{"id":645908,"date":"2026-03-10T16:06:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-10T16:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/645908\/"},"modified":"2026-03-10T16:06:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T16:06:13","slug":"ryan-gosling-in-derivative-space-adventure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/645908\/","title":{"rendered":"Ryan Gosling in Derivative Space Adventure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThere are clich\u00e9s that critics go back to, and when I realize I\u2019m guilty of overusing one (sometimes once can be too often), I\u2019ll vow never to use it again. Here\u2019s one I did that with: lauding something as \u201cthe movie we need right now.\u201d That\u2019s a phrase so cringe I\u2019m ashamed I ever used it. The reason I bring this up is that \u201cProject Hail Mary<\/a>\u201d is a cosmic adventure that feels diagrammed, if not programmed, to be The Movie We Need Right Now.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a lavishly scaled feel-good environmental outer-space thriller, starring Ryan Gosling<\/a> as a science geek who is sent many lightyears away to save Earth. So it\u2019s a movie that recalls such lone-astronaut-in-the-void hits as \u201cGravity\u201d and \u201cThe Martian.\u201d (It\u2019s adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, who wrote the book \u201cThe Martian\u201d is based on.) The film was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who started off as animators (\u201cThe Lego Movie\u201d) and have the skills to turn the mysteries of space into a catchy techno fantasy. Gosling, who has already anchored one space-travel movie (Damien Chazelle\u2019s unfairly maligned 2018 Neil Armstrong drama \u201cFirst Man\u201d), makes the hero, Ryland Grace, a charismatic space bro, sheepish and funny and relatable. And the movie, which turns on Ryland\u2019s relationship with an alien who joins him onboard, is like \u201cE.T. the Extra-Terrestrial\u201d remade as an intergalactic buddy movie. \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d wants to be the kind of great escape we need right now, and I have no doubt that many will hail it as one.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo forgive me if I say that it\u2019s not a very good movie. There\u2019s certainly an abstract commercial grandeur to it. I saw it on an IMAX screen (it will open on many of those), where it becomes the kind of bedazzling warm bath your eyeballs can sink right into. But here\u2019s the rub. \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d is way too long (two hours and 36 minutes), because there\u2019s not much variation to it. It\u2019s baggy and incredibly derivative of movies you\u2019ve seen before \u2014 like \u201cInterstellar,\u201d from which it lifts the premise of a space voyage as the last chance for human survival (in this case, the sun and other stars are dying, which means that we\u2019ve got to travel to the lone star that isn\u2019t in order to figure out why).<\/p>\n

\n\tMore crucially, everything to do with the onboard alien is far too cute and formulaic. We don\u2019t think so at first, because his spacecraft is a daunting dazzler (it looks like a giant oil rig made of pick-up sticks), and the creature doesn\u2019t have one of those beguiling faces. In fact, it has no face at all. It\u2019s made of rock (it looks like the Thing recast as a five-legged spider), with a flat slate where its features should be. How will Ryland and the alien, who he nicknames Rocky, communicate? By mimicking each other\u2019s body poses. Then by hooking the alien up to a computer, which translates his thoughts into one-liners that, within half an hour, are adorable enough to be sitcom-worthy. I should add that there are hugs. Too many of them. \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d never stops figuring out ways to make you fall in love with it.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe film opens with Ryland waking up in the spaceship, after decades of lying in an induced coma; he\u2019s got greasy long hair and a beard, and doesn\u2019t remember who he is or how he got there. But it will all come back to him. His two colleagues, including the ship\u2019s captain, have both died in hypersleep. The film then flashes back to Earth, where we\u2019re given the elaborate \u201cInterstellar\u201d setup (in this case, it\u2019s global cooling), and we get to know Ryland as the antic misunderstood genius he is.<\/p>\n

\n\tHe\u2019s a middle-school science teacher in nubby sweaters, because his research as a molecular biologist was rejected by the establishment as too radical. But it turns out that he was right about everything. When the sun begins to lose heat, he\u2019s recruited by the powers that be in Washington, represented by Eva Stratt (Sandra H\u00fcller<\/a>), an official of stoic Euro command who\u2019s the head of the Hail Mary project to save Earth. A mysterious line has been found linking Venus and the sun. It\u2019s dubbed the Petrova line, and Ryland discovers that it\u2019s made up of single-cell organisms, called Astrophage, that can be used as rocket fuel. That\u2019s how they\u2019ll be able to travel to Tau Ceti, a thriving star about a zillion miles away. Ryland is only supposed to be a consultant. That he ends up as part of the onboard mission hinges on a twist of desperate treachery.<\/p>\n

\n\tGosling\u2019s performance in the Earth sections is quite winning, because he plays Ryland as an anxious brainiac who\u2019s in over his head. But one of the key flaws of Drew Goddard\u2019s screenplay is that once Ryland is on the ship, that neurotic aspect of him isn\u2019t sustained. It kind of melts away, so that he\u2019s just Ryan Gosling, icon of witty golden-god valor. (He has no flight training but masters the ship in no time.) The film feels padded, whether it\u2019s stopping in its tracks for Eva to do a full-blown karaoke version of Harry Styles\u2019 \u201cSign of the Times\u201d or spilling over into a finale that doesn\u2019t know where to end. The sentimental dilemma of whether Ryan, at one point, is going to go forward with the mission or turn the ship around to save Rocky is string-pulling of a very generic order. \u201cProject Hail Mary\u201d will likely be a hit, but the movie we need right now \u2014 or, really, anytime \u2014 is one whose drama extends beyond its ability to push our buttons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are clich\u00e9s that critics go back to, and when I realize I\u2019m guilty of overusing one (sometimes…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":645909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[28],"tags":[171,53,23897,23898,256071,67,132,68],"class_list":["post-645908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-project-hail-mary","tag-ryan-gosling","tag-sandra-hu00fcller","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116205740764634550","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=645908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/645908\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/645909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=645908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=645908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=645908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}