Phil Lord and Chris Miller‘s Project Hail Mary (Amazon/MGM, 3.20) deserves approval points for originality, I suppose, and for not dumbing down the science — it’s mainly for sharp sci-fi nerds. It’s not for none-too-brights like me, I can tell you that much. I always hated science class.
It is, however, a kind of bruh love story between Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace, an extra-brilliant junior high school science teacher who’s been forced to join a years-long mission to somehow save the earth from freezing to death…I feel a tad blurry from the effort of trying to recall the particulars…and Rocky, the rock-crab alien, who vaguely resembles a small-scale The Thing.
I did, however, find myself emotionally responding to a scene in which Gosling hugs the plastic-encased Rocky. Not quite on the level of Henry Thomas hugging E.T, but in that general ballpark.
But that was just a brief respite. Because overall watching PHM (156 minutes!) sent me into a vague depression pit. An “oh, no” feeling began to take hold. Anticipating a slight comprehension struggle, I read the Wiki plot synopsis of Andy Weir’s “hard” science fiction novel twice before settling into today’s 1 pm screening. And I still felt a bit lost.
The science is gobbledygook, but it helps to familiarize anyway.
The scientific villain of the piece — the bad, earth-freezing organism that consumes electromagnetic radiation and which will cause our sun to cool — is called Astrophage. (Different from Arbitrage, no relation whatsoever to decolletage.) It also helps to know what “the Petrova line” is, although I’m still not sure what “a dim infrared line from the Sun to Venus” actually looks or behaves like. (Is it a bit like the infrared laser beam that Auric Goldfinger used to sexually terrorize Sean Connery?) You should also get hip to xenonite, taumoeba and the spelling difference between Eridani, Rocky’s home planet, and the native Eridians. (Shouldn’t they be called Eridanians?)
The bottom line is that Project Hail Mary made me feel…well, not exactly like a dumbass but a bit like that kid in the back of the seventh-grade classroom who always flunked pop quiz tests.
I knew early on that I would feel vaguely distanced from this effing film. I didn’t hate it but vague discomfort certainly flooded my system. I wound up feeling sorta kinda nothing. Okay, I felt relieved when it finally ended. Because I really hate, hate, HATE films that make me feel this way…films that gun the brain engine and converse with exotic, ahead-of-the-curve techno-jargon. PHM sure as shit does this.
So I began looking at my watch around the one-hour mark. And I kept checking it every 15 minutes or so. I checked it seven times in all.
Apart from the serving of feel-good “I love you, man” vibes during the second half, what is this fucking thing really? It’s basically a two-hander that’s a great, big, fat science-project brain teaser.
Sandra Huller doesn’t count. She’s basically flashback filler. In a big scene she sings Harry Styles‘ “Sign of the Times”, which I didn’t immediately recognize. I knew the singing scene was coming, and I, being a clueless, old-school dumbass, thought it might be the Petula Clark version…nope.
This film really filled me with alienation. Existential gloom. I sat there thinking about death, and how being dead would be one way, at least, of avoiding any more Phil Lord and Chris Miller films.
Part of the reason I didn’t much care for PHM is Ryan Gosling’s over-acting. But it’s also Gosling himself…those vacant, close-together eyes. The shouting, the geek laughter, the slapstick physicality. What it is about this guy that I find so cloying, so irksome, so alienating? I haven’t really liked Gosling in anything since La-La Land.