Man, fuck Ryan Gosling! I’m so tired of this man and his charming, handsome ass. Whether he’s literally smashing heads in a satin scorpion jacket, doing tour-de-force work as an iconic toy doll or turning into an agent of chaos whenever he hosts Saturday Night Live, the man can do no wrong. And he’s got Eva Mendes baby-mama’d up at the house!
Excuse me for all the hate I’m spewing at the top of my review, but I’ve never seen a celeb come along and win on such a consistent basis as Gosling. Along with being an attractive, affable, scandal-free matinee idol and family man who people either wanna smash or hang with (or both), this former Mouseketeer has grown up to be one of those old-school movie stars who can be funny, tough and tender — sometimes all in the same movie. He’s a man’s man, but he can also be a simp, a fool, a song-and-dance man or the one who tells you, “It still isn’t over!” in the rain. He’s not afraid to kick ass, but he’s also not afraid to get his ass kicked. (I’m quite certain he doesn’t have a “no-lose” clause in his contract, as some action stars do.) No matter how much you try to hate on him, he’ll easily win you over.
He does it again in Project Hail Mary, which takes the First Man star back into the weightless unknown. Gosling works that dopey, dashing magic as a man who wakes up from a long slumber on a spacecraft, all by his lonesome, unable to remember who he is or how he got there. Flashbacks eventually inform us that he’s Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher and former molecular biologist who reluctantly becomes a part of a top-secret project — Anatomy of a Fall star Sandra Hüller really leans in on the dry-but-droll neurodivergence as his no-nonsense superior — to save the world from reaching a catastrophic ice age.
But Project isn’t just another mega-budgeted, brooding but beautiful space flick in which an A-lister is literally lost in space, quietly working out some personal shit in the middle of vast nothingness (or as I like to call it, sci-fi that sighs). It’s also another seriocomic adaptation from the bibliography of hard sci-fi author Andy Weir. About a decade ago, Ridley Scott put Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian on the big screen, with Matt Damon as the charismatic, cosmic castaway. Directors/animators/multihyphenates Phil Lord and Christopher Miller handle directing duties this time, with Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard once again adapting Weir’s work into a dense yet personable space epic, weaving witty dialogue into the hyperintelligent mumbo-jumbo (think Aaron Sorkin if he grew up with a subscription to long-gone science monthly Omni), as brilliant but relatable people work together to take on a mission that could both lose and save lives.
Blockbuster action-comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt opens wide Friday
It’s also — on my mama! — a buddy comedy. This happens when Grace meets up with a vessel carrying another weary space traveler who looks like a crab made of granite. (Sorry I couldn’t throw in a “Rock Lobster” reference.) While Gosling cruises the galaxy with his stony sidekick, figuratively using their noggins to both communicate with each other and get back home, Lord, Miller and Goddard kill two birds with one stone with this all-around crowd-pleaser. Yes, it’s a dreamlike, existential story of a lone astronaut stranded in the cosmos, floating in a most peculiar way. But it’s also something I thought fell out of style with flattops and L.A. Gear sneakers: the cute space movie.
It’s fitting that that trio of geeks would make a sci-fi popcorn flick that’s also reminiscent of all the cuddly space oddities that came out after E.T. made us want alien friends of our own. If you grew up in the era of noisy cable boxes and VCRs the size of cinder blocks, then you must’ve caught ’80s space jams like SpaceCamp, The Last Starfighter, Flight of the Navigator and Mac and Me (that last one being the only E.T. ripoff featuring a cameo from Ronald McDonald) — flicks in which space travel is a rollicking adventure and aliens are too adorable to be monstrous.
Sci-fi die-hards might not dig Project Hail Mary’s sappy, smart-alecky moments, while other moviegoers might find the dialogue too eggheaded. But Project Hail Mary combines the best of both worlds (c’mon, you knew that was coming). Just like The Martian, it’s a smart, sympathetic story about being there for your fellow man, whether you’re in space or on solid ground, and starring a guy who — even when he’s being too gotdamn perfect — you root for right to the end.
