Project Hail Mary (Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, 2026)
A head-scratcher this one: too long to be a kids’ movie and too juvenile to be of value to adults. The images seem generic and the pace of editing doesn’t allow for any sense of fear or wonder that one would associate with the idea of being suspended alone in the vastness of space. The movie wholly depends upon Ryan Gosling’s comedic chops — he is such a gifted physical comedian — but two and a half hours of marvel-esque quipping and quacking has a numbing effect.
I didn’t mind all this wisecracking in The Martian, one, because Scott knows how to cut a film down to 90 minutes, and two, all the science talk is at best middle-school level: familiar and comprehensible. I am fine with the telling-not-showing because, save for the crippling anxiety, I remember nothing from school. Unfortunately, The Martian doesn’t know how to weave that exposition into the drama: all of Matt Damon’s yapping is basically his morning pages and none of those logs facilitate any progression in the plot. It’s just V-Sauce YouTube channel in space.
Coming back to Hail Mary: none of the exposition works because the science is just imaginary mumbo jumbo. I don’t know, understand or care about astrophage. And rather than ground this pseudo-science within a cogent human drama a la Interstellar (which is also imperfect) Lord and Miller resist complexity. The alien is an overeager over-intelligent golden retriever and I found this rock-with-legs annoying as the film went on. Lord and Miller are fundamentally uninterested in capturing scientific rigour nor are they interested in human feeling. Instead they’re busy chasing more laughs-per-minute.
Lastly, a word on the premise. In its last half(?) hour the film reveals that Grace (Gosling's character) was in fact an unwilling conscript on this mission, to the point where the ‘government’ tranquillised, kidnapped and shipped him away unconscious into outer-space. Not only does this ’twist’ fail to recast the events on the ship, it is played off as a fun anecdote with Grace, well, graceful for the government’s faith in him. What's more, the film hammers home the point that Grace has 'no one waiting for him back home.' Why flit between two timelines if everything is played straight? And if all this is not an endorsement of conscription by a police state I don’t know what is.
For all its faults The Martian is at least about the world coming together to save an annoying man from space because, well, he’s one of us. Hail Mary is about humanity jettisoning a man into space and saying, 'tick tock'.
There’s a more interesting movie in here, with Grace waking up in space a bitter misanthrope with the fate of humankind on his shoulders and knock-knock knocks the alien. The title: between a rock and hard place, ba dum tsss.