So to even begin a review of Project Hail Mary I have to first confront my ambivalence about its star, Ryan Gosling. He tends to get gushed over but for dubious reasons: Much as the world loved the Barbie movie (2023), I found it a big gob of pink bubblegum. It was fine, if you like that sort of thing—vacuous brand-name-based comedy. (Remember the Summer of 2023? The whole “Barbenheimer” thing? Was that only three years ago?) Ryan Gosling certainly had his comic moments as Ken. He’s great in The Place Beyond the Pines (2012) too. Maybe he should play bank robber/stunt-motorcyclists more often. Which leads us to Project Hail Mary, composed of, oh, approximately 95% Ryan Gosling on screen.
An easy description would be something like “It’s E.T. meets 2001 meets Contact meets Arrival meets Wall-E”—with a healthy dose of Steven Spielbergian moments, most in outer space. There are twists and turns that I won’t reveal, but I’ll note Gosling’s costar appears to be made of rather flexible rocks, hence the moniker “Rocky,” as in “Rocky phone home.”
Although comic, it’s not exactly funny. It’s sweet. My one-word review would be “Cutesy.” Hard not to quibble with the premise, from this Trumpian hellhole into which our nation has fallen: An intergalactic menace is threatening our sun, and to save it a great team of international scientists cook up a mission to travel beyond our solar system to find the fix. (Of course in our “real world” all the scientists would either be fired or under investigation for being “woke,” so forget the whole save-the-world mission altogether. For this review I consulted a team of scientists who confirmed we have a 99% chance of becoming the overweight humanoids of Wall-E by, say, 2035.)
Yet in the far-fetched fictional world of Project Hail Mary, they need a hero. For that they tap Ryan Gosling, who plays Ryland Grace, a high school science teacher who has a PhD and somehow manages not to yell at his students to put away their frickin’ phones. He’s reluctant to join this mission to deep space. I don’t blame him. What follows is heart-warming. Rather unlikely but heart-warming. Isn’t that what we all need at the moment?