REVIEW: "Project Hail Mary"

Belmont Vision Multimedia. (Zach Watkins)

Belmont held an advanced screening of the highly anticipated “Project Hail Mary” starring Ryan Gosling at the Johnson Large Theater Wednesday night.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir, which was published in 2021. It follows “The Martian,” released in 2015, as the second of Weir’s works brought to the silver screen.

“Project Hail Mary,” despite early critical acclaim and promises to be the next great space epic, succumbs to a lot of the pitfalls of its galactic predecessors.

Two things that plague this film were unavoidable based on the source material: exposition and monologuing. 

The movie doesn’t belabor itself explaining all the fictional science it presents, but when it does, it’s typically delivered by Ryan Gosling’s character Ryland Grace. 

Grace is the main character, and being stranded in space, naturally has no one to talk to for much of the first hour of the film. 

The solution to this is having him speak his thoughts out loud constantly and eventually pivoting to recording himself á la “The Martian.” 

Though a necessary evil, it is played out to a ridiculous point. 

Even though he suffers memory loss, there’s no reason for him to physically write out “Why am I here?” on a whiteboard. It kills immersion. It isn’t for him; it’s for the audience. 

Another immersion killer is the constant humor. The film doesn’t whiff on any of its jokes—it’s a funny movie—but it incessantly undermines its important moments for a quick laugh. 

It feels like the filmmakers were scared of the tension they created and felt the need to cut it by any means necessary.  

It’s a problem that persists in a lot of different modern movies, and so is another problem I had with this movie: color. 

The parts of this film that take place on earth are so inexplicably gray. I understand that the atmosphere is supposed to be bleak and that the sun is literally dying, but that doesn’t justify draining the saturation. 

It puts little-to-no faith in the audience; changing colors to influence the audience how to feel, spelling out obvious plot beats and even going so far to have Grace point at something visible in frame and read it aloud. 

The film is quite trite, predictable and sickeningly saccharine, but it’s still worth a watch. 

Despite the complaints, the movie is solid. It’s fun, upbeat and endearing, even if it’s almost annoyingly so. 

It can be unbelievably corny at times, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, and I’ve never heard a theater filled with a tidal wave of conversation like I did Wednesday night. 

“Project Hail Mary” officially releases in theaters March 20. 

Written by Nick Rampe