Project Hail Mary Can Absolutely Go And Get Fucked!

Monday is for movies, sometimes TV. Today, I review a giant stinker that is masquerading as feel-good fare

I haven’t been this incensed about a film’s immediate reception since Oppenheimer.

That was nearly three years ago. I’ve certainly seen some dreadful films since — I often enjoy a bad film. But my least favourite kind of movie to have to sit through is a bore-fest that garners almost universal acclaim. I felt close to that last year with the Superman reboot, people attaching all sorts of ‘meaning’ to lazy comic-book fare. But Marvel and DC and Superhero stuff in general has this weird baked-in nostalgia about it that has captured the market. You might almost say the same about interminable Mission Impossible sequels and the last two decades of James Bond. Joker and Barbie too…

But nothing bugs me more than mediocre sci-fi being called profound. Or in this case ‘feel-good’. It brings out my mad side; my inner film grinch.

Yes, we are living in shit times, and yeah Ryan Gosling is incapable of being shit — he’s either great, or just charming and nice, and the world has decided he’s a safe space, and permanently ‘good’. And I’m not mad about that. But Project Hail Mary’s free pass is peculiar to me.

I watched a long-winded film that felt like it should be animated (no surprise, given the filmmakers’ backgrounds) and felt like a desperate attempt for Dune and Interstellar and Close Encounters fans to have something they could take their kids to.

Well, my kid dragged me along to it. And I’m always happy to go to the cinema with my son — and so that part was no failure. But the cloying vibe of the movie just irked me. And its bunch of flowers and a card reception is giving me the King Kong shits.

Project Hail Mary is an Amazon film which is already dubious ground — War of the Worlds and Mercy and the Melania doc are among the studio’s recent duds. But somehow this film gets the pass? Possibly that’s because a lot of people have love for the source material (I haven’t read the book). But also, there just feels like a vibe that’s been attached to this: Only Ryan Gosling can save us.

The film’s plot is that a science genius (Gosling) got all but laughed out of academia for a challenging take, and is now a fun school teacher. But he gets the summons, black Government vehicles and a humourless ‘boss’ — and he’s forced to go to space to save the sun from being eaten.

I realise I’ve stripped it back from any, um, nuance, but just how fucking stupid does that sound?

The story is told in back and forth style, flashbacks overlapping with the mission — we start with a long-beard Gosling who has awoken from a coma and has to piece together his mission.

Cue, eventually, a cute alien friendship.

And basically you’ve seen this before if you’ve watched The Martian or Interstellar or Contact, or, well, anything that puts a man out on his own in a ship, on a mission, usually to save earth from itself.

The annoying repetition of the word “astrophage” — a coinage taken from Astro (star) and Phage (derived from the Greek for ‘eater’) — made the script feel flimsy and convoluted all at once. The astrophage is a type of ‘space algae’ that is feeding on the sun’s energy and is likely to bring a new ice age to Earth. It is mentioned roughly 4000 times in the film. And yes, this comes directly from Andy Weir’s novel. But feels, yet again, like FisherPrice MyFirstSciFi.

For two hours and 40 minutes, Gosling is calm and chill and almost bored, but never quite boring. That’s his skill, in a way. But quite why we need to elevate this to a ‘great’ performance, or to a Feel Good film, or even ‘masterpiece’ — which I’ve seen mention of far too much in the last couple of days — is the sort of shit that really winds me up.

Someone said they thought it was ‘good for what it was’ — that’s basically admitting defeat, but putting a FairPlay award around its shoulders after anyway.

As with any of the films I’ve mentioned — and many I haven’t liked (I’m not really a fan of this brand of sci-fi, you probably spotted that a while back) — the very best thing was the movie’s score. Beautiful. Stunning. Amazing. No real surprise, as Daniel Pemberton is a class act, and I’ve loved most of his score work, including for many films I’ve either not seen, or barely cared about.

I‘m saying it’s as good as the Oppenheimer score and Interstellar and Dune, and many others. All amazing. And though it’s early days, it’s probably better than any of those — and weirdly, given how much I loathed the movie — I can feel it becoming one of my most listened to albums this year. A new favourite film score.

In the film (but not on the soundtrack album, which is just the instrumental score) there’s even this incredible needle-drop:

Yes, Now Is The Hour or ‘Po Atarau’ by our own St Joseph’s Maori Girls’ College. An unreal inclusion. And I thought it was amazing to hear this — but it also added to the cloying vibe that sits underneath. Hard to explain. But the film just always seems to be vying for a FairPlay award.

Same with the other big needle-drop that’s being referenced. Two of Us by The Beatles.

I’ve even heard it written up as a rarity or obscurity. Get fucked. It’s The Beatles. There are no rarities. Or obscurities. (Giles Martin, Paul McCartney, and Peter Jackson are certainly making sure of that). Um, but, yeah, it’s the opening track from that ‘obscure’ Beatles record, Let It Be.

Amazon Studies is making horrific movies, but Hail Mary is getting a pass because there are fans of the novel, and fans of this kind of delusional hero saves the day escapism.

Yep, we live in a world with all manner of billionaires making hair-trigger decisions from their hair-transplant bunkers and safe-houses. The fuel crisis, the online bullying, the nastiness of everything. But that doesn’t mean a shit, silly, film filled with lazy tropes and no real meaning deserves to be called a “masterpiece”.

I’m happy dying on this hill. I fucking hated The Lord of the Rings for example. But tell me I’m not out there alone — ironically like Gosling in his spaceship — there must be, um, Two of Us that thought this film was a treacly load of shit?