What makes a movie ‘beautiful?’ A brilliant colour palette, spot-on contrast of light and dark or perhaps a striking landscape? Whatever the answer is, there has certainly been no lack of people calling Amazon’s newest science fiction movie, “Project Hail Mary,” an ideal possessor for this prestigious title.
“Project Hail Mary” follows the story of Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, as he finds himself in a spacecraft light-years away from Earth with no memory of how he got there. Bits of remembrance come periodically, and we soon learn the stakes of the situation. Back in our solar system, an alien microorganism called “Astrophage” or “star-eater” has, as the name suggests, begun to consume energy from the Sun, threatening an end-stage ice age and extinction of all life on Earth. Gosling’s mission is to discover why only one star out of hundreds in proximity, Tau Ceti, seems not to be infected by these light-eating bacteria.
Miraculously, this movie has received near-complete positive reviews. Its critical esteem appears almost unanimous, from all sides, and it has received a seemingly record-breaking amount of good press. And to top it off, the film was adapted from a novel written by Andy Weir, the same author who wrote “The Martian,” which was also adapted into a movie and received considerable acclaim. Book-to-movie adaptations are infamously difficult to accomplish, but directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller of “Project Hail Mary” managed to exceed this low bar substantially, and Weir managed to exceed it twice.
Personally, I found that “The Martian” felt decidedly more high-stakes in its entirety. While watching it, I was literally on the edge of my seat for a good portion. On the other hand, while “Project Hail Mary” observably had a scarcity of these extreme high-stakes moments, it provided in many other aspects, most notably emotionally. It was, to say the least, moving.
What really stuck out about “Project Hail Mary” was the humour. The dialogue between Gosling and his alien friend Rocky, voiced by James Ortiz, was the perfect mix of witty and ridiculous, always with the perfect comedic timing. It could have just been the electricity in the theatre, but this film seemed to get a laugh out of everyone.
“Project Hail Mary” is brimming with movement to such an extent that no two frames are exactly the same. When I look at photos of movie stills depicting Gosling in space, it is so unfamiliar and foreign… It is as if I am looking at the marketing for a completely different movie than the one I watched. It doesn’t do the film justice, tantamount to the select few who have journeyed to space, maintaining that seeing the earth from a photograph is incomparable to experiencing it in person.
I loved “Project Hail Mary,” and I would advise anyone interested in watching it to do so immediately. It is a movie theatre movie. I cannot stress enough that this film would not have the same effect when watching it at home. The movie feeds off of the audience, and vice versa, just the same as Astrophage feeds off of the Sun.
