24 frames per second

Slightly spoilerific. You’ve been warned.

After The Martian, here’s another film based on a novel by the same author (Andy Weir) about a hero stranded and alone, someplace away from earth.

This time, it’s on a spaceship, and the location is not Mars. It’s not even in our solar system. Grace Ryland wakes up from an induced coma in a spaceship and finds that he’s the only one who survived a long voyage to a distant star. The reason he’s on that trip? It turns out the sun is dimming. (And here you thought The Core was pretty out there with the idea of the earth’s liquid outer core stalling?)

The reason this is happening is that a strange microbe is effectively eating up the sun. And it’s not just our sun it’s happening to. A distant star called Tau-ceti seems to have escaped that fate, so a small team is put on a spaceship and sent to find out why, and whether the cure for the sun is out there. I’ll say this for Andy Weir – he isn’t trying to hit a single to rotate the strike. He wants the ball out of the stadium.

Now, to be honest, none of this matters. Science Fiction, by and large, requires some suspension of disbelief, so why not this? What we’re really asking ourselves is, does it work?

The answer, in the case of Project Hail Mary is: sort of, but not entirely.

Both The Martian and Project Hail Mary have certain similarities. There’s a Robinson Crusoe-ish premise, a hero with a sense of humour whose narrative voice provides a lighter counterpoint to the seriousness of his predicament, and a story whose best parts focus on problem-solving and an active use of intelligence. These are qualities you see in the books as well, in fact to a greater degree. Both films have very personable actors playing the lead, and their innate likeability is a big plus — Ryan Gosling is in top form here, like Matt Damon was in the earlier film.

[While the earlier film had a bigger supporting cast involving NASA and the Mars mission, this one has only a few people worth naming. Sandra Huller plays mission head Eva Stratt with both intensity and humanity turned up to 11 (she has a fantastic scene at a party that deserves its own blog post), and James Ortiz does stellar work as the alien.]

There is also some deus ex machina-type outside help involved. The use of a rotating camera and hexadecimals allow for communication to be established between Mars and Earth. Tau-Ceti, on the other hand, is nearly 12 light years away, so this isn’t an option. What Grace Ryland finds, however, is another spaceship from a different planet, and an alien on that spaceship with the same mission and the same predicament. After some initial hiccups and inventive use of tools to translate between sound and text (deep neural nets FTW, I guess?), the two begin to communicate. The alien’s sounds get translated to human voice, and the film turns from a survival story in space to a buddy comedy. Now we’re in familiar territory, with an emotional landscape that we know from countless films. It is quite well done, but while this makes the film entertaining, it takes away the tension.

Now, to be fair, the stakes here are much higher than a single stranded individual: entire planetary systems are at stake. But what we see on screen in the two movies are primarily the two heroes. So our emotional investment is in their fate. Which means, the more entertaining the proceedings on board the spaceship are, the less we feel the ever-present underlying threat. There’s a big dose of seriousness towards the closing portions, but even this feels like standard masala filmmaking. We’ve seen versions of this before.

The end result is a film that feels entertaining but not satisfying. Ironic how, for a film where the big villain eats sunlight, its biggest weakness turns out to be its lightness.