I honestly don’t know why this movie got such good reviews, even from the usually reliable Roger Ebert website.
I’m sure you know the set-up. Ryland Grace – Ryan Gosling – is a science teacher roped in to save not just the world but much of the galaxy when boffins discover that nasty little microscopic critters are eating up stars including our sun. They call them astrophages – ‘star eaters’, and they are feasting away on every star except one, and the boffins want to send a mission to that star to find out why the astrophages don’t fancy it. If the mission fails, the astrophages will have chomped up our sun in about 30 years and it’ll be curtains for the human race and all life on earth.
The reason he gets the gig is that years ago he was a molecular biologist who wrote a paper that was pooh-poohed at the time so he went off to become a teacher – cue Ryland being adorably engaging and playful with schoolkids – but when the scientific establishment works out what’s happening they unearth his paper and realise he was on the money.
He helps them out for a while, ostensibly to educate the astronauts they plan to send on the mission. Then they get killed in a launch catastrophe and he’s the only one left who can do the job. They tell him it’s a suicide mission so naturally he’s reluctant to go. I suppose I have to credit this one original aspect of the movie: he’s no hero, and in the end they have to drug him and force him onto the spaceship, where he wakes up 11 years plus later in earth time and gradually puts together the backstory as to why he’s there. This backstory is revealed in flashbacks throughout the movie and provides some relief from Gosling’s omnipresence on the screen being cute and having a cute bromance with a funny-looking alien from a planet that’s also twigged to the dangers of astrophages.
The movie is based on a book by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, a similar space survival epic starring Matt Damon. In the trailer to that movie, there’s a scene where Damon’s character, on being informed there’s been a glitch and he’s going to have to fend for himself in space for a while, says ‘I guess I’m going to have to science the shit out of this’. I found this utterance so irksome I decided then and there not to go and see the movie.
I should have known that Hail Mary would have the same deeply annoying goofy/tough dialogue. They seem to be saying our main man might be a brainiac but see how he talks like a regular guy.
Lots of reviewers remarked on how good the science was. Well, the script was overloaded with scientific terms and screens full of colour and movement, but that doesn’t amount to good scientific storytelling.
Okay, it’s science fiction so you don’t have to be pedantic about the quantum physics, but not if you’re claiming scientific verisimilitude. There was no coherent explanation about how he got to a distant star in such a short time.
It was all so implausible. He’s allegedly the only man for the job because he’s the expert on astrophages. But how come he couldn’t pass on that knowledge to someone in NASA? He could have done that in far less time than it would have taken him to learn how to pilot an interplanetary spacecraft.
There is an onboard computer that gives him instructions, but she’s no HAL. In fact I reflected at one point how superior a film was 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its exploration of the implications of handing control of human affairs to artificial intelligence. Surely the time is even riper now for such a theme.
And the special effects weren’t even as good as in Kubrick’s masterpiece, which was made nearly 60 years ago!
Other things annoyed me about The Hail Mary Project.
Ryland’s hair. When he comes to in the spacecraft he has long hair and a long beard, neither of them long enough for over 11 years’ growth, incidentally. We see him start to hack away at it with scissors, but next thing you know he’s got a stylish modern cut with a fetching front quiff. So they packed hair product for him, OK. But who did the neat trimming at the back?
Certainly not the alien, who Ryland cutely dubs ‘Rocky’ and who looks like a cardboard crab and gets around Ryland’s habitat in one of those terrariums made out of crinkly glass panes held together with solder.
Ryland teaches Rocky enough English to help solve complex technical problems, but not to master simple pronouns like ‘me’ and ‘you’.
After one escape from some near-disaster, Ryland introduces him to the joys of the hug. Arms around the terrarium, big goofy smile. Oh please.
The space-based action is hard to follow, so it’s a relief when we flash back to Earth. There’s a scene where the German lady scientist who recruited him sings a big sentimental ballad at a NASA karaoke night. Here we go, I thought – this is the love story that will give him the motivation to carry on, up there in his spacecraft with only a cardboard crab for company.
But no, no love story. They get one more point for cliché-avoidance. So what was the point of this sappy episode? One reviewer, who’d read and loved the book, said this scene totally ruined the movie for him. I enjoyed a quiet moment of schadenfreude.
Final verdict? That’s 2 and a half hours of my life I’ll never get back.