One Thing I Really Like About Project Hail Mary

There’s one scene in Jurassic Park that I hate. It’s the one where Grant and Sadler first see the dinosaurs free-roaming through a field, and he’s so awestruck that he fumbles with his glasses, and then he reaches around and physically turns her head to take a look at them.

Even back in the 90s, when I was much less cynical and more impressionable, it felt like they had put all of this effort into making dinosaurs that seemed as real as they could possibly make them, and then undercut the whole thing by having humans behave in a way that was cringingly fake. I think it’s a huge part of why I’ve never quite been able to really love that movie as much as everyone else seems to.

And it’s perpetually frustrating, because Steven Spielberg is indisputably the master of fun, accessible, action and sci-fi movies, and an absolute genius at executing on an action sequence. But so many of his best movies are undermined with these moments that just feel saccharine, maudlin, or just full of forced awe and wonder.

So the one thing that impressed me the most about Project Hail Mary was that it delivered on those heart-caught-in-your-throat moments of Spielberg’s best sci-fi — I’m not too proud to admit that it had me on the verge of sobbing at a couple of parts — but without explicitly telling you, this is awesome. You should be in awe of this.

Of course, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have established their own style by this point, which is always threatening to undermine everything. With them, it’s “flippant and quirky,” and especially early on, it feels like it’s always just on the edge of going too far.

Ryan Gosling’s character1 sometimes seems like they were trying to create the male version of a manic pixie dream girl, with his cardigans and his novelty science teacher shirts. As he was digging through his belongings, I was dreading the moment he’d pull out a ukelele. I kept thinking “you’re a grown-ass adult. Either put your glasses on your face or push them on top of your head like a normal person.”

But the intensely annoying thing about Ryan Gosling is that it’s all but impossible for him to be too intensely annoying. He’s just unfairly good at comedy and being relatable for somebody who looks like he does. So before he’s allowed to turn into a caricature of Quirky, Relatable Science Genius Guy, he resolves into an actual character. His whole process of trying to remember who he is — “wait, am I smart?!” — means the audience gets to figure him out as the movie goes on. Instead of, for example, the Michael Crichton approach of introducing an expert to us at the start and leaving the process of making them relatable or human as an exercise to the reader.

There’s one moment in Gosling’s performance that I think is the best example of this. He’s just received a container of something of unknown origin, and we get a short montage of him trying to figure out what it’s made of and how to open it, using Science. The solution turns out to be so simple that it’s corny — because this is a movie unconcerned with being “hard” science fiction, no matter how much it may look like it is — but Grace suddenly realizes he got fixated on the puzzle when he should’ve been trying to open it in a safe environment. He shouts, “oh nooooo!” and runs it over to the standard glass-walled-box-with-built-in-gloves that may or may not actually exist outside of Hollywood; how should I know?

That line delivery is just dead-on perfect. And more than that, it sells everything about his character for the rest of the movie. Smart and capable, but also practical, over-confident, and reckless. More interested in finding the solution than in going through all of the steps to find it the right way. That means the movie can lightly skip over all of the impossibly hard — and boring — parts of a real story about First Contact, and get back to its strengths, which are character development and plot.

I’ve seen a few criticisms of the movie that say its tendency to go for laughs undermines all of the awe and wonder that should be present in this story. But for me, the “awe and wonder” in a story like this has already been over-mined for decades. I was six years old when Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out and demanded the audience be struck dumb with awe at the sight of a UFO over Devil’s Tower. That moment is referenced in Project Hail Mary, and it’s already so iconic that they don’t even have to explicitly say what they’re doing; he just hums the tune.

Earlier in the movie, when alarms are going off all over the ship, Grace screams “Shields up!” and the ship’s computer calmly responds that the ship doesn’t have shields. He replies, “Why not?!” The characters, the audience, and the filmmakers have all been steeped in science fiction our whole lives. A movie telling us this is awesome! and demanding that we play along just isn’t going to feel realistic anymore. We need a way in besides spectacle, something that’s going to make us care about the characters and what’s happening to them.

Because I waited too long to get tickets, I had to go several days of hearing people online gushing about how great the movie was, giving it a thumbs-down emoji, or saying “amaze amaze amaze.” So I went in dead-set on not falling into the hype, and I sat there arms crossed, saying, “You’ve got to earn it, movie. Entertain me.”

And it really did. It managed to be charming even after telling me directly how it was trying to charm me. Funny in ways that I hadn’t expected — playing scenes of two spacecraft coming into first contact for laughs instead of awe — but never so much that it felt like it wasn’t taking any of it seriously. Its moving moments and its joyful moments felt completely earned. And despite all of the modern self-awareness of its tone, it still retained that old-fashioned optimism that no matter how bad things get, there’s no problem too big for science and cooperation to fix.

Finally, it’s unrelated, but there’s one detail that I noticed that I have to call out: While he’s trying to remember who he is, Grace keeps a white board list of clues and questions. One of them says “ALWAYS MUSCLES?” And I’m still completely not sure how I feel about it.

On the one hand, I appreciate it as a quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it acknowledgement that for their schlubby, relatable, Science Genius middle school teacher guy, they’ve cast someone with the physique of Ryan Gosling. But at the same time, this movie never shows off his physique at all, much less to Guardians of the Galaxy or Captain America extremes. It’s only because we all had a year of relentless Barbie promotion showing him with his shirt off that we had any idea what was going on underneath the novelty T-shirts and cardigans. So drawing attention to it feels not only unnecessary, but almost rubbing our noses in it?

It’s not a big deal, and definitely didn’t change my overall take on the movie as being pretty great. I’ll just file it away along with Fat Thor as yet another case of Hollywood simply not knowing how to handle its actors being hot without finding a way to make it weird.

1
I haven’t read the book, but does it explicitly make the “Hail Mary, full of Grace” gag anywhere, or just leave it implied?

1 I haven’t read the book, but does it explicitly make the “Hail Mary, full of Grace” gag anywhere, or just leave it implied?