Lily Huynh/The Cougar
Project Hail Mary is the newest film by acclaimed and controversial director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, their own take on the space exploration genre, like such greats as 2001 and Interstellar. With this film sharing an original source with the 2016 Matt Damon film The Martian, both movies were based on books written by Andy Weir.
It is about a middle school science teacher and an amnesiac astronaut, Wyland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling in one of, frankly, his worst roles. He participates in a mission to stop the sun from going out, a similar plot to the 2007 film Sunshine, starring Chris Evans. To reveal anything else would be to spoil things, but one can easily imagine where it goes from there.
I did not hate this movie, not really. I can see how someone with more of a tolerance of or fondness for Millennial humor could get more out of what is, in essence, an Interstellar. It has a similar focus on an atmosphere of cosmic wonder, with beautiful, expressionist shots that can get outright eerie at times and a mostly great co-star in the form of Rocky, the rock-spider alien who assists the main character and utterly steals the show.
However, I personally have next to no patience for the kind of smarmy, self-defacing humor that utterly infests this film. An endless stream of “so-that-just-happened” style quips, paired with what’s supposed to be wondrous, now becomes cheap, low-hanging fruit. I will be blunt: a film like this is not supposed to be “funny”. This film’s multiple attempts at comedy utterly incinerate the wondrous atmosphere it clearly aims to induce. The main character is downright insufferable, with everything he says deflating whatever investment I had in the scene preceding it. His reaction to terrifying personal news is to launch into weak jokes.
This “comedy” infects not just every other character, but the cinematography itself. Beautiful, shadowed shot of the main character floating outside of the spaceship, immediately cut away for a borderline juvenile pratfall joke, turning what could be a beautiful, haunting and borderline spiritual moment into an irony-poisoned “comedy” beat. And frankly, that’s the entire film scaled down.
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