Project Hail Mary: The Stars Want Us Happy |
There is a scene early in Project Hail Mary that tells you everything about the kind of film you are watching. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school science teacher who emerges from a medically induced coma aboard an interstellar spacecraft with only the scantiest memory of how he got there, discovers his two crewmates dead in their pods. He could ignore them. Instead, he holds a small funeral ceremony for a man and a woman he barely knew. Before he releases their bodies into space, he lingers on the family photographs each of them brought along for the journey. There is no audience, no custom to observe, no authority demanding it. Grace does it because it is right. Because these people belonged to something beyond themselves and deserved to be sent off as if that mattered. A materialist might call that irrational. I would call it pious, and a film that opens this way has already told you where its heart is. Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller in their return to live-action after a decade in animation, Project Hail Mary is adapted from Andy Weir’s novel by Drew Goddard, who previously brought Weir’s The Martian to the screen. The kinship between the two films is real: Both follow a man who refuses to stop solving problems and ask what that refusal finally costs. This time, a microorganism is consuming our sun, threatening an ice age that will end life on Earth within a........