Movie Review: Project Hail Mary

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up to a breathing tube being taken out of his mouth and a computer asking him what two plus two is. Not able to answer the cognitive question correctly at the moment, he is dragged out of his sleeping pod. He climbs a ladder and finds two other sleeping pods, but the people in them are dead. Grace blunders about through an amazing amount of loose equipment until he finds a window. The stars out there reveals he is in space. What’s worse, he is on a trip taking him far out of the solar system.

Grace does not remember how he got there. As he tries to figure out how to run the spaceship, his memory comes back to him in dribs and drabs. He was a middle school science teacher. Students asked him about the dimming of the sun. He acknowledged this was happening, and it was linked to the Petrova line, which goes from the sun to Venus.

Scientists discovered this line was composed of microorganisms dubbed the Astrophage. A high-level government agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) recruited him to work on this. It turns out Grace was a microbiologist who was shunned for insisting that life can exist without water. Dispirited, he ended up teaching middle school. But in a government lab, he finds the Astrophage is composed of individual cells. They absorb enough energy from the sun to travel to Venus. Why? They are attracted to the carbon dioxide on Venus, where they breed using the carbon dioxide.

This is causing the dimming of the sun. In about thirty years, all life on Earth will be dead.

Other stars are being infected, presumably by the Astrophage. But one star, Tau Ceti, is not. The Hail Mary spacecraft is assembled for a three-person crew. They will hopefully go to Tau Ceti, find out why it is not being affected, and send the information back to Earth via probes. If the information is relevant, and scientists can do something useful with it, the Earth may be saved. (The movie does not describe it, but the Hail Mary pass is a desperate move in American football, so the name of the spaceship reflects the improbable nature of the mission.)

There is only enough fuel for a one-way trip. This is a suicide mission.

Back in Grace’s present, the Hail Mary has been under constant acceleration, providing Grace with a sense of gravity. But when it reaches a planet orbiting Tau Ceti, the drive cuts out. Now in fully-realized zero gravity, he scrambles around in the pilot seat. The pilot was one of those who died, so Grace has no idea what he is doing. Will he figure out how to pilot the ship, and will he find anything useful to save Earth?

Project Hail Mary is a fun movie designed to appeal to viewers who don’t necessarily know a whole lot of science. It has the opposite of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s serious and well-disciplined crew. A surprising scene showed the Hail Mary’s crew preparing to leave by drinking and singing in a bar. It is also the opposite of The Right Stuff. Grace is not cut out for this mission, and he knows it. He is the wrong stuff.

One has to get used to Ryan Gosling’s face, since much of the movie focuses on him. But that’s not a problem for most people. He has an everyman nature about him, whether he is tearfully sending his dead crewmates out for a space burial, or using his scientific genius to try to find a way to defeat the Astrophage.

I had never seen Sandra Hüller before. Much of her work has been done in Germany. The movie certainly takes advantage of her expressive face and surprisingly expressive voice. Her character of Eva Stratt will surprise you.

P.S. If you stay and watch the end credits, you will see that Meryl Streep really did say a sentence as a voice actress.

P.P.S. The current ad for the movie reveals a lot. In fact, if you are planning on seeing the movie, don’t watch any ads for it. Or any interviews with the actors.

SPOILERS *** SPOILERS***SPOILERS

This isn’t exactly a spoiler anymore, because the current ad for the movie takes a lot of the surprise out of it.

The spider-like, asymmetrical alien named Rocky is creepy. It took me a while to get used to it. Obviously, this is on purpose, so our experience will track with Grace’s,

In the bar scene, it looks like Eva Stratt is developing feelings for Ryland Grace. This becomes a great head fake with her surprise song.

Most moviegoers do not understand how to simulate gravity in science fiction. They did a great job showing what happens when acceleration is turned off, then the spaceship has to spin to simulate gravity in a different way.

CRITICISMS ***CRITICISMS***CRITICISMS

The movie doesn’t work.

I am referring to the movie, not the book, into which the author Andy Weir poured in an immense amount of scientific research.

The Hail Mary spins fast enough to give a G-force of 1g. This would make for an immense Coriolis effect (which I won’t attempt to explain here) in that size of a spacecraft. Grace would have to lean crazily to the right or left to compensate. More likely, the spacecraft would tear itself apart.

When the Hail Mary is diving too deep into the planet’s atmosphere, Rocky starts it spinning again. Fine. This keeps Grace’s face from being smushed into a console. But how does that rescue them from burning up in the atmosphere? The movie definitely shows the spinning gets them out of danger, but with no explanation.

For this next part, remember that I am criticizing the movie, not the book. The Astrophage take energy from the sun to go to Venus. Why? Because they are drawn to the carbon dioxide (actually, a part of the infrared spectrum that implies carbon dioxide). Grace shows this convincingly in the lab, when cells zip away to that infrared. In space, he and Rocky discover a bacteria that will eat the Astrophage. This will kill the Astrophage on Venus and Rocky’s equivalent of Venus.

So what? There is no explanation as to why that would stop the Astrophage infection from maintaining the Petrova line as they take energy from the sun to Venus.

On a different subject, Rocky tells Grace the return trip to Earth would take only four years. That would be about three times the speed of light. There is no mention of time dilation. It would simply take four years.

Although I liked the human interactions, the scientific flaws lead me to dislike the movie.