Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling on ‘charisma overdrive’ in space buddy movie

This sci-fi film (from the team behind “The Lego Movie”) tugs at the heartstrings, while also delivering “galactic” levels of good cheer, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times.

Adapted from a novel by Andy Weir (who also wrote “The Martian”), it stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist turned schoolteacher who comes round from an induced coma to find himself stranded on a spaceship 15 light years from Earth, with no memory of how he got there.

Through a series of flashbacks, however, we gradually learn that he ended up on the Hail Mary mission after joining a taskforce to prevent the Sun from being destroyed by highly heat-resistant alien microbes. As Dr Grace battles to fulfil this mission to save life on Earth, he befriends a perky alien critter named Rocky.

The film isn’t wildly original, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph: it’s “essentially ‘Interstellar’ recast as a buddy movie”. But it is gorgeous to look at, with wonderfully “tactile” visual effects, and the story is pretty involving.

It suffers from too many false endings, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but Gosling is on “charisma overdrive” and powers it “to the highest-possible entertainment orbit”.

I’m afraid I found it “a bore”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, not helped by the fact that it runs to a “bladder-challenging” two-and-a-half hours. The cutesy alien seems to have wandered in from another film (perhaps “Guardians of the Galaxy”), and essential elements just don’t ring true. For instance, we are told that Gosling’s character was selected for the mission because he had no friends or lover at home who’d miss him. Yet he is “affable and witty”, and he looks like Ryan Gosling. It makes no sense.