His misses are so rare between his many hits that we don’t think of Ryan Gosling as ever taking an errant step on his rise ro stardom. But a “Gangster Squad,” “Song to Song” or “The Gray Man” turns up just often enough to remind us he’s human.
I am mystified about his need to dabble in “cutesie” with the sci-fi misfire “Project Hail Mary.” Yes, he’s got kids, and an alien stone-crab (literally stone) CGI sidekick in a “Silent Running/The Martian” mashup from two filmmakers best known for getting their start as an animation directing team (“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs”) seems almost understandable.
But I went out of my way to avoid adding “adorable” to the “alien sidekick” description. It’s not, no matter how many times the critter’s translated “Fist me bump” or “You are dumb” or “Do puppet show” burblings — James Ortiz provides the nondescript voice — aim for laughs.
I see a lot of lightweights and critic-come-latelys are endorsing this, and maybe I’m too reluctant to let go of my reactions to the first trailers for it. But “cloying” is a hard sell at 156 often interminable minutes.
Gosling plays a middle school science teacher who runs a fun and delightfully encouraging class. That’s not quite a running thread through the movie, but it has or had promise.
One day, the ex-college researcher/professor Dr. Ryland Grace (a tad on the nose, that name) is challenged by his students to talk about the “red dots” that scientists have announced seem to be eating the sun in a giant arc of a solar system buffet table that ends on Venus.
Even Grace isn’t convinced when he insists “They’re gonna figure this out,” “they” meaning the world’s best and brightest astrophysicists, biologists and the like.
Then he’s confronted by “they” in the form of scientist/project leader Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller of “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Toni Erdmann”). Her bluntness gets right to the point of his one-time expertise. She will accept no argument from a teacher and onetime researcher who lost his career over his theory that “water is not necessary for life” in the universe.” She needs him and that’s that.
Her humorless is her humor. Yes, those black SUVs are full of guys who will kidnap him.
And as we learn about that class, that school and this now-renewed research through flashbacks Grace experiences after waking up from cryo-sleep on a spaceship, we can guess how he ended up there, too, a turn of events as ludicrous and unlikely as a vacuum-of-space virus that is eating stars all over the galaxy.
Grace is all alone on a ship traveling over eleven light years to study a star that isn’t being eaten, or so everybody thought when he took off. That’s where he runs into an alien vessel also studying this star. And that’s how he meets just-as-lonely “Rocky.”
The science in this “sun is being eaten” story — such as it is — is grasped just long enough to let it slip into “fantasy,” with energy sources that seem more Tony Stark and “Avatar” “Unobtainium” than Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The “learn to communicate” scenes involving models and yes, “puppet shows,” are grossly inferior to earlier takes on that trope — “Close Encounters,” “Contact” and “The Martian.” Sci-fi films are readily referenced with “Shields’ UP!” the only joke that works.
The narrative’s “work the problem” business is flat-out gobbledegook, as the movie feels more production designed than Phd-in-chemistry approved.
And the pathos derived from the Big Themes of loneliness, sacrifice and fighting through fatalism left me cold –deep space cold. When even “Am I expendable?” is played for laughs, and lands with a thud, it’s not just gravity that’s to blame.
Gosling can be forgiven for taking the Bezos bucks, and he has earned such goodwill that he’s almost become bad-review-proof, especially since “Barbie.” But “Project Hail Mary” doesn’t make the pass, much less complete it in the end zone when time FINALLY expires.
Rating: PG-13, “thematic meterial” and “suggestive references.
Cast: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Yeoung and the voice of James Ortiz as “Rocky”
Credits: Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, scripted by Drew Goddard and Andy Weir An Amazon MGM release.
Running time: 2:36
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