Project Hail Mary review: Ryan Gosling charms in science fiction with a reassuring soul

The last time Ryan Gosling blasted off into space was in the guise of Neil Armstrong heading for the moon in 2018’s First Man, making it home again before the milk in his fridge had gone off.

Project Hail Mary is a considerably longer voyage into the unknown that sees Gosling’s mild-mannered science teacher Dr Ryland Grace on a fictional mission with significantly greater stakes than the one embarked upon by NASA’s real-life history maker.

Exactly how long it’s been thus far when Ryland awakens on a spaceship isn’t immediately clear, certainly not to the hippy-haired, shaggy-bearded doc himself who’s suffering from amnesia; the most he can surmise is that he’s “several light years from my apartment” and all his fellow crew members have died.

The bewildered traveller’s temporary memory loss is a tidy device, setting up a succession of patchy recollections to serve as flashbacks explaining how he got where he is and what’s happening back on Earth to have made the trip necessary; the sun is dying from a constant bombardment of parasitical extraterrestrial bacteria, and the key to avoiding mass extinction may just lie in a seemingly immune star at the far end of the galaxy.

It’s good to get the premise-establishing science stuff out of the way in one sentence, as Project Hail Mary is by no means a film reliant on swathes of technological hokum (Ryland’s on-board problem-solving is framed in the playful manner of middle school classroom exercises), and more a family-friendly, intrinsically human story.

Not entirely human, though, as our plucky but still a bit fuzzy-headed hero discovers a creature in the same planet-in-peril boat, or rather a massive craft that dwarfs Ryland’s own; a spider-ish being whose body appears to be comprised of several rough-hewn stones. He decides to call him Rocky.

Language barriers are slowly overcome until viewers twig that what they’re watching is, in fact, a buddy movie in all but name, with a personality that could feasibly lay claim to being cinema’s most heartwarming cross-species bromance since Elliott touched fingers with ET.

It’s a valid parallel, as the film is riddled with Spielberg-like wonderment (as opposed to the colder, convoluted likes of, say, Armageddon or Interstellar), and cruises along on the innate charm of Gosling, effortlessly hopping between puppy-dog helplessness and steely potential saviour of humankind.

Co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller cut their teeth in animation (The Lego Movie, the Oscar-winning Spiderman: Into The Spider-Verse), and the duo’s talent for the wittily fantastical transfers well to what is only a second live-action feature, helped enormously by the quality of the source material.

Screenwriter Drew Goddard’s previous adaptation of an Andy Weir novel was 2015’s crowd-pleasing The Martian, and there’s much of the earlier film’s Matt Damon central character in Gosling’s Ryland, both retaining a keenly honed sense of the absurd when confronted with supposedly insurmountable obstacles.

On Earth, Sandra Huller provides a solid sparring partner for Gosling as the pragmatic project leader who figuratively dragged Ryland away from his cosy, non-life-threatening day job in the first place, employing deadpan humour to manage her recruit while impressing upon him the enormity of the task ahead.

With a running time north of two-and-a-half hours, it’s perhaps a touch longer than it needs to be, although it’s nonetheless a tale well told and only intermittently sags; even then, it’s rarely for more than a few minutes before the ever charismatic Gosling rights the ship, either when going it alone or as part of the marvellous Ryland and Rocky show.

It’s by no means the most original movie ever made and there are plenty of opportunities to play spot the reference, but they arguably serve as unashamedly affectionate celebrations of the myriad joys out-of-this-world popcorn fare has brought us over the years.

This is science fiction with a reassuring soul, where the sombre comes bearing a smile, and the vastness of space is never quite so scary when you’re sharing it with a new pal.

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