Project Hail Mary is Disney’s greatest mistake of the last decade. There should already be a theme park dedicated to the movie! Instead, Bob Iger has only himself to blame, watching Kathleen Kennedy and the Star Wars brass fire Hail Mary’s directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, for “creative differences” for Solo, souring that relationship forever. In that messy IP purchasing Igor didn’t realize the amazing run the directing duo were about to go on as maybe our best family movie makers in the business, miring Disney into IP hell mostly since. Man I want to see Lord & Miller’s Han Solo so badly!
Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up, alone, on the Hail Mary spacecraft, close to another sun Tau Ceti’s orbit (his other crewmates, sadly, didn’t wake up with him). The spaceship is called Hail Mary thanks to project designer Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), who recruits Gosling as one of many scientists to try to figure out how to stop an infrared line called the Petrova Line from dimming Earth’s Sun (Tau Ceti is the only star NOT dimming). Dealing with some memory loss and what to do next, Dr. Grace notices a larger spaceship approaching his little one, mimicking its movements. After a few attempts to communicate, the other spaceship forms a bridge, allowing Dr. Grace to meet an alien (puppetted and voiced by James Ortiz) on the same star saving journey he was on, also alone. Looking like a bunch of rocks put together, Grace gives him the most inspiring of of names: Rocky.
What Phil Lord and Christopher Miller accomplish with Project Hail Mary is movie magic. In interviews I heard them say they wanted to make something like E.T. for a new generation to watch and be inspired by. Well, thank goodness the boys gave us a hail mary like this one instead of this one. How did they do it? First off, they loved The Martian like most of us did, so they got Drew Goddard to pen another Andy Weir adaptation (he wrote the book). Goddard has a foot in the book and movie worlds, so he simplifies the novel but maintains the essence of the story, a tricky task only the greats can pull off. Visually, the movie is marvelous mixture of the big and small. When we have to see outer space, the digital effects team really makes you feel the scope of the situation, in both grandeur, and in peril when necessary. But most of the time is spent on the Hail Mary or the bridge with Ryland and Rocky; for that design, Lord & Miller went hyper practical, using incredible puppet and wire work with real sets to simulate zero g solitary life in space. Rocky’s habitat is particularly inspired, a mixture of geometry and geology in the best ways possible.
The very last piece was making sure casting directors Nicole Abellera and Jeanne McCarthy nailed Grace and Rocky. For Ryland, Ryan Gosling ascends to the place the great movie stars like Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, or Robert Redford all go at some point: alone on the big screen. At this point in his career, Gosling was ready to take it on; Ryland is probably not far from Gosling’s real personality, charming and quippy, but ready and willing to make a fool of himself over and over again to sell the story. At its heart Dr. Grace is the classic unsure hero who has to rise to the challenge: a Sam Gamgee or Neville Longbottom if you will, and Gosling, Goddard, Lord, and Miller make sure we see the transformation over the course of the mission. But it can’t just be all Gosling: at some point he needs Rocky to back him up. I don’t know much about James Ortiz, but everything he does here will amaze, amaze, amaze, you, to the point I started looking up best supporting actor odds even though we never see him. That’s cause Ortiz’s voice and puppet work is nothing short of masterful, creating a real being with agency and complexities with random movements and limited vocabulary. As great as Gosling is, the big emotional scene of the movie belongs to Rocky, nearly bringing me to tears because I completely forgot I was watching a puppet do something: that was Rocky, also living up to his Italian Stallion roots.
I’ll never forget I was in the dinosaur craze at age 8…exactly as Jurassic Park was about to release in the theaters. That’s a movie experience I NEVER forgot, blowing my little mind, and making me want to go back to see films, over and over again. For all the parents with kids around 8 or so, remember that feeling? Project Hail Mary will blow your child’s mind, and have them dreaming big at the possibilities of where their lives can go. And all this because Kathleen Kennedy didn’t like Alden Ehrenreich. Move over Grogu…Rocky’s the real star I want the kids to fall in love with!