Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up from a coma in a spaceship and can’t remember anything. Beside him are two dead colleagues and after doing some calculations he realizes that the “sun” that he’s seeing isn’t actually the sun but that he’s in a solar system light years aways from Earth, heading towards Tau Ceti. As he tries to get used to his new surroundings, his memories slowly start coming back. Piece by piece, he remembers a past where he was a simple physics teacher until an apocalyptic threat made his special expertise necessary. He’s still unclear on how he came to be on the spaceship. But soon he’s not alone anymore: on his route there’s another flying object that isn’t from Earth, and the only passenger is looking for a way to save his planet from destruction, like Ryland. Ryland contacts the creature, who looks like a stone with arms, and names him Rocky.

In the book “Project Hail Mary” that the film is based on, Andy Weir constructs an intergalactic “hard“ sci fi that presents largely plausible doomsday scenarios based on "hard" scientific facts – and then sends a socially awkward but clever and likable guy and his newly found alien buddy out to find solutions. The book's captivating power lies primarily in the reader's active participation. Through Ryland's internal monologues, the reader gradually uncovers, through trial and error, exactly what threatens Earth, what might be possible to do about it, and just how reckless these ideas are. The starting off point is the following: hobby astronauts from all over the world have found out that not just the sun, but also almost all of the stars, are becoming darker. Something is eating the light, which could lead to a new Ice Age. The reason is most probably a microscopic little creature that the scientists have collected in space and named Astrophage and global task force manager Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) recruits an international team of scientists – and Ryland Grace.

Sandra Hüller is fantastic as the dry and laconic Eva Stratt (and is the exact person I was imagining while reading the book). Hüller has thus definitively arrived in international superstardom. Ryan Gosling is more spaced-out and dreamy than his book counterpart, with a touch of stoner surfer, and thus exudes a lightness that works well for the film. For a stone with a soul, Rocky is pretty impatient and sometimes even sarcastic. What’s impressive is how the very loyal adaptation manages to do without narration, by replacing Ryland’s first person perspective with him talking to himself, video footage, and dialogue. Even more than the book it is based on, PROJECT HAIL MARY is a story about intergalactic communication and cooperative problem solving and it’s charmingly told with an endearing cast, IMAX space images, and a big (sometimes too big) score and mostly practical sets. The film doesn’t match the fascination of the book: the surprising moments are missing when you know the plot, of course. But most of all the immersive, highly tense, and the intricate processes of solving the puzzle together which make the book into a thriller are missing, and is only somewhat reproducible, even in two and a half hours. What remains is a somewhat convoluted but fundamentally charming space buddy movie.

Hendrike Bake

Translation: Elinor Lewy