Writer/director/producer duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have always had one foot in animation and one foot in live action. They met at Dartmouth doing sketch comedy in the ’00s and created Clone High for Cartoon Network, but their breakthrough was the 2009 animated film Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. They followed it up immediately with a live-action buddy comedy based on 21 Jump Street, and both films were big enough hits to spawn sequels. Since then, the friends have had more luck with animation, creating The Lego Movie series and winning an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. On the live action side, they’re most famous for getting fired by Lucasfilm while they were in the middle of shooting Solo. Ron Howard took over the troubled picture and delivered a solid, if unsurprising, space adventure film. But many of the kind of fans who post opinions on the internet have wondered over the years if the Han Solo story Lord and Miller would have made would have been something more than a mere sci-fi footnote.
After watching their new sci-fi film, Project Hail Mary, I can say that: 1) Kathleen Kennedy was right to fire them from Star Wars, and 2) Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film.
Based on a book by Andy Weir, the coder-turned-sci-fi writer whose book The Martian was adapted into a huge hit film by Ridley Scott, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as an astronaut who wakes up from cryosleep on a giant spaceship and can’t remember who he is, or what he is doing there. His first discovery is that all of his crewmates have died in transit, so he is all alone on a ship he doesn’t remember how to fly. His second discovery is that the ship is arriving at Tau Ceti, 13 light years from Earth. His third discovery is that he doesn’t have enough fuel to get home.
After figuring out his name is Ryland Grace, he remembers that he was an elementary school teacher on Earth. He recalls a classroom conversation where he had to explain to his students that the sun was slowly dimming because of an unknown phenomenon called the Petrova Line, a mysterious arc that connects the Sun with Venus. Soon after, he is contacted by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), the head of the European Space Agency. Grace has a Ph.D., and used to be a university exobiology researcher until he published a paper on the possibility of alien life that doesn’t require water. But the research that got him fired from his professorship is now invaluable, because the Petrova Line is caused by an extraterrestrial microorganism that is apparently eating the Sun. These Astrophages will dim the sunlight enough to kill all life on Earth in just a few decades.
As he’s absorbing the news that the fate of the human race depends on him, Grace discovers that there is another ship in the system, and it’s not from Earth. After the best meet-cute first contact sequence since Earth Girls Are Easy, Grace discovers that the other ship is also populated by the lone survivor of a solar rescue mission. He dubs his new spider-shaped, silicon-based alien friend Rocky (James Ortiz, voice and puppeteering), and the two set out together to save both of their respective worlds.
Despite the planetary-sized stakes, Lord and Miller keep the film light and breezy. Gosling is the perfect actor for Lord and Miller’s style. He’s quick on his feet, with a great improv sense. His seemingly limitless charisma helps paper over some of the story’s gaping plot holes. (Somehow, Rocky’s people created a nuclear reactor to power their interstellar spaceship while understanding neither radiation nor relativity.) The directors need someone like Gosling for their comedy-inflected style to connect with audiences, and it turns out those are exactly the combination of talents that Alden Ehrenreich, who played the young Han Solo in the directors’ ill-fated Star Wars spinoff, lacks.
To sum up, Solo was always doomed, but if you’re looking for a grand space adventure that’s fun to watch, Project Hail Mary is here for you.
Project Hail Mary
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