Ryan Gosling’s space epic is ‘a mind-stretching sci-fi’ ★★★★☆

Luckily, he’s not quite alone. It turns out that another spacecraft is on the same mission from a different planet, and it, too, has just one living occupant, a crab-like alien made of lumps of stone (a puppet, with some digital tweaking). The jovial Rocky, as Grace calls him, builds a corridor between the two ships, and Grace learns to talk to it via his computer, which can translate its R2D2-ish burbles into English (the main puppeteer, James Ortiz, provides its chirpy voice). Interplanetary chat is a lot easier here than it was for Amy Adams in Arrival.

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Indeed, Grace skips past every obstacle without much difficulty, and therefore without much drama, at least until the film’s nerve-jangling final stretch. Essentially, Project Hail Mary is an upbeat buddy comedy. Grace has no family and no romantic attachments, so there isn’t the sense of painful personal sacrifice that gave Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar its heart-wrenching power. Nor does this laidback, well-groomed joker seem angst-ridden by his high-stakes suicide mission, or awestruck by his close encounter with an extra-terrestrial. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

Still, maybe Lord and Miller knew what they were doing when they went for such a bright and breezy tone. They’ve crafted a sci-fi epic which is more than two-and-a-half hours long, and which is a one-man show for much of that time. They have filled it not with action, but with mind-stretching concepts, painstaking laboratory research and knotty technical puzzles. To do all that and keep things zippily entertaining throughout is an extraordinary achievement.

Besides, as jaunty as it is, Project Hail Mary is radical in its own way. The fate of humanity, it suggests, might not rest on fighting, but on knowledge, intelligence, communication and collaboration. No wonder the film is already being tipped for next year’s best picture Oscar.

★★★★☆