Project Hail Mary

What if Stanley Kubrick was a big softie? What if the apes in “2001” hugged and fist-bumped and HAL was helpful? That’s Project Hail Mary – Lord and Miller’s sappy-sweet Hallmark card to space movies. Ryan Gosling’s solitary space quest is filled with so much techno-jargon jibber-jabber, it’s often impossible to figure out what’s really going on. “The dilithium crystals have decoupled from the flux capacitor! If I don’t bypass it in 3.2 nanoseconds the whole ship will careen out of orbit!” Thankfully, Daniel Pemberton’s score beautifully and skillfully reminds us how to feel and when danger is lurking - filling the atmosphere with curiosity and hope. It’s a gem. It’s the bee’s knees. The astronomy and biology of it all is probably pretty accurate. But how could we know? What ends up mattering above all else is that Gosling’s reluctant astronaut is able to communicate with “Rocky” the loveable alien who is thankfully not an asshole or an acid-blood monster so that together they can save the universe or whatever. It’s a movie about communication. When our current political reality constantly reminds us of the many myopic tyrants’ unwillingness to communicate, it’s nice to fantasize about a universe that can. See it in IMAX.