Film Pick of the Week: Project Hail Mary - review by Yvette Huddleston
Project Hail Mary Prime Video, review by Yvette Huddleston
Ryan Gosling’s easy charm and everyman relatability is a huge asset in this ambitious, if a tad too long, sci-fi adventure based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel.
Gosling plays popular high school science teacher Dr Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist, who had an earlier high-flying career which was thwarted by the fact that the scientific establishment was not ready for his radical ideas. Set in the near-future when Earth is under threat from the carelessness of humanity, the film opens in 2032 with Grace awaking from an induced coma. He’s on a spaceship, the rest of the crew (two others) are dead and Grace has no clear recollection of how he came to be on board. He hunts through items he finds on the ship and his own personal belongings and those of his colleagues for clues about the sequence of events that led to the situation in which he now finds himself.
This all slowly unfolds in flashback at various points in the narrative. With the discovery of a so-called ‘Petrova line’ of infra-red light stretching between the Sun and Venus containing a substance known as ‘astrophage’ which was starting to grow at an alarming rate on the surface of the Sun and causing it to dim. This would result in catastrophic global cooling within thirty years. A team of scientists, the Petrova Taskforce, headed up by efficient German technocrat Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, effortlessly brilliant as always) are on the case but they have come to a bit of standstill. Stratt recruits Grace because of his background in astrobiology and soon he is making significant headway in identifying the composition and properties of astrophage. A space mission is proposed, which is basically a last-ditch attempt to save the Earth and, despite his insistence that he is not the right man for the job, Grace ends up as part of the three-person crew, essentially becoming an astronaut against his wishes.
These sequences are interspersed throughout the main narrative which focuses on Grace’s relationship with a friendly alien creature that looks like a spider made out of stone, which Grace names Rocky (voiced by James Oritz, also one of the puppeteers operating Rocky). He too is alone on his spaceship, the rest of his crew having perished, and the two begin to work together to try and save their respective planets. Thought-provoking, profound and often funny, this is one not to miss.