Verdict: Yes, you should go see Project Hail Mary as soon as possible

First, in the plainest language, before we get to anything else, Project Hail Mary is a fantastic film. It does right by its source material, and it also easily stands on its own for folks who haven’t read the book. It comes out on March 20, and if you’re a regular Ars Technica reader, you will almost certainly enjoy the crap out of it. Go see it as soon as you can, and see it in a theater where the big visuals will have the most impact.

Next, a word about what “spoiler-free” means here: In this short review, I’ll talk about stuff that happens in the movie’s many, many trailers. If you’re an ultra-purist who is both interested in this film and who has also somehow avoided reading the book and also seeing any of the trailers, bail out now.

Otherwise, read on!

It’s a buddy movie

PHM is, first and foremost, a movie about a schoolteacher who becomes friends with an alien and the joy of that relationship. And because the film is based on an Andy Weir novel, there’s also some problem-solving with science.

What problems? A pretty major one dominates: As we learned back in the first trailer, the Earth’s sun is mysteriously dying, and no one knows why. An assay of our nearby stellar neighbors reveals that those stars all appear to be dying as well—all except for one, Tau Ceti, located just under a dozen light-years away. Why is Tau Ceti seemingly being spared by whatever force is causing the other stars to dim? In what quickly becomes a common refrain, no one knows.

Ryland Grace finds himself a long, long way from home.

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

The solution, as presented to us by a mysterious government representative named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), is to build an interstellar craft, accelerate it to near the speed of light, and visit Tau Ceti to find out what’s going on. It’s a long-shot mission—a “Hail Mary,” as she puts it.

But why do they send Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle-school teacher with no immediately apparent qualifications? Why not send a crew of trained astronauts, or top scientists, or both? These questions are eventually addressed—but before they are, poor Grace finds himself stuck at Tau Ceti and plunging headlong into something no one was prepared for: first contact.

Hey, yo, Rocky

Since the trailers go there, we can go there: Grace quickly discovers he’s not Tau Ceti’s only visitor. Another ship, much larger and obviously alien, is already present—seemingly for the same reason. And aboard that ship is Rocky, an extraterrestrial whose design breaks hard from traditional Trek-style humanoids with bumpy foreheads.

Rocky (left) and Grace (right), solving problems with science.

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

Brilliantly realized almost entirely through practical puppetry, Rocky is everything one could ask for in a space-going science friend: he’s inquisitive, he’s funny, and most important of all, he’s friendly. Grace and Rocky quickly work out a shared vocabulary and get down to the business at hand of saving both species’ stars from destruction.

It’s important at this point to say that although Project Hail Mary shares a considerable amount of heritage with 2015’s The Martian—both are based on novels by Andy Weir, both celebrate engineering as a discipline, and both were adapted for the screen by Drew Goddard—this film is very much not The Martian II, in tone or content. This is, above all else, a buddy movie.

It’s also a relatively long buddy movie, coming in at two hours and 46 minutes—but it doesn’t feel nearly that long. The film has a lot of establishing work to do, and it gets that work out of the way quickly; we run into Rocky about 40 minutes in, and from that point on, the Grace and Rocky show is in full effect.

Look and feel

This is a big blockbuster film, and it brings with it big blockbuster set design. The interior of Grace’s ship, the eponymous Hail Mary, is a multi-story cathedral of glorious analog and digital chunkiness—every surface is studded with practical controls and hanging wires. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller explained at the film’s late-February press junket that they wanted the ship to be “a PC” and not “a Mac”—so less Enterprise, more Nostromo. (Everyone I asked also admitted that on set, they’d been powerless to stop themselves from constantly flipping every switch and pressing every button within reach.)

Colorful visuals dominate most of PHM‘s views of space

Credit: Amazon MGM Studios

I caught the movie on the big screen at the famous TCL Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles, and it was absolutely worth seeing in such a large venue. The film has a bombastic and consistent visual language, with recurring motifs of bright colors (which you can get a real sense of from the various trailers). It’s also loud—there are a couple of jump scares that seemed designed to literally lift you out of your seat, so be prepared.

In spite of the deadly serious subject matter—the extinction of all life everywhere is pretty heavy!—it’s very much a celebratory movie, earning its PG-13 rating by never falling too far into existential despair. The tone throughout is hopeful, even when things seem grim—perhaps a bit of a departure from the book, which is much more Martian-like and which stacks problem after seemingly unsolvable problem onto poor Ryland Grace’s shoulders.

An adaptation that stands on its own

There are inevitable differences between Weir’s novel and Goddard’s screenplay; many center on the differing dramatic and narrative strategies that must be employed when telling a story via film versus a novel and are simply par for the course. However, one aspect that suffers in translation is the actual process of solving those unsolvable problems.

Most of the challenges Grace (and later Grace and Rocky) face in the novel are present in the film, but rather than spending pages discussing the engineering behind a particular solution and the nuts-and-bolts details of the solution’s implementation, most of the problems are breezed past with minimal time spent on the “how.” This is a screenwriting choice with some risk behind it, but even with the breezy explanations, this is still a movie that clocks in at damn near three hours long, and taking even more time to digress about physics, molecular biology, and astronavigation would have resulted in an unworkably lengthy film.

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