[COLUMN] The Familiar Space Movie Nostalgia of Project Hail Mary | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary, Interstellar and (in as much as it can be spoiled) 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you’re looking for a quick review of Project Hail Mary: it’s a good time at the pictures. It’s fun, playful, and charming. It has a nice goofy performance from Ryan Gosling, but a really incredible CGI/puppet performance. I feel kind of bad that this piece is mostly me talking about the parts of an enjoyable film that, to me, held it back from greatness, because it is a lovely crowdpleasing spectacle of a film.

Project Hail Mary is the latest film from directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord.

It is in some ways a departure for the pair, who largely developed as a creative team defined by their work in comedy with a decidedly postmodern bent, from the animated feature films Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie through to the spoof 1980s reboot 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street. This is true even in the context of the films produced by the pair, such as Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. As a rule, these are funny and self-aware movies.

On paper, Project Hail Mary feels like it should be something else. It is a space adventure movie with apocalyptic stakes, as unlikely astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) finds the weight of the world placed on his shoulders. When the sun starts dimming due to the arrival of strange alien creatures known as “astrophages” feeding on the sun’s light, Grace is tasked with making the long and dangerous journey towards Tau Ceti, the only local star unaffected by these parasites.

However, in practice, Project Hail Mary leans very strongly into Lord and Miller’s sensibility. It is an adaptation of the book by the same name from author Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian. The screenplay is adapted by Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian. That space adventure about an astronaut trapped on Mars was somewhat light-hearted considering the stakes, to the point it was infamously nominated for “Best Musical/Comedy” at the Golden Globes.

Project Hail Mary makes The Martian look like a gritty stripped down drama. Ryan Gosling is very much in the mode that has defined the past eight years or so of his career, playing a lovable goofball like those featured in The Nice Guys, Barbie and The Fall Guy. It is a long way from the brooding and serious performances that defined his earlier career in movies like First Man, Blade Runner 2049, Only God Forgives, Drive, The Place Beyond the Pines and so on.

This pivot away from serious dramatic work in Gosling’s career is intentional. “A long time ago I went to see a shrink and he wrote me a prescription that said: ‘Do comedy,’” Gosling told The Evening Standard in 2016. Gosling has told this story several times; apparently, he got this advice after working on Blue Valentine in 2011. Gosling also talked to The Wall Street Journal about taking lighter roles for the sake of his kids, who were on set during the production of Project Hail Mary.

As such, Project Hail Mary feels very much like a Lord and Miller movie in that sense. It is a very fun and very broad comedy, in which the potential extinction of the human race is never allowed to put too much of a dampener on Gosling’s goofy screen persona. There are extended and repeated jokes, some impressive comedic set pieces and a general warmth pervading the movie that feels somewhat at odds with the general premise.

However, the film feels like a Lord and Miller production in other ways. Lord and Miller are extremely postmodern directors. They might even be described as “metamodernism”, that post-postmodernism school of referential filmmaking often applied to movies like recent Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once. The idea is that such works employ the referential style of postmodernism, drawing from a wealth of influences, but towards an authentic emotional end.

Most of Lord and Miller’s movies are extremely referential. The LEGO Movie is a film about playing with toys featuring a cast of licensed characters like Batman (Will Arnett) or Gandalf (Morgan Freeman). The Jump Street films are very self-aware about being nostalgic riffs on a retro property, as demonstrated by monologues from Deputy Chief Hardy (Nick Offerman) and by the closing credits to 22 Jump Street that offer a pitch-perfect satire of contemporary franchise media.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a love letter to both Spider-Man media, lifting art styles directly from specific comics, but also to animation in general, including stylistic shoutouts to Looney Tunes and anime. The film takes for granted the audience’s familiarity with the contours of the Spider-Man mythos, running no fewer than six variations of the Spider-Man origin, with the assumption that the audience will be able to fill in the gaps as they go.

In concept, Project Hail Mary would not seem to lend itself to this approach. After all, it does not take place within an existing fictional universe or with an existing intellectual property. Nevertheless, the film is overt in placing itself within a larger cinematic lineage. This is the latest in a line of space movies that includes films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Ridley Scott’s The Martian and so on.

Almost every major beat or scene in Project Hail Mary has some sort of antecedent within the genre, often quite overtly. Grace’s red space suit evokes 2001. His mission to reignite the sun is the basic plot of Sunshine. His first meeting with a mysterious alien that he comes to call “Rocky” (James Ortiz) recalls the contact scenes in Arrival. One of Grace’s only companions is a robot arm like that featured in Iron Man, which was a key reference point for Mark Watney (Matt Damon) in The Martian.

The climax leans rather heavily on Interstellar. At one point, the ship spins so fast that the centrifugal force reaches a point where it will cause a blackout, recalling a key action sequence in Interstellar. There is also a big reveal towards the climax that despite Rocky describing Grace as “brave”, he is actually a coward who did not volunteer for the mission to save mankind, mirroring a similar reveal about Mann (Matt Damon) in Interstellar. Rocky’s ship also evokes the tesseract in Interstellar.

Even the ending of Project Hail Mary feels like a more accessible take on the conclusion of 2001. In 2001, astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) journeys through a wormhole to make contact with an alien intelligence. Although never explicitly stated, the imagery implies these aliens build a habitat for Bowman and allow him to live out a life in an alien environment. At the end of Project Hail Mary, Grace goes home to Rocky’s world, where they build a miniature ecosphere for him.

There is perhaps even a slight nod to Gosling’s previous entry in the “sad astronaut” canon, Damien Chazelle’s First Man. In that film, which is inspired by true events, Neil Armstrong (Gosling) only ends up on the manned mission to the moon because of a freak fire that kills the first draft picks. In Project Hail Mary, Grace is a last-minute substitute who is chosen after the first draft picks are killed in a freak fire.

The difference between Project Hail Mary and earlier Lord and Miller films is that these references are not explicitly articulated. While Grace makes a joking allusion to Alien, he never remarks that he is wearing the space suit from 2001 or that the first contact chamber looks very similar to Arrival. Grace has seemingly never seen First Man, which is unsurprising not just because of the paradox of realizing that it stars his doppelgänger, but because the film notoriously underperformed.

This is the most frustrating aspect of Project Hail Mary, which is otherwise a very enjoyable movie. It feels like the first time that Lord and Miller are making these sorts of pop culture references simply for the sake of making these sorts of pop culture references, rather than in service of some larger narrative or thematic point. Their earlier films included lots of these sorts of references, but often building towards a clear goal.

The LEGO Movie is, as the title implies, literally and thematically about taking disparate pieces and putting them together to build something new, so its magpie approach to pop culture makes a great deal of sense. 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street are fun theatrical comedies, but there is always a sense that they are joking about themselves, they are making a broader point about how desperate Hollywood’s dependence on intellectual property had become that Sony was rebooting 21 Jump Street.

The two Spider-Verse movies are very directly about the idea that anybody can be a superhero, including Miles Morales (Shameik Moore). There is no single right way to be a hero, just as there is no single right way to tell a Spider-Man story. The films are textually about this, with Across the Spider-Verse pitting Miles against Miguel O'Hara (Oscar Isaac), who is policing the canon and who believes Miles does not belong in this particular story.

Similar to Everything Everywhere All At Once, form and function are intertwined, what these movies are is also what they are about. These Lord and Miller projects are not just referential, they use their references to make a large point. More than that, they often bring these competing (and occasionally contradictory) influences together to create something that feels new. Their use of existing material is inherently nostalgic, but it is also iterative, evoking the notion of sampling in hip-hop.

Project Hail Mary marks the first time that Lord and Miller’s work feels imitative rather than iterative. It honestly doesn’t feel like they have anything particularly insightful to say about the films that they are quoting from, other than that they are good films. These are good films, but they are also widely available, and they have things to say about their own influences. Nolan’s Interstellar riffs on Kubrick’s 2001, but larger as a rejection of the oft-cited comparison between Nolan and Kubrick.

It’s the biggest problem with Project Hail Mary, which is otherwise a really fun and enjoyable time at the movies. This sense that it is borrowing from these influences for no greater reason than to reference a bunch of great movies is also what makes it Lord and Miller’s weakest effort to date. The pair have honed their crowd-pleasing instincts, but for the first time have lost their own voice in the mix.

The result is a film that reaches for the heavens, but is not quite out of this world.