Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling befriends an alien in a shameless crowd-pleaser

“So I met an alien…” Project Hail Mary is a shameless crowd-pleaser, though one aimed at a demographically specific crowd. Cloying and ingratiating, its brand of humour, which dominates the film, apart from the odd weepy bit and the occasional action scene, is distinctively millennial. To be even more specific, possibly too specific, it is Reddit; it is a rage comic brought to life – rage comics being a crude, cringey meme format of the High Millennial 2010s. It is also shamelessly similar to The Martian (2015), based on a book by the same novelist (Andy Weir) and adapted by the same screenwriter (Drew Goddard), sharing the same comic style and the same premise: a lone astronaut, stranded in outer space, problem-solves his way out of certain death, all the while cracking wise to the audience, technically without breaking the fourth wall, via video diaries. The difference is that this time our man finds a friend up there, an extra-terrestrial he calls Rocky. 

As in Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s Sunshine (2007), the Galaxy’s stars, including our Sun, are dimming, auguring the extinction of life on Earth, and so a rocket is sent to the only unaffected one to discover its secret. The film begins with Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a science teacher, waking from an induced coma to discover that only he has survived the voyage, with the story till then told in flashback, helpfully breaking up what would otherwise be a one-man show with scenes of Grace being recruited by stereotypically German project manager Eva (Sandra Hüller), practically the only other human character. Once Grace has his bearings, and has been reminded that there is no way of communicating with Earth, and no chance of return, he discovers he is not alone. Likewise the sole survivor of a long journey, Rocky, a multi-limbed creature with no face, limited sight and not especially dexterous hands, shows up in his own spaceship because his planet faces the same fate and has placed its hopes in the same solution. 

From this point the problem-solving intensifies, starting with Grace and Rocky having to find a way to communicate, which leads ultimately to Rocky being given a computer-generated voice (that of James Ortiz), before they are able to collaborate on the bigger problem of scooping up some gunk from a nearby planet that will neutralise the different gunk that is causing the stars to fade out. The relationship between Grace and Rocky is the film’s core – far more so than that between Grace and Eva – and it is relentlessly cute. One of the first ways they communicate is by Rocky mimicking Grace’s dance moves, with Grace apparently dabbing. Ryan Gosling sells it, just as Matt Damon did in The Martian, and even the most curmudgeonly among us will find things to laugh at. 

What is more doubtful is whether directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have managed to extract these laughs without taking away from the humanity-dooming peril that the film is also striving to conjure up. Consummate industry professionals, Lord and Miller have navigated the IP mines of 21st century Hollywood with aplomb, straddling animation and live action, notably with the Jump Street movies (2012, 2014). But they are not in the line of Spielberg, Cameron or, indeed, Ridley Scott, director of The Martian, and the direction of Project Hail Mary is indifferent. Plot points are fumbled, the big action sequence is busy and hard to follow, and there is no sense of the strangeness of outer space, no matter how many ahhh-ing choirs they fill the soundtrack with. 

In an odd and revealing scene with Eva, we learn that intelligent, decent, handsome Grace, youngish though not that young, has no friends or family of any kind – we know he had a girlfriend, once. The scene is odd because this is not treated as at all odd, and revealing because it makes his friendship with the childlike Rocky, and so the film, more legible as a fantasy of fatherhood, via some kind of male virgin birth (‘Project Hail Mary’, indeed). Seen in this light, the harrowing scene in which Grace is shown not to have consented to be sent into space – stern Eva has to drag him kicking and screaming into taking responsibility – reveals another aspect of the same thing. In the end, Grace appreciates what Eva has done for him, but Eva is not part of the fantasy itself; the fantasy is fatherhood as second boyhood, sans wives and mothers.

► Project Hail Mary is in UK cinemas now.