But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.
Hey, yo, Rocky
Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.
Credit:
Amazon MGM Studios
Rocky (left) and Grace (right), solving problems with science.
Credit:
Amazon MGM Studios
Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.
It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.
It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.
Look and feel
This is a big blockbuster film, and it brings with it big blockbuster set design. The interior of Grace’s ship, the eponymous Hail Mary, is a multi-story cathedral of glorious analog and digital chunkiness—every surface is studded with practical controls and hanging wires. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller explained at the film’s late-February press junket that they wanted the ship to be “a PC” and not “a Mac”—so less Enterprise, more Nostromo. (Everyone I asked also admitted that on set, they’d been powerless to stop themselves from constantly flipping every switch and pressing every button within reach.)