The hero of Project Hail Mary is Ryland Grace, who wakes up aboard a spaceship on an interstellar odyssey. The rest of his crew have died in suspended animation, and he gradually recalls that he is the science officer, sent from Earth to gather data from a star that could stave off a catastrophe back home.
Based on a 2021 novel by The Martian writer Andy Weir, this is a “first contact” tale on multiple levels: Grace encounters the first known extraterrestrial life in the form of a cosmic microbe dubbed “Astrophage,” which is infecting and cooling suns through the galaxy. But Grace is also the first human to make contact with a sentient alien, a little goober he dubs “Rocky,” because he looks like a rock pile, crossed with a crab. Rocky has traveled from his home planet because it’s facing the same threat as Earth.
Though Weir’s yarns are regarded as “hard” (read: reasonably plausible) sci-fi, they have an edge of warmth and humor that keeps their technical sides from numbing us. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Lego: The Movie) from an adaptation by Drew Stoddard, this movie version works the same way. A bit surprisingly, it scores as a buddy picture – it might be called The Oddest Imaginable Couple.
We get plenty of derring-do and special effects spectacle – a little too much, perhaps. Like so many blockbuster releases, the movie is probably about a half-hour longer than it needs to be. But the emotional core of the story is how Rocky and Grace gradually learn to communicate with each other, learn to cope with each other’s personalities, then bond as friends and figure out how to save their respective worlds.
Although Sandra Hüller of The Zone of Interest, seen in flashbacks, registers strongly as the dour honcho of the mission – she even gets a musical number! – Ryan Gosling is the main show, in human terms. Agreeably bespectacled and nebbishy, his performance evokes some of the lonely, melancholic gentleness of Bruce Dern in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972), which this movie recalls overall.
Nonetheless, Gosling does get upstaged – just as Dern was, by his cute little robot helpers in Silent Running. Rocky is a fully realized character. Voiced, through the computer, by James Ortiz, the stony little dude’s movements and body language get across a sweetly fretful worrywart given to occasional bursts of exuberance. He’s exactly the alien you hope we meet, if we ever meet an alien. It’s a true achievement in special effects characterization, and you’ll forgive me if I observe that Rocky rocks.
