Project Hail Mary movie review: Ryan Gosling finds an unlikely ‘buddy’ in deep space; delivers the feel-good sci-fi we needed

Feel good you will, and good – as we hear – is not the enemy of the perfect. The film also imagines space as something genuinely beautiful, pure, raw and untouched, not an expanse of unknown terrors where things go very, very wrong, very, very quickly, that we have come to know.

However, Project Hail Mary’s insistence on being sunny side up, in the face of the darkness coming mankind’s way, dilutes the urgency that is fuelling this desperate mission.

Grace (Gosling) is a science school teacher, much-liked evidently from the one class the film shows him holding. Once upon a time, he was the kind of promising molecular biologist who gets called to UNESCO conferences, but a harsh word too many against the established geniuses resulted in a backlash, forcing Grace out to the Cleveland school where he is now not-unhappily working.

One afternoon, just when he has finished explaining to an over-inquisitive student, seemingly of Indian origin, what the ‘Petrova Line’ is, in walks Eva (Hüller), the head of the Petrova Line Task Force. The said-same line involves a beam connecting Venus and Sun, via which organisms called astrophages have been arriving and eating up our star. Eva seeks out Grace for his biological skills and out-of-the-box thinking, and he requires some persuasion, but not much.

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There is some genuinely funny banter involving secret agents and Grace as he and Eva work towards cracking what they can do to save the Sun. The plan boils down to sending a spaceship fired by 2 million kilogrammes of astrophagus to a solar system whose sun seems to be the only star immune to being eaten.

Directors Lord and Miller, who have cut their teeth making films such as The Lego Movie and the two Spider-man: Spiderverse, do surprisingly well in keeping the science light as well as lucid. The astrophages don’t run away with Project Hail Mary, and neither does all the waking-from-induced-coma confusion, the finding-your-feet (literally) in zero gravity, and the learning-how-to-pilot a spaceship by yourself stuff.

That breezily accomplished, the film introduces Rocky, from a planet far, far away. How Grace and Rocky meet and literally tango in their spaceships is a work of art, playing out against a dark sea of stars. The human ship is all metal and hull and chutes and screws. Rocky’s ship is like rays of light strung together in a golden weave.

Rocky had a 20-plus crew at one point, which is now down to only him. He is as alone, and as eager, to save the sun of his own solar system. That is the start of a beautiful friendship between him and Grace, and it surprisingly involves a lot more tears than you expect a Hollywood male star to shed.

If there are frontiers to be conquered and worlds to be saved, these two buddies, who also find a way to converse, will now do it together. Rocky, voiced by Ortiz, is a quick study, and a delight when he moves into Grace’s ship as a very nosey roommate.

In all this otherworldly scheme of things, the gravity is entirely on the side of Eva, and Hüller plays her role, requiring blood, sweat, tears and life of her recruits, with brilliant equanimity. Her patient and understanding leader can transform double quick into detached commander; though her task is made easier by the fact that those signing up for this mission to certain death are so cheerfully stoic that it rings patently fake.

A song Hüller breaks into on one of the last nights on Earth for the astronauts – Harry Styles’s Sign of The Times – is a performance rippling with all the contrasting emotions going through Eva.

Hüller is also clear evidence of the power of the unsaid word. Particularly contrasted with the banter Grace and Rocky determinedly keep up; Grace can’t help a few jokes even when paying eulogy to his dead crew members.

Gosling is a great enough actor to ensure that most of these jokes land, as well as to make us tear up at the possibility of him and Rocky parting.

Which brings us to what essentially drives mankind’s space lust: to prove that we are not alone. As Hüller says when Grace asks her if she believes in God: “It beats the alternative.”

Project Hail Mary movie cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, voice of James Ortiz
Project Hail Mary movie directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Project Hail Mary movie rating: 3.5 stars