Hard as it may to believe in an era when we get a War of the Worlds adaptation on Amazon that may as well have been Jeff Bezos mooning the camera while reading out a product blurb, actually interesting movie iterations of thoughtful scifi novels still get through. We of course have Villenevue’s Dune with a third part upcoming, and now, a decade after The Martian, we have another Andy Weir title now on the big screen with Project Hail Mary. The former proved a hit with audiences, combining relatively grounded science in your science fiction with Ridley Scott’s direction and Matt Damon’s easygoing charisma—do Phil Lord and Christopher Miller pull off the same, with a slightly different story of misfits trying to guard the galaxy?
Our lead is Ryan Gosling, who at least in my eyes generally spends his career trying not to get mixed up with Ryan Reynolds, another Canadian white guy lead who looks a bit similar…come to think of it, has anyone seen them in the same room? Anyway, Gosling here plays a scientist turned high school teacher, who as often in some of these tales like Arrival, gets whisked away on a mission of world-saving importance by Sandra Huller, who isn’t taking no from an answer from him.
There’s a lot of flashback structure through the film, which some might find obnoxious, but it’s a good workaround as any for dealing with the literary structure of front-loading your setup. The meat of the film takes place in a distant star system, with the titular mission reduced to just Gosling, and as the marketing spoils, turns out he’s not quite alone out there as he thinks.
Compared to Martian there’s a somewhat minimalist human element for our lead to bounce off of, but that itself also makes it more interesting, which the directors just about pull off. Here, Weir went with that scifi writer’s maxim of being allowed to BS only one thing, with everything else flowing from there—and that’s reflected with our themes of isolation and then understanding. When confronted with a rock spider that communicates and senses via vibration, when you’ve nothing in common but a desire to save your species and the universal concepts of science, where do you go from there?
And yes, they do succeed in making a rock spider with no face an enjoyable and interesting character unto itself—that’s something that could’ve gone pretty wrong.
Overall, that leaves Project Hail Mary perhaps not quite as much of a crowdpleaser or spectacle as Martian, but still a pretty interesting flick that by everything I can see honors its source material well and, if nothing else, gives something to ponder on with the prospects of crossing gulfs of both universal void but also just simple communication. In a world ever smaller but ever distant, what better to contemplate on?
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