Tale of a brilliant molecular biologist cast into outer space with only a helpful alien for company is a bit silly, but Gosling’s charisma keeps it watchable
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his is a movie, adapted from Andy Weir’s sci-fi bestseller, about a desperate astronaut mission of the future, named by Nasa after the “Hail Mary pass” in American football, launched into space in a last-ditch attempt to save Planet Earth, dying because a string of alien microbes are snuffing out the sun.
Hunky high school science teacher Dr Ryland Grace, played with seductive, unruffled good humour by Ryan Gosling, wakes up from his induced coma on this spacecraft, with wacky long hair, straggly beard and zero memory of why he is aboard. The rest of the crew are dead, and Grace must now figure out how he got there and how to rescue humanity.
Gosling is an effortlessly charming screen player, and he keeps it watchable, though the film itself has moments of dullness and a sort of puppyish silliness, perhaps not surprising given the comedy track-record of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller. And the final moment before the credits, in a film which had been asking us to take it seriously at some level, feels like a kids’ TV show. Weir wrote The Martian, the basis for Ridley Scott’s movie with Matt Damon, and this has the same cheerful, breezy humour and tonal commitment to unseriousness; this for me meant Project Hail Mary was funny ha-ha and funny peculiar at the same time.
