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James Mottram

2/5 stars
Ryan Gosling flies almost entirely solo in Project Hail Mary, a disappointingly derivative sci-fi mash-up of Interstellar, The Martian and Tom Hanks’ desert island drama Cast Away.
Gosling plays former teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes up on a spacecraft. Coming out of years of stasis, he is bleary-eyed and disoriented. With his two fellow crew members dead, he must figure out why he is on board.
Gradually, flashbacks reveal the truth: the sun is being attacked by an organism and, within the next 30 years, the Earth is expected to cool, causing desperate food shortages.
It emerges that he is on an exploratory trip – orchestrated by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), head of the Hail Mary project – to visit a planet seemingly resistant to this micro-organic attack. It is a one-way suicide mission, as there is not enough fuel to get back.


Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the film is adapted from the bestseller by Andy Weir, author of The Martian – famously turned into the 2015 Ridley Scott hit starring Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars.
Needless to say, the concepts are strikingly similar, firmly placing Project Hail Mary in the “intrepid survivor” category of films alongside All Is Lost and Gravity, where a person’s ingenuity is put to the test under the most extreme conditions.
With screenwriter Drew Goddard returning to adapt Weir’s work, as he did for The Martian, the choice of Lord and Miller to direct is interesting. The irreverent pair behind The Lego Movie and the 21 Jump Street remakes are not exactly the obvious fit for an “end of the world” film. While there are flashes of their humour, especially early on, this soon gives way to cloying sentimentality.
German actress Hüller is left with exactly the sort of non-event role – unless you count her doing karaoke to Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” – that esteemed European stars making their way to Hollywood are often saddled with.

Meanwhile, Gosling’s laid-back likeability is severely stretched by the 156-minute running time. With so much of the film just him on screen, he struggles to command attention.
Here, rather than a volleyball à la Cast Away, he gets to talk to an alien creature he nicknames Rocky, who appears to be on a parallel mission and delivers irritating dialogue like “fist my bump” instead of “fist bump”.
While borrowing plot strands from Interstellar, including food shortages, the film never boasts the same gravitas or sense of jeopardy. If we are all doomed, Project Hail Mary never really shows it.
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Ryan Gosling plays an astronaut on a mission to save Earth in this film directed by The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Ryan Gosling plays an astronaut on a mission to save Earth in this film directed by The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Ryan Gosling plays an astronaut on a mission to save Earth in this film directed by The Lego Movie’s Phil Lord and Christopher Miller