It's been 10-1/2 months since we've actually gone to the movies to see a movie (Ballerina) and considering I missed out on properly seeing Avatar: Fire & Ash in 3D at the show, it must be something special to get me out of the house. That would be Project Hail Mary, based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir with a screenplay adapted by Drew Goddard, the tag team who filled the same roles for Ridley Scott's 2015 epic The Martian. (Somehow I never wrote a review when I saw it theatrically nor when I watched the Blu-Ray and Extended Cut 4K UHD Blu-ray, but it scored 8/10 Catch a matinee for the show, 8/10 Buy it for the Blu-ray, and 9/10 Buy it for 4K.) I even read the novel beforehand which for me is a rarity due to my crippling illiteracy.
So, having done the homework and being otherwise primed to have a great time, I ended up underwhelmed by this adaptation despite the Herculean work Ryan Gosling does with his performance as the only hope for mankind to save the world as long as he figures out what to do after remembering who his is in the first place.
The movie opens with Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace waking up on a spaceship. He has long hair and beard and no memory of how he ended up there and why there are two dead bodies in the other beds. He frantically searches his confines to discover it's a spaceship and the star ahead isn't Earth's Sun.
He buries the others in space and begins to have flashback memories of his life beginning with his being a middle school science teacher who is recruited by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall) to analyze a sample of astrophage, a single-cell organism that appears to be eating our Sun's energy then migrating to Venus. If the nature of the astrophage can't be understood and a means to counteract it isn't found within 30 years the Earth's climate will cool to the point where half the world's population would starve and the rest would live in a permanent state of war as nations fight over the remaining food. No big deal!
Grace figures out how the astrophage works and is immediately drafted into Project Hail Mary (roll credits!) where he is informed that the astrophage seems to be consuming many stars in our neighborhood of the galaxy except one, Tau Ceti, almost 12 light years away. The plan is for a ship powered by engines that leverage the properties of the astrophage to travel there, try and figure out what's made that star immune, then send probes back to Earth with their findings. Since they'll only have time to make enough fuel to get the ship and crew there, it will be a one-way ticket, a suicide mission. Grace's job is to prep the science and train the crew. So why is he there?
These questions are interrupted by the arrival of Blip A (as the Hail Mary's computer labels the radar ping), a huge alien ship that an understandably panicked Grace tries to flee from, finally giving up and coming to a halt. With the Hail Mary stationary, radar detects Blip B, an object "tossed" from Blip A. He goes out and catches it and thus begins communication via models with the alien ship culminating in a tunnel being constructed by Blip A to connect the two ships.
This is when Grace makes first contact with intelligent alien life in the form of a five-legged creature that appears to be made of rock with no visible eyes or face, looking like a literal stone crab. He names this alien Rocky (because, you know...) and they begin to figure out how to communicate. Rocky "speaks" in cooing musical tones, so Grace cobbles together a translator program on a laptop, eventually giving it a voice (James Ortiz, who was also the lead puppeteer of Rocky) allowing for this odd couple of sole survivors - Rocky's crewmates died of radiation exposure due to their race, the Eridians, not even knowing about radiation while being able to build interstellar starships - to join forces to try and save their respective worlds.
The rest of the movie briskly races through their efforts to figure out how the astrophage can be stopped leading to them sciencing the sh*t out of the problem and encountering some hairy situations trying to gather samples and coping with fuel leaks that threaten to end their trips. It's a foregone conclusion that they'll figure something out because no one makes a movie which ends with failure and everyone dyin - yeah, yeah, Knowing, Don't Look Up, and Bugonia notwithstanding - so whether the movie succeeds or not is in the execution. Sadly, this is where the problems are found.
What Goddard brilliantly did in adapting The Martian (which I, miracle of miracles, also read) was to condense the novel's often excessive passages of sciencing the sh*t out of problems down understandable concepts explained by Mark Watney (Matt Damon, The Martian) via video logs which he presumes will be gathered by whomever picks up his body. The problem here is that either he overly simplified or directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller edited out so much of so many important details that the first thing I asked the missus in the car after the show was whether she was able to understand what was happening?
Thanks to having read the book, I understood what the passing references represented, but in practice many critical details are so quickly glided over I really wonder if non-bookies understood what was happening. For a movie that runs 2-1/2 hours and uses the vlog format more for comedic effect than a stealth exposition mechanism, this is a disappointing omission that leaves the non-booked viewers outside the drama. While overexplaining like the audience is stupid isn't good, fast-balling very important details past people just once is worse.
Another huge difference from The Martian is the very narrow point-of-view as we spend 85% of the time with Grace and Rocky and when we do flashback to Earth they oddly choose to do almost nothing to characterize the, um, characters. His deceased comrades (Ken Leung, Lost, and Milana Vayntrub, Amy from the AT&T commercials) get a few lines so their deaths mean nothing. The closest we get to a humanizing moment is when Stratt sings a Harry Styles song at karaoke to show Grace she's not just a humorless East German taskmaster. Compare that to The Martian where we bounced from Watney on Mars to his fellow crewmates dealing with what happened to the folks at NASA on Earth trying to figure out how to rescue him. Everyone got fairly fleshed out, even Donald Glover's weird autistic astrophysicist who comes up with the way to save Watney. Somehow, Goddard, Lord, and Miller made all the wrong cuts with an already thin cast.
It's a testament to Gosling's talents (which sometimes don't seem that apparent) that the fact we feel anything and how to relate to a rock monster is due to him carrying this movie on his back. Matt Damon was good in his role, but he wasn't the central load-bearing pillar the whole show rested upon. Gosling's performance deftly sets up the humdinger of a reveal of how he ended up on the mission; a detail that the missue was NOT at all happy about along with the final scenes even though they are what happened in the novel and were quite a shock in print as well.
The success of Project Hail Mary (currently grossing over $600M globally) is being pointed to by some as a rebuke to failed Lucasfilm vandal Kathleen Kennedy who fired the pair from Solo, bringing in Ron Howard to reshoot most of the movie, costing so much it was the only money-losing Star Wars movie (until perhaps The Mandalorian & Grogu coming soon). But I'm not totally sold on their direction because it feels like they cut a lot of plot meat in favor of less pertinent material. I saw a video of them showing what all the various premium large format (e.g. IMAX, 4DX, etc.) presentations would provide for epic viewing, but I saw it in regular plain old movie style and there is very little material that would benefit from a giant extended image.
I'd be interested in seeing a rumored extended cut of Project Hail Mary to see if they balance the plot better - the extended cut of The Martian was pretty good; more of good things - but I have to say that I went into the theater expecting to eventually buy this in 4K and now I'm not sure if I will. While not bad, it feels like it should've been and could've been so much better. To say it like Rocky would, "Disappoint. Disappoint. Disappoint."
Score: 7/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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