Muppet Armageddon: "Project Hail Mary"

The premise of Project Hail Mary is pure horror. Ryan Gosling awakes from a medically induced coma to find himself aboard a spaceship with severe memory loss and his fellow travellers dead in their cots. Matters get no less traumatic once his recall kicks in. The movie's opening flashback reveals Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace to have been pressganged into serving on this mission with an eye to stopping so-called "space dots" (alien microbes of some description) from eating the sun and thus freezing the Earth. The project has stalled by the time we rejoin him, and not just because of the sudden shortfall of available hands: Grace, a high school teacher by trade, quickly calculates it would take fully a hundred years to turn the craft around and return to Earth, so he'd likely return as a corpse - if, indeed, there was any Earth left to which a corpse might return. (I guess they could put him on ice.) The source material is a 2021 novel by Andy Weir, also the inspiration for 2015's The Martian, and evidently a specialist in tales of intergalactic sacrifice and endurance. Hand this story to eight out of ten directors (including The Martian's Ridley Scott), and they'd likely show up on the red carpet clutching something stark and doomy, heavy on the existential dread. Yet Sony's chosen two are Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the poptimists behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie and the 21 Jump Street reboots, who view this predicament as frankly a lark and a gas, if not always a hoot; the end of the world is here reframed as an opportunity to try new things and make friends, as a problem for which there will be a fix even if there isn't one already. Should Project Hail Mary prove as big a hit as I suspect it might be, it will be primarily for one reason: here's a Hollywood movie that devotes vast resources and ventures deep into the heart of the cosmos on a mission to turn our collective frown upside down.

The approach demands a new set of rhythms, lightyears away from those of a Christopher Nolan or Denis Villeneuve: playful, unpredictable, reliant more on montages than crashing setpieces, these are deployed here with the aim of keeping the audience on their toes and rescuing us from this narrative's deadly black holes. It also requires a top-to-bottom rethink of sci-fi iconography. Lord and Miller offer us spaceship as revolving funhouse; when Grace snaps on an umbilical cord so as to perform an exploratory space walk, it's as springy as a bungee rope. The scuttling creepy-crawly that breaches the ship's defences is an alien but crucially not a monster; it's a puppet of sorts (operated very expressively from within by James Ortiz) who becomes an unlikely pal. (First contact here involves mirrored bodypopping and a remix of the Close Encounters five-note salute.) For props, Lord and Miller swap in toys. The spinning UFO our hero retrieves on that space walk is a pop-up 3D puzzle; the globe that mission controller Sandra Hüller tosses to Grace - literally and metaphorically putting the whole world in his hands - is a hackysack. This may be the cinema's first space vessel to both feature an IMAX screen and carry novelty party hats. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to stretch too far if you wanted to point to the 12A-rated Project Hail Mary as the latest frontier in the ongoing juvenilisation of the American cinema. If the movie's Amazon-bought infrastructure - all $248m of it, reportedly - aspires to the grandiose and Kubrickian, its mushy emoji heart is pure Disney: I felt I was being primed not for some mindblowing evolutionary leap, but for that new Star Wars movie with Baby Yoda in it. Gosling, bless him, gives another moviestar performance: holding all this cutesy bricolage together, he gets substantial mileage from the oldtimer's trick of peering over the top of those specs the movies stick on a hunk so as to pass him off as a nerd. Yet there's also a lot of what I feel obliged to call Sesame Street acting involved: for much of Project Hail Mary, we're watching a grown man swapping expositionary dialogue with a creature on a stick.

Obviously, much of this is 2026 (and, indeed, post-2024) pertinent. Underpinning the film's out-of-this-world bromance is a vision of different species overcoming their initial fear and distrust to work together and ensure one another's survival. (Some context: Hail Mary's biggest box-office rival this weekend is liable to be the Dhurandhar sequel. Its biggest real-world rival is whatever the hell is currently going on in the Middle East.) Such childlike simplicity has its virtues and appeal in a modern blockbuster context. Early on, we see Dr. Ryland gazing at a pictogram of the Seven Ages of Man, a progression Drew Goddard's script allows Gosling to enact: first seen crawling out of cryogenic deep freeze like a worm, the good doctor will soon come to stand for solitude, self-interest and self-pity, then curiosity, companionship, compassion and courage, and finally the selflessness required to avert disaster and propagate a species. It's rare to see a modern American studio movie - particularly one as expensive as this - which comes at us from a place of innocence rather than cynicism. And yet Project Hail Mary never quite evolves as its protagonist does: it starts as a goofy Eighties throwback, and it ends there, too. Along the way, it succeeds in being very genial, sometimes funny, occasionally charming, yet it most often feels dramatically underdeveloped: there was a greater sense of catastrophic, world-ending stakes in these filmmakers' U and PG-rated animations, Lord and Miller now appearing much more invested in their man-and-puppet business than they are in the looming prospect of Armageddon. Their project here looks to have been to take a big paycheque and have fun with it, and while there are worse ways to occasion and launch a putative blockbuster - like, say, taking a big paycheque and having no fun with it - that also runs the risk of indulgence. At some point amid the film's 157 minutes, I found my sympathies aligning decisively with Hüller, the one grown-up in the vicinity of this project, swaddled in mourning clothes on an increasingly lightless and heatless Earth. Indirectly, she gives Project Hail Mary - and all its childish things - the one piece of direction it needed, cutting short her stab at morale-boosting karaoke with four thin-lipped, no-nonsense, frostily Teutonic words: "And that is enough."

Project Hail Mary is now showing in cinemas nationwide.