Ryan Gosling and a sentient rock star in Project Hail Mary

Milo Zinser-Trudel, Reporter
Featured Image: Amazon MGM Studios

It’s hard to imagine a less likely movie star than a sentient five-legged rock. It’s even harder when said rock has no face and communicates primarily through guttural wails. However, Rocky, one of the main characters of Project Hail Mary, manages to pull it off perfectly while bringing both touching emotion and wacky comedy to the film.

Project Hail Mary (which is, as I had to explain to my very disappointed Catholic grandmother, not a church fundraiser) was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, best known for 21 Jump Street (2012) and The Lego Movie (2014). It follows Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up to find he’s the only living person on a spaceship called the Hail Mary, light-years away from Earth, with no memory of how he got there.

Through flashbacks, it’s revealed that Grace, a middle school science teacher and former biologist, is in space as part of a massive worldwide effort called Project Hail Mary, sent to find a why to prevent Earth’s sun from rapidly dimming, which would kill billions of people. Just as Grace’s mission is beginning, he meets Rocky, who was sent on a similar one by his species.

Grace is played by more traditional movie star Ryan Gosling, who is the only human on screen for more than half of the film. Despite the obvious weirdness of his main scene partner being an alien puppet, he brings incredible range to his performance. His interactions with Rocky feel genuine and are consistently funny, from learning to communicate and work together to their eventual Abbott and Costello-style exchanges:

ROCKY: Words of encouragement!
GRACE: You can’t just say “words of encouragement.”
ROCKY: Words of great encouragement!

While the human supporting cast appears quite minimally, they flesh out Grace’s backstory well in flashback sequences. Sandra Hüller in particular stands out as Eva Stratt, the harsh German bureaucrat who runs Project Hail Mary. Stratt serves as a deadpan foil for Grace, while her few brief moments of emotion ground the joke-filled story. The flashback sequences, which are the only times an actor other than Gosling is on screen, slowly answer the obvious question: how did a middle school teacher wind up in space?

Compared to other “hard sci-fi” space movies, Project Hail Mary is noticeably more vibrant, with high-contrast visuals that looked incredible on a theater screen. I saw the film in a massive IMAX theatre (in its full 1.43:1 aspect ratio), and then again at the New Canaan Playhouse (cropped to a narrower 2:1) and it was a captivating experience both times.

The fast-moving handheld camera work by Dune cinematographer Greig Fraser does a lot to make the small space aboard the Hail Mary feel alive. There’s obviously a lot of CGI, but also impressive practical effects, like the puppet used for many of Rocky’s scenes. According to co-director Christopher Miller, the production didn’t use any green screens, shooting space scenes against massive backdrops instead. Under all of it, the synth-pop score by Spider-Verse composer Daniel Pemberton backs up the on-screen action perfectly.

Like The Martian (2016), Project Hail Mary is based on a book by Andy Weir, and both movies were written by Drew Goddard (Weir and Goddard are clearly the masters of the “wise-cracking scientist alone in space” genre). There are obvious influences from that and other space films throughout, with the spaceship design resembling Interstellar (2014) and the spacesuit Gosling wears being a near-carbon copy of the designs from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

Where Project Hail Mary diverges from these other films is in tone. The Martian and Interstellar are tense dramas, while 2001, despite being a stunning film, is a slow burn to a comical degree. This is a fast-paced comedy, with its serious moments (Grace waking up alone with amnesia, which is terrifying to imagine) always immediately followed by comedic ones (Grace stumbling around screaming “Am I smart?,” which is painfully relatable). The entire film is, to quote Rocky, “amaze amaze amaze.”