It is down to Ryan Gosling’s amnesiac fish out of water (AKA human out of earth) to kick off this year’s post-Awards blockbuster season. The masterminds behind it are symbiotic-film-wonders Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who didn’t have too much fun the last time they filmed a space opera in the UK (uncredited on 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story). But nearly a decade later, they’ve found a winning formula with Drew Goddard’s humour-packed adaptation of the 2021 novel by Andy Weir, a writer previously better known for penning The Martian.

The result, which wisely retains the novel’s name Project Hail Mary, is mostly a visually stunning date movie. And it’s a funny one, almost entirely thanks to Gosling’s one-man show—not that there isn’t sterling support from a deadpan Sandra Hüller as a ruthless executive and master puppeteer James Ortiz. 

It’s Gosling’s Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher, who awakens from an induced coma on a deep-space craft that’s closing in on a strange star. The only survivor of the three-person crew, he has to piece together his scrappy memories of the events that landed him light-years from home, and find an answer to an existential threat to Earth.

A mysterious line of particles, some kind of lifeform, is feeding from the Sun and its stellar cousins, and it’s around the mysteriously unaffected star Tau Ceti that Grace finds an ally in an advanced but wholly un-humanoid alien, the Eridian he nicknames Rocky. But can the pair, the last of their respective crews, both on missions that face impossible odds, discover Tau Ceti’s secret to save their respective planets?

It’s hard to believe there was a time many doubted the one-time All New Mickey Mouse Club star-turned-intense indie darling of films like Half Nelson when he started signing up for light-hearted movies. Now, watching this lengthy but wholly enjoyable space opera, it’s hard to think of anyone other than Gosling who could carry this off. 

The actor, and producer, doesn’t underplay his quirky, highly-strung Grace: a study of a human maybe being born great, possibly achieving greatness, but wholly struggling with having greatness thrust upon them. In the scope of an impossible mission and a heady blend of semi-believable physics and biology and straight out sci-fi, he’s just the right cocktail of clumsy, brilliant, deprecating, emotionally rich and emotionally stunted.

Lord and Miller have a whale of a time grabbing at glorious slices of cinematic sci-fi to craft the warm, but not wholly safe, approach to interstellar space travel that warps around Grace—something the Star Wars universe could never have allowed. It’s a particularly 1970s-tinged film. There are heavy nods to Silent Running (1972) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and lighter, fun pokes at Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Superman: The Movie (1978). But the vintage references don’t stop the pair riffing off their own more recent back catalogue, including an early stop-motion-style visual joke between two meeting spaceships that must be a doff of the cap to The Lego Movie.

Much of Project Hail Mary hinges on the buddy-relationship-going-on-bromance between Grace and Rocky, which throws up all manner of laughs (Goddard’s script is a treat). While it works through a few expected beats, and mostly plays as a weird bickering marriage, it doesn’t overstay its welcome… Until the end. A dual structure keeps the ‘present-day’ story in space and the one from years earlier on Earth running in parallel. While it’s not overwrought—how the flashbacks affect Grace’s mind is kept pretty woolly—for a lot of the second act, there’s a hanging worry that the tension might only hit in the past. In fact, Goddard, Lord and Miller manage to keep the plot twisting satisfactorily in both timelines, but the sacrifice is what feels a lot like an overly extended ending and an unnecessary coda of schmaltz. 

Aside from that, Project Hail Mary gets almost everything right. While Daniel Pemberton’s score starts out strangely anodyne, his pounding, anthemic soundtrack builds and builds until, brilliantly, it sympathetically ends up becoming a friend by the end. Peppered throughout are some strong needle drops—Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times gets a strong showing, even if it feels like there should be a follow-up that never arrives—and some superb references to Liverpool and the Beatles, which is what any sci-fi epic needs for balance. All together now: two of us riding nowhere…