‘Project Hail Mary’ is a malformed, swashbuckling space adventure

Using a combination of expository note-taking in the present and a series of Earthbound flashbacks, the premise comes gradually (if unevenly) to light. Ryland is 11-point-something light years from our solar system and headed towards a nearby star, Tau Ceti, in order to solve the mystery of why the majority of the galaxy’s suns have been dying—including our own. Grace, these flashbacks reveal, was once a mere schoolteacher in the United States, but his scientific background led the world’s brightest minds (led by Sandra Hüller’s hilariously blunt project leader Eva Stratt) to seek him out. Upon discovering a strand of infrared light leaving the sun for Venus, and containing energy-consuming microbes dubbed “Astrophage,” the globe’s scientists look to Grace to unlock this microbial mystery as they prepare for a trio of astronauts—including Russian Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub) and Chinese Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung)—for a heroic one-way trip to Tau Ceti aboard their spaceship, the appropriately named Hail Mary, in order to send back life-saving information. However, since this is the very ship upon which Grace finds himself in the present, alongside the bodies of Ilyukhina and Yáo, something has clearly gone wrong in the interim, especially since he wasn’t a part of this interstellar roster in the first place.

It’s a little irksome that, despite the film being rooted in global cooperation (like its sister project The Martian), the movie’s key Russian and Chinese characters are reduced to window dressing in favor of its American hero (it would surprise no one if we eventually learn they had further factored into a longer cut). However, the filmmaking is often so fine tuned that these problems tend to fade into the background. Lord and Miller’s visual approach is akin to judicious drama, with an often poetic use of light in moments both terrifying and awe inspiring, though this can make settling into their comedic rhythms a slightly awkward prospect. That said, after a little acclimation, the film switches gears in intriguing fashion as Grace nears Tau Ceti and encounters an imaginatively rendered rival spacecraft, whose polygonal designs and extending appendages lead to an unexpected meeting with a mysterious being on a similar mission.

What follows is a slickly produced live-action film in the vein of Pixar’s best animated works—particularly Wall-E. Its emotional core soon pivots around the surprising dynamic between Grace and the faceless, five-limbed arthropod he meets, and nicknames Rocky for his stone-like appearance, a delightful creature brought to life through a mix of practical and digital effects. Project Hail Mary feels, at times, cobbled together from the spare parts of several existing space movie landmarks—including the cosmic mysteries of Alien, the time-dilated sacrificial mission of Interstellar, and most notably, the first contact saga Arrival, which is mirrored here in Grace’s attempts to create a shared vocabulary with his new echolocative friend (they soon begin speaking to each other with the help of a computer). However, Lord and Miller sublimate these disparate influences into something mostly coherent.

The movie’s dual timelines are, individually, examples of rousing blockbuster sci-fi (and hard sci-fi at that). On Earth, we follow Grace’s snappy problem solving to figure out the nature of the Astrophage, and thus, the existential threats facing humanity as the sun begins to dim. Meanwhile, in the depths of space, Grace and Rocky’s blossoming dynamic is similarly rooted in the scientific process of solving why Tau Ceti has been left immune to widespread star death, a mission that comes to involve collecting biological samples at great personal risk. However, in totality, the film’s two halves seldom work in tandem. The skips between past and present rarely feel motivated, and they also aren’t tethered to the central question of Grace’s faulty memory. At no point does the film seem to broach whether these Earth-set scenes are emerging recollections, or if Grace knows or remembers much about his life at all, leading to a distinct lack of structure and emotional purpose each time we move back and forth.

Deep space movies are, by their nature, rooted in the idea of memory. They tend to feature astronauts so far from Earth that our planet, and our way of life, exist only as synaptic sparks deep in their recesses. Take, for instance, any of the aforementioned space films, which depend on the physical and psychological connections between then and now for their presentation; Alien relies on recognizing how futuristic characters mirror the economic hierarchies of today; Interstellar turns memory into four-dimensional fabric its characters can traverse; Arrival is entirely about memory as a kind of language, akin to a tool. Though perhaps the most pertinent example of such a film is Claire Denis’ space prison saga High-Life, which features a structure similar to that of Project Hail Mary, but whose Earthbound flashbacks are framed and textured as though they were the shared memories of a now-extinct human species—or even of the film itself.

Memory is certainly on Lord’s and Miller’s minds as well. The Hail Mary ship contains a holodeck of sorts, where Grace can reexperience Earthbound pleasures on enormous screens like beaches and trees (and in the process, teach his adorable new comrade about them), but despite beginning with the central question of what Grace does or does not remember, this ends up of little importance during the subsequent 156 minutes. Project Hail Mary understands that memory has its own visual language, so its flashbacks depart from the full-frame clarity of its enormous IMAX presentation, and appear within a wider, more traditionally “cinematic” frame, with the occasional blur to perhaps hints that there’s something fuzzy about them. However, there’s no tangible relationship between the movie’s two major threads, and thus, no meaning created between its images of past and present, with the flashbacks appearing practically at random, rather than being triggered by present sensations or events. Grace, while trying to solve the problem of our dying sun, doesn’t ever grasp at recollections out of reach, or come to any realizations about himself (or the mission) based on preexisting information, because at no point in the film is it made clear what he starts to remember, rendering the very idea of memory a mere stylistic flourish with no real human grounding.

And yet, despite a structure that you could reshuffle a million times for the same results, the movie’s space-set scenes remain tightly wound, and are executed with enough flair that their momentum is seldom weighed down by this thoughtless construction. Daniel Pemberton’s score reaches soul-stirring heights in the film’s climactic scenes, whose alien backdrops are rendered with eye-popping beauty and nail-biting ferocity, as the characters come within inches of oblivion (add Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity to the list of ingredients). The question of who Grace is remains curiously malformed, but the simplicity of his dynamic with his alien pal—a boy-and-his-(smart) dog story reminiscent of 1980s all-ages cinema in the shadow of E.T.—brings to life the adventurous heart found in Weir’s work, even if the movie bungles his flashback structure.

Much like Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian, Lord  Miller’s version of Project Hail Mary eschews some of the novel’s pertinent details—for better or worse—while finding an emotional simplicity worth rooting for. Does this gel with the movie’s more complex science fiction elements, which are a delight in their own right? Not necessarily (there are some nagging plot holes surrounding fuel and lightspeed you have to try really hard to ignore), and the mishandling of something as fundamental as the protagonist’s identity, and what he knows or doesn’t know, is a major problem. But at the end of the day, it’s hard not to be moved by some of the more rousing scenes of swashbuckling self sacrifice and unexpected friendship. Sometimes, a film just works.