Director: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz, Lionel Boyce
Certificate: 12A
Run Time: 156 mins

Project Hail Mary is an adaptation of Andy Weir’s (the brains behind The Martian) 2021 novel about an explorer who wakes up on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. It’s also the first film to be directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller since 22 Jump Street back in 2014, although they worked on Solo: A Star Wars Story before exiting due to creative differences. Ryan Gosling plays the explorer in question, Ryland Grace, and through flashbacks, we learn he’s a middle-school science and former molecular biologist who’s been sent on what is essentially a suicide mission to save the world from a global cooling. He quickly meets a five-legged, rock-like alien and must learn to communicate with him if he has any hope of saving mankind.

Sadly, I found Project Hail Mary a pretty perfunctory experience. While The Lego Movie has its moments, I can’t say I’ve ever been a fan of Lord and Miller’s meta tone and it’s a significant problem here. The constant reliance on fast-paced humour and self-referential quips really dilutes the stakes, and despite the film running for an unnecessarily bum-numbing 156 minutes, Lord and Miller never give it a chance to breathe and let us take in the atmosphere. While Dune and The Batman‘s Greig Fraser’s cinematography is suitably handsome, there aren’t any particularly memorable images in this – and it’s telling that the visual effects of Interstellar continue to be more impressive despite now being 12 years old.

Ryan Gosling’s a likeable enough presence as Ryland, but there isn’t a great deal of depth to the character. I never felt him being in any real danger. This is also a real waste of Sandra Hüller, so brilliant in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, who plays the stern head of the international task force behind the Project Hail Mary initiative. I found the relationship between her and Ryland overly trite, and a karaoke scene involving Harry Styles’ ‘Sign of the Times’ is particularly toe-curling.

While I’m all for a happy and positive film, Project Hail Mary lacks any real gravitas – and that’s exactly what top-tier sci-fi films when they convey the isolation and loneliness of being stuck in space. It feels like a crowd pleaser – and dare I say it, almost like a Marvel film in its comedic but empty approach – but the theme of finding hope in tough times here is overly saccharine. I never found myself invested or wowed in what is supposed to be an epic journey for Ryland, and 156 minutes of it proved exhausting.