When “An Amazon Original Film” appeared on screen, my seatmate sighed. It was a sigh of disappointment at what he already knew, a sigh of resignation, a sigh with a wry twist: we were going to enjoy this movie, despite its origin..
As it turned out, we did enjoy Project Hail Mary. For two-and-a-half hours, the movie remained dynamic, jumping between Earth and space, past and present. We meet our hero, Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), as he awakes from an induced coma aboard an abandoned spacecraft.A mangy beard covers Grace’s pretty face. He can’t remember anything. His two compatriots are dead. The spacecraft, the Hail Mary, hurtles towards an unknown fate, light-years from Earth. But it’s no distance a jump cut can’t cross.
We meet a different Grace: an energetic and “quirky” science teacher attempting to steer his class away from existential terror. Strange organisms, called Astrophage, are eating the sun. As the Sun fades, the Earth will cool rapidly over the course of thirty years,and a fourth or more of the world’s population will die. Luckily enough, Grace is a renegade scientist, once rejected from the scientific community for suggesting the possibility of non-carbon-based lifeforms and also hurling expletives at a conference. In the Earth’s time of need, the One World Government™ coalition recruits him to figure out the secret behind these seemingly inorganic Astrophage. Grace soon learns that the problem is even bigger than imagined: every star in the galaxy is meeting a similar fate. Except one. Grace needs to find out why.
As Grace slowly regains his memory, the movie shifts between the stewing anxiety of Earth and the confusion of space. While a gifted scientist, Grace is close to useless on the Hail Mary,and his incompetence is choreographed perfectly. He bumbles around a flawless, detailed set, drifting and flailing. The Hail Mary’s cockpit is a daunting mish-mash of every button, knob, lever, gadget, doohickey, and mousketool imaginable. Just as Grace seems to be figuring out his mission and his ship, he meets an alien, a charming and expressive rock-spider-crab-thing. With some quick linguistic fieldwork, Grace learns that he and his new friend, Rocky, have the same mission. What follows is a story about two bros who love each other just trying to save their planets and, hopefully, themselves.
Project Hail Mary maximizes the amount of starpower it can draw from Ryan Gosling. He has the blockbuster leading man vibe down to a science, a steady and genial agent of plot progression. He keeps things predictably quirky, but can shed a single tear when called for. During the Earth scenes, Grace is dressed in any number of whimsical outfits, including a woolen sweater with foxes on it, light-wash denim, a bright yellow rain slicker, and more. The characterization is clear: Grace likes Wes Anderson movies and experimented with guys in college.
But it’s Rocky, a puppet, who has the standout performance here. Rocky is both voiced and controlled by James Ortiz, who somehow channels an emotive and energetic performance into a faceless, four-legged stone alien creature. Not even Kermit at his peak (before the divorce from Miss Piggy, before the DUI) could’ve outdone Rocky. Project Hail Mary does little to develop its side characters, leaving almost all of them as mere sketches. Apart from Grace and Rocky, the closest thing to a developed character is the curt, all-business Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), the agent of One World Government™ who prepares Grace for his mission. We’re given little exposure to what lies beyond her grave professionalism, except for when she sings Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times” at a pre-launch karaoke night. The performance is supposed to reveal that there is a person beneath the cold veneer, but the dour lyrics only clumsily reinforce the central message that Eva has been pushing this whole time: things are really, really bad. Like really bad.
What a space movie lacks in emotional depth, it can always make up for in spectacle. This is not to say that this spectacle is hollow; it borders on poetic. Some of the best scenes of the movie are those that relish in visual splendor above all else, like the scene where incandescent Astrophage surrounds Grace or when Rocky gives Grace a tour of his immense, cathedralesque spacecraft. The movie frequently cuts between Grace, adrift in zero gravity, to our world, rendering it upended, askew, or otherwise disoriented. For a brief second, you are reminded of the fragility and contingency of our earthly perspective, the very perspective at stake in Grace’s mission.
But it is not his mission per se. Early on, it’s established that the Hail Mary and its crew are on a one-way trip: there simply isn’t enough fuel for the return. While Grace isn’t initially on the Hail Mary’s crew, explosive circumstances force him into the rare black-and-white moral decision: join the crew, give up his life for humanity’s sake, or save himself, for now, and let the world die. He pathetically chooses the latter, so Eva has him restrained, drugged, and put on the Hail Mary. She reassures him that he’ll be remembered as a hero.
It’s damning that Project Hail Mary lets the richness of this moment go otherwise unaddressed. Grace is a new kind of hero for a contemporary audience. We have become so unsure of our resolve and efficacy as moral actors that the usual heroic fantasy no longer offers escape. We cannot see ourselves in heroes who, when faced with a moral imperative, shake off their self-interest for the greater good. Our sense of agency in the world has been so thoroughly debilitated that, when confronted with an actual moral imperative, there is seemingly no way to make sense of it. We have become experts in self-justifying, compartmentalizing, and manufacturing our own ignorance — all to avoid making any real choice.
Grace experiences a species of what the philosopher Bernard Williams called “moral luck.” From the very moment he wakes up on the Hail Mary, he is already considered a hero on Earth. And the Earth can only stand to gain from him continuing the mission. Considering he is expecting to die anyway, he might as well try. This is the real fantasy: that we might be placed in material conditions such that we can only do good. The confines of his ship and his mission provide Grace the opportunity to be the perfect moral actor, but the notion of a “moral action” is meaningless without choice. Grace is more of a benevolent functionary than a hero.
Over the course of the movie, perhaps Grace does become a hero in the older, proper sense, but only through his solidarity with Rocky, the non-human character, can such a transformation occur. Rocky did choose to be here; he did make a conscious sacrifice. While he confesses his fear to Rocky, Grace never reveals that he didn’t choose to be on this mission. Project Hail Mary insists on treating Grace and Rocky as equals, despite what we know. By the time the credits roll, one could even forget Grace’s choice (or lack thereof) entirely.
Project Hail Mary is entertaining and worth watching regardless of who Grace “actually” is, but without exploring Grace, the movie lacks a central moral tension and fails to be remarkable. If we look past the space adventure and look at Grace, the man, we see that the moral logic of his world is so fundamentally broken as to be unsalvageable. It is only in confrontation with the otherworldly that Grace is redeemed. As for us, stuck on Earth, we can continue to renounce our choices. We will hold out hope that someone, somehow, might deliver us from our cowardice.