One of the charms of “Project Hail Mary,” a feather-light science-fiction movie about a heavyweight subject — the end of the world — is how it embraces the seductions of outer space. It’s a nice change of pace, given how space often occupies the darker corners of the human imagination, whether for fictional horrors, as a metaphor for the void, as an exploitable resource or as a fixation of self-aggrandizing billionaires. The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller appreciate the terrors of space, but they also get the allure of space and its seemingly infinite potential for beauty, for mystery and especially for play.
Adapted by Drew Goddard from the 2021 novel by Andy Weir (author of “The Martian”), the story finds humanity once again facing Earth’s demise. For a change, it isn’t our fault (yay). Rather, an alien entity that devours energy has begun snuffing out stars like candles. It’s latched onto our sun, activating the Big Countdown to extinction. In desperation, the countries of the world have joined forces to try and find a solution, one of those reassuring premises that telegraphs the movie’s optimism and — given the lack of unity on the human-generated environmental catastrophe we’re facing — comes off as quaintly old-fashioned. It’s easier to suspend your disbelief when it comes to this movie’s science fiction; it’s the multilateralism that’s tough to buy.
A molecular biologist, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) has been working as a middle-school teacher when some serious-looking people recruit him for humanity’s seemingly impossible mission, a setup that brings to mind Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” (2016). In that solemn science-fiction drama, Amy Adams, as a linguist, is tapped to help communicate with recently landed extraterrestrials whose presence has set the world on edge. “Arrival” is partly about grief as a condition of life; at the start of the story, the linguist is mourning her daughter. By contrast, “Project Hail Mary” — which includes scenes of Ryland teaching bright, eager students — is very much about insisting on hope.
Lord and Miller are best known for “The Lego Movie,” an animated superhero comedy that was amusing enough to make you feel almost OK about watching a feature-length commercial. The filmmakers have an advanced degree in pop culture, a helpful prerequisite when it comes to repackaging stale goods. With its cosmic reach, armies of performers and lavishly detailed large-scale sets, “Project Hail Mary” is more ambitious than anything they have previously directed. Shot in two different aspect ratios (the cinematographer is Greig Fraser), the movie looks great; it’s been polished to a high gloss and flows with commensurate smoothness, which is crucial given its time shifts.
When you first meet Ryland, he has long hair, a prodigious, shaggy beard and a thoroughly baffled mien. To his great confusion, he has awakened from a long sleep on a spaceship that’s far from home. His situation is as much a mystery to him as to you, one that he puzzles through onboard — the scientific method to the rescue — amid explanatory flashbacks. Some involve Eva Stratt (a welcome Sandra Hüller), a no-nonsense enigma who, after tapping him for savior duties, delivers him to a command center where more scientists and other deep thinkers are feverishly searching for a way to save the planet.
Once in space, Ryland spends a lot of time alone, which fits Gosling’s self-contained affect. Weir sent the unpublished manuscript to the actor in 2020 in the hope that he would star in an adaptation. Gosling did just that, and he fits the role impeccably. As an actor, he can go as glib as the movie he’s in (“The Gray Man”) and play persuasively obtuse, as evidenced by his blissfully doltish Ken in “Barbie.” He has, though, more range than is at times asked of him, as well as a talent for expressing interiority, for feelings and for thoughts. Gosling can overdo the waterworks, but he’s good at conveying the kind of vulnerability that’s all the more touching when men, in particular, try to hide it.
It is, in other words, easy to go along with Ryland, to want the best for both him and for Earth. The twinned crisis of the global threat and his isolation invest the story and the character with pathos, and his amnesia reinforces Ryland’s helplessness while also establishing his regular guy bona fides. He’s just like us, not an unrelatable brainiac, but a hapless, baffled castaway who, at least at first, is grasping for solutions while sometimes humorously pinwheeling though microgravity like a scrap of wind-tossed refuse. The filmmakers and the actor lean into the comedy of the character’s plight, yet while that’s sometimes a relief and often funny, it blunts the existential terror.
By the time that Ryland has made his acquaintance with a benign alien life force that he names Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), Lord and Miller have almost finished filing down the story’s every potential jagged edge and announced the limits of their ambitions. Rocky is certainly an entertaining addition, a wittily conceived nonhumanoid that evokes a five-legged wood stool if the stool were an ambulatory rock formation. Like Ryland, Rocky has a back story and a ship, a delicate-looking vessel that resembles streaks of golden light with gilt latticework. Rocky is also alone and has a friendly disposition, and soon the two have settled into a cozy, affable odd-couple relationship.
This alliance has its attractions, though it’s a little too cute, a little too programmatically Spielbergian, and it upends the movie’s initial serio-comic balance. Before long, a science-fiction freakout — one that is easy to see as a metaphor for our own climate catastrophe — has turned into a good-natured buddy movie that becomes increasingly, almost willfully more insubstantial with each new chuckle. Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.
Project Hail Mary Rated PG-13 for mild peril and the threat of doomsday. Running time: 2 hours 36 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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