Project Hail Mary is a pitch-perfect adaptation of Andy Weir’s hit sci-fi novel
Photo by Jonathan Olley, Courtesy Amazon Films
Typically, when it comes to adaptations, I’m of the “let the movie have a take” school. I liked Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I didn’t mind that Train Dreams added characters. The book is the book. The movie is the movie. It’s an interpretation, after all, not a transcript. If I’m going to see an adaptation of something filtered through a specific filmmaker or screenwriter’s lens, part of the fun is seeing what that story looks like through their eyes.
All that is to say that, as an adaptation, Phil Lord, Chris Miller and Drew Goddard’s Project Hail Mary is so close to its source that it’s arguable the film lacks a voice of its own. But it’s equally arguable that the style of Andy Weir’s novel so closely matches the sensibility of Goddard as a writer, and Lord and Miller as directors, that the venn diagram is already pretty much a circle. It’s hard to come up with anything significant they’d feel a need to change.
This sounds like faint praise, but maybe think of it as solid praise, with the smallest asterisk attached. Project Hail Mary is every bit as thrilling, funny and optimistic as Weir’s novel. It’s a treat reminiscent of 90s science fiction thrillers that aims to put a smile on the face of everyone in the theater, and mostly succeeds.
Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who’s tapped by a consortium of global governments led by no-nonsense German Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to solve a planet-threatening problem. An organism called astrophage is absorbing energy from the sun, throwing Earth’s natural systems out of whack. The same is happening to other stars across the galaxy — all but one. Grace, and an international team of scientists and astronauts, must figure out why tau ceti, a star 12 years outside of our solar system, isn’t being drained.
That’s just the start of what becomes an epic and science-forward interstellar adventure. To reveal more introduces spoilers that, if you’ve managed to avoid the film’s egregiously informative trailers, mess up a major story-altering surprise. Suffice it to say that Lord and Miller are to be commended for the tactile route in their depiction of space travel and the organisms encountered therein, when it would’ve been very easy to go with CGI. If you’ve read the book, you will likely be similarly pleased.
Weir’s novel maintains a balance of quippy inner monologue and hard science talk related in easy-to-understand terms (there’s a reason our main character is a science teacher). Goddard’s script keeps that same balance. Lord and Miller, the directors behind the 21 Jump Street movies and the animated Spider-Man films, also radiate that sense of humor and heart. As a performer, Gosling perfectly combines his dramatic skill with the unpretentious comic sensibility that’s defined the last decade of his career.
If there’s a fault to be found, it’s that we don’t get to know the other earth-bound characters around Grace quite as well — an issue that’s also true in the book. The story’s focus is understandably on the science and the existential threat to earth, but it leaves the strangely conflict-free global cooperation at the heart of both the book and the film feeling oversimplified and under-explored.
Project Hail Mary’s real animus is the joy of discovery, and showing the scientific process as fun and exciting. It takes delight in knowledge and experimentation similarly to the way 90s movies like Jurassic Park or Independence Day made science look cool for a whole generation of future lab-dwellers. In that sense, the film feels like a delightful throwback. From writing to directing to casting, Project Hail Mary hits the right nails squarely on the head.
