Awesome space ships. Friendly aliens. A race against time. The weight of the world on one man’s shoulders. Ryan Gosling. Project Hail Mary has it all! This story kept the entire audience enthralled, laughing, crying, and stressing right alongside the main character.
For starters, the film was stylistically gorgeous. Stunning colors and beautiful images that dazzled the audience and elicited more than a couple gasps from me. The vibrance made every scene a delight and brought the sky alive in a new and unique way. Every few minutes there was a moment that took my breath away, and made me feel the same wonder that Ryland Grace experienced.
Not one to be outdone, Daniel Pemberton, the music producer for the movie, absolutely blew the audience away with his scores. As Yael Levy, freshman at Cresskill High School, eloquently put, “The music carried a nice tone and added a lot . . . it felt epic at times.” It helped increase the feeling of immersion and transported us to a world of far-away stars and weightless travel.
In my opinion, one of the best parts of the film was Rocky, the lovable and clever alien companion. The design perfectly matched the description in the book and I had so much fun watching this creature of imagination come to life. On top of the character design, I was immensely impressed that they managed to make a lump of rocks so expressive, you could tell exactly what he was feeling at each moment.
Pairing perfectly with the extraterrestrial, Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of Ryland Grace nailed his awkward-school-teacher vibe perfectly. With his perpetually lopsided glasses and painfully punny science t-shirts he felt like a real, relatable person rather than the larger-than-life persona that leads in most movies. Yael agrees, saying “I liked how he was a sort of funny humorous guy who was also genuinely worried”. This all added to the idea at the center of the story, stepping up to be heroic when it really matters.
My only complaint about the movie was its length. Throughout the story, Grace goes through a lot, and there were several scenes of him dealing with his pain. This includes everything from crying,
to contemplating, to drinking something that definitely wasn’t water. While those moments helped make the main character feel more relatable and realistic, they also added to the total length of the movie.
“It felt pretty long and I sort of felt like there were two climaxes and I was looking at my phone a few times to see the time,” commented Yael when asked about the notoriously long run time.
As someone who read the book before the movie was even a thought in the director’s brain, I can say it was pretty loyal to Andy Weir’s inspiration. HOWEVER, my favorite scene in the book didn’t make the cut, which definitely disappointed me. In the opening of the book, Ryland Grace has to do some pretty fancy math calculations to figure out where he is, and the reveal that he is in outer space was phenomenal, setting the tone for the rest of the novel perfectly. In the movie, he looks out the window, glances at some charts, and suddenly knows exactly where he is. If I was the director, I would’ve cut 20 seconds off of each time Ryan Gosling cries and use them to improve the opening
Overall, it was a really entertaining movie, and I definitely don’t regret watching it. The actors did amazing and allowed me to connect to the characters in a new way. I would highly recommend taking the 2 hours and 37 minutes to watch it. I hope in the future, they continue adapting Andy Weir’s books. I’m voting for the book Artemis (give it a read, it’s worth it).
