Project
Hail Mary

I did not expect to love this film as much as I did. I went in hoping it would be good. I came out completely stunned by how much it gave me. Project Hail Mary is the funniest film I have seen this year, and somehow also one of the most moving. That combination is almost impossible to pull off. Lord and Miller pulled it off.

This is a film full of heart. Genuine, earned, overwhelming heart. I gave it a five out of five and I would do it again without hesitating.

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or how he got there. His two crewmates are dead. A robotic arm is fussing over him. And something outside the ship is pinging him back. As his memories return in fragments, the picture becomes clear. The Sun is dying. Earth is running out of time. And Grace, a mild-mannered middle school science teacher who once annoyed the wrong people, is somehow humanity's last shot at survival.

Then he meets Rocky.

Rocky

The friendship between Grace and Rocky is the heart of the entire movie. Two beings from different corners of the universe, facing the same extinction-level problem, figuring out how to trust each other. It sounds like the setup for a tedious allegory. In the hands of Lord and Miller it becomes something genuinely joyful and genuinely devastating in equal measure. The film earns every emotion it asks you to feel.

Ryan Gosling

This is a Ryan Gosling performance that will be talked about for a long time. He plays Grace as someone who is perpetually out of his depth and perpetually rising to the occasion anyway, and the comedy he wrings from that situation is some of the best physical and verbal comedic work he has done on screen. But then the film asks him to go somewhere much quieter and much more vulnerable, and he goes there completely.

Sandra Hüller is brilliant in a smaller role as Eva Stratt, the cold, relentless government operative who put Grace on this ship in the first place. She is only in the flashback sequences but she brings a moral weight to those scenes that makes the whole backstory feel enormous.

Lord and Miller

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have not directed a live action film since The LEGO Movie in 2014. This is their return. And what a return it is. They understand something that a lot of big-budget sci-fi directors forget, that the science can be as funny as it is awe-inspiring. That a man figuring out alien biology using high school chemistry logic can be both hilarious and deeply moving at the same time.

The film is 156 minutes and it does not drag for a single one of them. Drew Goddard's screenplay is one of the sharpest science fiction scripts in years. It trusts the audience. It makes you feel smart for keeping up. Greig Fraser's cinematography is extraordinary. Space has never looked more lonely and more beautiful at the same time.