DAN WEBSTER:
If there’s a movie critic who’s worth following these days, it’s Manohla Dargis of the New York Times. I respect others as well, from Time magazine’s Stephanie Zacharek to Variety’s Owen Gleiberman.
But Dargis is the one I consult most often. Not that I always agree with her. Sometimes, in fact, I vigorously disagree with her opinions. And that’s been true since her days at the Los Angeles Times.
What Dargis does well is to find simple, direct ways to describe a film or a director’s film style. And in the case of the movie Project Hail Mary, which was helmed by the directing duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—the guys responsible for, among other films, 2014’s The Lego Movie—she managed to coin the perfect adjective: “Spielbergian.”
As any fan of Steven Spielberg—and I am one—knows, he tends to make soft entertainment. Yes, he is the guy who made the Holocaust study Schindler’s List and the powerful World War II statement Saving Private Ryan. But when film historians look back at the man’s career, they’re likely to consider such films as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Jurassic Park as being most representative of his overall work.
It follows, then, that those films—especially the franchises that three of them spawned—have rocketed Spielberg into being the most successful movie director, at least in terms of money earned, in history. So why wouldn’t guys like Lord and Miller follow his game plan?
Of course, with Andy Weir’s best-selling novel to work with, their job turned out to be a whole lot easier. Weir first achieved fame with his 2011 novel The Martian that became a 2015 Ridley Scott blockbuster starring Matt Damon . His second novel, 2017’s Artemis, attracted the attention of Lord and Miller, but any potential adaptation of that book was put aside when Project Hail Mary was published in 2021.
And it’s easy to see why. While Artemis, which is set on the moon, has been described as “a heist narrative at heart,” Project Hail Mary is far similar to The Martian. It involves a character, the middle-school science teacher Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling) who is recruited—not completely voluntarily—for a project that, ultimately, requires him to use his knowledge and his wits not just to complete the project but to literally survive. Add in the fact that the novel and the movie evolve into an extraterrestrial buddy flick, and you have Spielberg’s trademark feel-good formula.
In telling Weir’s story, Lord and Miller play fast and loose with chronology. They begin with Grace waking up, similar to the characters in Ridley Scott’s Alien, from cryogenic sleep. Stricken with amnesia, he struggles to figure out where he is and how he got there—knowledge that slowly returns to him.
We, though, get filled in right away as the film takes us back to when Grace—a skilled molecular biologist who ran afoul of the leading scientists in his field—has been reduced to teaching children. But someone, including a no-nonsense administrator named Eva Stratt (played by the German actress Sandra Hüller), has read his work and realizes that Grace has the expertise needed to address a big problem, which is that something is draining power from our sun.
From there Project Hail Mary shifts from present to past, from Earth to space, as Grace discovers the source of the problem—a single-cell organism he calls “astrophage" —and is literally hijacked on a mission to a distant star to find out why it, amid so many others being devoured, manages to survive.
Soon enough, Grace finds himself paired with a spider-like alien creature whom he dubs Rocky (vocalized by James Ortiz), and the two become fast friends, each intent on saving their respective worlds—and each other as well.
As for the film overall, the special effects are state-of-the-art impressive, and Lord and Miller keep Weir’s story moving along well enough. The film’s two-hour-and-34-minute running time is a bit excessive, but as he has shown in the past, the always reliable Gosling can imbue a character with just the right shades of emotion, drama or comedy, to fit whatever the film requires.
It’s a necessary skill for any project, but especially for one that’s Spielbergian.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.
