Project Hail Mary

It seems to me that, from time to time, we get the movie we need precisely when we need it. As the Eighties relentlessly shallowed out, Sigourney Weaver arrived in Aliens to remind us that our mommies really did love us. During the first Trump Administration, we got back-to-back Avengers movies, reminding us that all-pervasive evil can truly be resisted.

Now here we are, on the precipice of societal collapse, and we’ve never needed a feel-good movie more. Alas, Superman already dropped last year – and we desperately need something to shore us up before Dune 3 pummels us in December.

And out of the blue comes Project Hail Mary, from the same set of pens that inspired us with The Martian a decade ago. Sci-fi novelist Andy Wier and screenwriter Drew Goddard could not have timed it better: this gem isn’t just a feel-good movie; it’s every feel-good movie we’ve ever seen, all rolled into one.

The movie’s premise is fairly straightforward: the sun is beginning to die, as jillions of tiny space nasties have started eating it, leaving Earth too cold to live on in just a few decades. All the other stars in our galactic neck of the woods are likewise being eaten, with the exception of Tau Ceti. The Hail Mary here is an interstellar mission to find out why, in hopes that this information will provide a means of saving the sun.

That’s pretty goofy, but most feel-good movies are goofy, right? And those movies land best when the people in them are also goofy – as Ryan Gosling certainly is, in the role of Dr. Ryland Grace, a microbiology-genius-turned-middle-school-science-teacher who finds himself cajoled into joining the mission.

Gosling wisely eschews the I’m-too-sexy-for-my-trunks façade of his Barbie days in favor of a nerdy bed-headedness and quiet sadness that gently endears us – particularly when he wakes up on the ship as it nears Tau Ceti, his memory spotty and his crewmates dead. He is able to piece together what he’s doing there and why, and bears his staggering isolation with ironic calm: the loneliness of being over 11 light-years from home with no one to talk to isn’t that far afield of his normal existence.

And that loneliness soon abates, as another starship has arrived on exactly the same mission, to save their own world. Grace meets a tiny, multi-limbed alien who appears to be made of rock, imaginatively dubbing him “Rocky”, and suddenly we’re in a buddy movie.

And what a buddy movie it is! We fall in love with Rocky, right alongside Grace, as the two of them work out ways to communicate and collaborate. This accomplished, they begin working the problem, bonding as they go. They are both through-the-roof adorable, which bumps up our empathy all the more when things inevitably go wrong.

Woven into this delightful we gotta-fix-the-world tension are sober flashbacks to Earth, disclosing the scramble of Earth’s governments and scientists to save the sun and how Grace got roped into it all. These flashbacks (featuring a superb Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, Grace’s government handler) are a stark contrast to the warm, almost comedic tone of the events at Tau Ceti – deadly serious, gray in mood, even despairing. The world is getting colder and colder, and the life is being sucked out of everyone. Talk about your real-world metaphors.

Even at 2 1/2 hours, the movie rolls along gangbusters through several endings, and we’re left cheering – as we should be. Movies like this can’t end any other way; it’s just a question of how surprised we are, and in this case it’s quite a bit.

More than a few critics point out that Project Hail Mary, for all its excitement, dazzle and cleverness, doesn’t offer up anything new: in one critic’s words, it’s a “greatest-hits mix tape” of other cinematic treasures, including (but not limited to) E.T., Interstellar, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Apollo 13, Planet of the Apes, Cast Away, and… well, Rocky. Their DNA permeates this wonderful movie, imbuing it with charm and exhilaration and poignance. It gives us more than enough of what we really need.

Yet even this warm kinship doesn’t bottom-line it: we need to step out into the context of our world moment for that. Again, some movies come along right when we need them, and we need this one right now. Right now, we need to see the world uniting for the good of all; right now, we need to see strangers becoming friends, cooperating instead of othering; right now, we need everyday nobodies to become heroes. We need to keep believing these things are possible. Right now, Project Hail Mary has been the movie we’ve needed, right when we most need it.

The movie is breaking box office records, and is a shoo-in to sweep next year’s Academy Awards – and that’s kind of a shame. Of course everyone should see it, and of course it will deserve every honor bestowed – but all that celebrity somehow gilds the lily. Project Hail Mary’s true worth is in the hope it conveys, in its ability to remind us what really matters – and they don’t really have an Oscar for that.