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

Fortunately, he’s not completely alone. It turns out that another spacecraft on the same mission is from a different planet, and also has only one living occupant, a crab-like alien made of blocks of stone (a puppet, with some digital tweaking). Playful Rocky, as Grace calls him, builds a passage between the two ships, and Grace learns to talk to her through his computer, which can translate his R2D2-ish voice into English (master puppeteer, James Ortiz, provides his hilarious voice). Interplanetary chat is a lot easier here than it was for Amy Adams upon arrival.

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In fact, Grace overcomes all the obstacles without much difficulty, and thus without much drama, at least until the film’s nerve-wracking final stretch. Essentially, The Hail Mary Project is an upbeat buddy comedy. Grace has no family or romantic attachments, so there’s no sense of the wrenching personal sacrifice that gave Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar its aching power. Nor does this calm and polite Joker seem anxious about his high-risk suicide mission, or terrified by his close encounter with an alien. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and he feels fine.

However, Lorde and Miller probably knew what they were doing when they chose such a bright, refreshing tone. They’ve crafted a sci-fi epic that’s over two and a half hours long, and it’s a one-man show for a good portion of that time. They filled it not with work, but with mind-stretching concepts, painstaking laboratory research, and complex technical puzzles. To do all that and keep things entertaining the whole time is an exceptional accomplishment.

Moreover, despite its fun, the Hail Mary project is radical in its own way. This study suggests that the fate of humanity may not depend on fighting, but rather on knowledge, intelligence, communication, and cooperation. No wonder the film has already been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture next year.

★★★★☆