Project Hail Mary makes you think of all the space movies you’ve ever loved, and for the most part, that’s a good thing. However, it can also lead to nitpicking.

It isn’t revealing too much, because it’s been a part of the film’s advertising campaign, that the character played by Ryan Gosling, Dr. Ryland Grace, meets an alien with whom he might work to discover why a substance that Earth scientists have called “astrophage” is potentially killing all the stars, both of their suns included. This alien, who resembles a spider made of rocks, is called Rocky, and is voiced by James Ortiz.

When a movie like Arrival – not technically a space movie in that it takes place entirely on Earth – deals with the issue of communicating with alien life, it goes through a painstaking process of plausible science to imagine what it would require to develop a language the two sides can use to understand each other. Project Hail Mary? We use the term “hand wave” to describe any element of a script that it isn’t important to get hung up on, that you just have to accept so you can get to the larger and more fun points of the experience. And so PHM totally hand waves this.

But for a movie that prides itself on at least some form of legitimate science – this is, after all, based on a book by the same man (Andy Weir) who wrote The Martian, also adapted into a movie by Drew Goddard – it’s difficult not to get stuck on the idea that a single astronaut, who is not even really an astronaut and is really not a linguistic specialist, manages to develop, in a comparatively short amount of time, such a nuanced language system with his rocky friend that they can understand each other at every moment, and even make jokes.

Fortunately, the Grace-Rocky relationship is quite a fun one, as is anything Gosling brings to the screen in this or any other movie. Then when you add that the film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, with a screenplay by Cabin in the Woods scribe Goddard, well, try telling the part of your brain hung up on science that it’s not enjoying itself. You won’t make a very convincing argument.

Astrophage has been discovered on a line between the sun and Venus, and it’s no coincidence that the sun is dimming – a phenomenon which, if continued, will lower the temperature on Earth by ten or 15 degrees in 30 years, and lead to the extinction of all life on the planet. Grace, a disgraced former astrophysicist whose discredited theories led him to teaching high school science, is recruited to study the substance and try to figure out why it is having this impact on stellar bodies. His recruiter is Eva Stratt, played by Sandra Huller.

Although there’s no immediate theory on why this substance, which is also a powerful energy source, should be doing what it’s doing, there’s a glimmer of hope: a star called Tau Ceti, which is the only star they can identify that is not dimming. Lacking in other options, they need to send a crew to glean whatever information they can from the healthy star, even though it will take a decade to get there, and any small logistical failure could mean the immediate extinguishing of Earth’s only hope. In the parlance of American football, it’s a “hail Mary” — a reckless throw deep downfield with time expiring, in the dim hope it will result in a game-winning score.

Project Hail Mary also has a beguiling narrative structure. It doesn’t tell the above story in the order I’ve told it here. It opens on Grace awakening from a medically induced coma, designed to allow him to survive the trip with minimal sustenance, to find the only other two crew members on the ship with a red readout DECEASED on their life support monitors. If that’s a spoiler, it’s a spoiler that occurs within the film’s first 90 seconds — and is another thing that can be gleaned from the advertising campaign.

That sets up a structure where we go back and forth between the ship, also called Hail Mary, and Grace’s time on Earth learning about astrophage and preparing for a mission he was never expecting to be on, as both plots proceed forward chronologically. Each glimpse into the past provides stakes for what the suddenly alone Grace — but not for long — is trying to accomplish, with a massive stringy beard and only a few shreds of his sanity remaining.

The above gives a hint about exactly what Gosling is bringing to this performance, which is everything in his toolbox. Gosling has become one of the most charming stars in Hollywood on the strength of his knack for both verbal and physical humour, and both get a chance to shine when he spends a lot of time talking (at first) to himself and trying to figure out a ship that is as foreign to him as Greek philosophy is to an otter. Matt Damon was funny in The Martian as well, but this role is conceived more primarily as comedic, which is right in the wheelhouse of the directors and screenwriter. Gosling is more than capable of delivering on this choice, and keeps us in stitches, even as these enormous stakes loom. Ortiz as Rocky makes a very good companion, his work kind of in the tradition of amiable shipboard AI that says things in funny ways.

The space stuff may not break ground — any movie like this also puts us in mind of Gravity — but it’s sufficiently accomplished to produce awe at every turn. The ship stuff feels plausible, all except the aforementioned linguistics, and just as a reminder of what Grace and Rocky are trying to save, there’s a giant immersive chamber where the crew can watch images of waves crashing against the beach and other Earth scenes — in a manner that will remind one of IMAX, for which much of this movie was shot.

So if the ease of communication is the only asterisk-worthy quibble, why not a fuller endorsement of Project Hail Mary? The problem is that this movie is at least 30 minutes longer than it needs to be at 156 minutes. It suffers from Lord of the Rings: Return of the King syndrome, with one apparent ending after another becoming recontextualised each time the next new one arrives. There’s a rather important reveal in the past story that should take another 15 minutes at least to tidy up, even though we’ve already started to imagine that the credits are about to roll — our first indication that Lord and Miller haven’t gotten the pacing quite right and have tried our patience more than they needed to.

Having too much of a good thing is never, ultimately, a bad thing. Which is why Project Hail Mary should be a similar sized hit to The Martian and other films in which a team works to solve a problem in space — even if some of that team is hundreds of millions of miles away, and ten years in the past.

 

Project Hail Mary opens in cinemas today.