Film review: Project Hail Mary (plus ticket giveaway)

For all of Hollywood’s insidious practices, it’s good to remind ourselves that the machine exists because a group of very business savvy-people perfected a formula to engineer entertainment. And make no mistake, there is a formula here. Scripts are analysed to the page, perfected to keep the attention span of everyone in the audience engaged. Scenes are built with a “beat” that keeps the motion flowing. Visually it just needs the bare minimum, a sheen of professionalism and to cut images every few seconds so no one loses the plot which remains king. A board of artists, marketers and businessmen analyse the comedy, the drama and the tension, and test screenings provide the market research they need to justify the investment of millions of dollars from an investor’s fund that expects considerable returns on the first weekend of release. It may sound cynical, but I really do admire how this side of cinema created an actual industry. Because art is still there, but there’s a financial element that bothers the purist and yet it requires a great deal of technical experience to pull off.

No one working right now in Hollywood is as good at this as Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Drew Goddard. The first two, a team of filmmakers whose writing achievements elevated meta humour to inventive plot turns (the 21 Jump Street reboot, the Lego Movie, the animated Across the Spider-verse films, all terrifically enjoyable blockbusters). The latter is a master of plotting with a finger on the pulse of millennial sensibility who started his career in generational TV staples like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost and moved on to make one of the most original horror comedies of the last twenty years: Cabin in The Woods.

Goddard also wrote the script for The Martian, that Ridley Scott film where Matt Damon is stranded in Mars. It’s based on a bestseller by Andy Weir that framed itself around trying to reason scientifically that it’s possible to terraform the red planet, but everyone remembers it for being a harmless crowd-pleaser. So much so that Goddard was the only choice to adapt Weir’s second book, and in a stroke of genius, the producers gave Lord and Miller the director’s chair. So, a highly popular book adapted by a team of filmmakers who are probably the best in the business at harnessing entertainment? Bring on the accountants, this can make or break Tinseltown.

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland, a passionate science schoolteacher in a near future that’s not threatened by incompetent world leaders and corporate greed, but by the fact that the sun is dying faster than we expected. An old paper Ryland wrote catches the eye of a multi-national organisation trying to save the planet, helmed by Eva (Sandra Hüller), the most German person to have ever existed. I joked to a German friend of mine, in German, that I couldn’t speak German. He replied, “But you just did, that’s very confusing, you shouldn’t say that”. Eva is that kind of German.

The scenes on Earth are intercut with Ryland in space. He just woke up alone from a self-induced coma somewhere in the deep space, he lost some of his memory and is struggling to move. Little by little his memory of how he ended up there comes back, shining a light on his mission – all the stars in the nearby galaxy are dying except for one, so Ryland has to join a team of astronauts on a one-way trip to find out why and send his findings back to save our planet.

For someone who doesn’t understand science at all, this all looks very real. Weir famously wrote The Martian to be as scientifically accurate as possible, and that language is perfectly adapted to Project Hail Mary. But while all the ideas of cellular beings attracted to light to eat the sun are sold to the audience, the twist comes when Ryland finds another lifeform, shaped like an arachnid made of rocks, that communicates through strange soundwaves. Think Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival but as a buddy comedy hangout movie.

It just so happens that that alien is also alone in his spaceship and had travelled there for the exact same reasons. So, Ryland needs to figure out how to communicate with the being, who he names Rocky, before joining forces in figuring out how to save their respective planets.

If this sounds a lot, it is. Project Hail Mary is a hefty two-and-a-half hours long, but the pedigree of the team behind it means that they perfected the scenes and the beats to keep our attention through. It’s a breezy enjoyable viewing, paced with almost mathematical detail. Is there anything wrong with that? Absolutely not. This is prime Hollywood at its best. Gosling is cast because right now, he’s the best at merging emotional star with comedy beat. The pop culture references sing to Gen-Xers and Millennials who slogged through films catering to a lower common denominator. It does feel like this is the first ‘millennials are adults’ sort of film, which says a lot about their arrested development when most of them are pushing 40.

There’s also a permeating optimism that seems at odds with 2026, but it makes it at least refreshing. Remember when nations of the world got together and spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a mission to save our planet? Me neither, but it’s good to imagine it would be possible. And that’s the fiction part of this sci-fi story. Because I buy Gosling building a black box to look for fluorescent alien cell forms, and a plan to collect particles from the atmosphere of an inhospitable planet. But nations of the world looking at no expense to save our planet? Yeah, as if…

Verdict: 4 out of 5
For fans of science-fiction with a capital S and youthful sense of wonder. There’s not much depth to this, just 150 minutes of pure enjoyable entertainment.

Ticket giveaway – I Swear

LSJ and Transmission Films have 10 double passes for the upcoming British comedy drama, I SWEAR.

Based on the true story, I SWEAR is a moving, uplifting account of the life of John Davidson, a Tourette Syndrome campaigner who grew up with the condition in 1980s Scotland, at a time when it was little known and misunderstood. Featuring outstanding performances from Robert Aramayo, Peter Mullan, Shirley Henderson and Maxine Peake, I SWEAR is a frank, funny and touching story about the transformative power of friendship and community. In cinemas March 26. Watch the trailer here.

For a chance to win one of the double passes, email your LawID to journal@lawsociety.com.au with the subject line I SWEAR by Tuesday 24 March.