary is another of Weir's works, published in 2021, and bound by the same comforting, idealistic outlook: that scientific collaboration, across nations and galaxies, can and will save us in the end. It is escapist entertainment into a world where hope exists.
Most of the global effort plays out in the background, with a wonderfully phlegmatic Sandra Hüller (recent star of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest) as a representative of the intellectual establishment back on Earth. We are primarily stuck with Gosling's Ryland Grace, a seemingly ordinary guy who wakes up on a spaceship, light-years from home, with no memory of who he is or why he is there.
What is important to know is that Project Hail Mary is, in large part, a buddy comedy, pairing Gosling with an extraterrestrial who is clearly the Gosling of their own society. While his Ken in Barbie (2023) will certainly be the more defining role of his career, Grace reflects the same ethos – that it takes an actor as cool as him to successfully play a goofball like this on screen.
Visual Splendour and Nostalgic Elements
It is also an immaculate film to look at, in whichever of the 12 advertised formats audiences choose to watch it in (including 70mm, Imax, and 70mm Imax), with its conscientious mix between practical sets and VFX technology. Its cinematographer, Greig Fraser, known for Dune (2021) and The Batman (2022), is one of the finest in the dying art of beautiful, dynamic lighting on a blockbuster scale.
Project Hail Mary was clearly made to catapult a certain segment of the audience back to their childhoods – it carries the same fetishisation of late Sixties and Seventies sound and production design as recent fare in the Alien franchise. Grace's spacesuit happens to be the same red as Dave Bowman's in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and, at one point, he hums the same tune used by the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) to communicate.
Cinema's Precarious Position
That said, cinema is in a precarious position right now. And, just maybe, Project Hail Mary will remind people why they ever fell in love with it in the first place. Sometimes, to move forward, it helps to look back. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, and Milana Vayntrub, this Cert 12A, 156-minute film is in cinemas from 19 March.
