Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary [Jonathan Olley]

PROJECT HAIL MARY
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Certificate: 12a
☆☆☆

HOW many times has a sci-fi started with a premise of the lone astronaut stuck millions of miles from home with a planet-saving mission to tackle?

It’s a well-trodden celestial voyage, beloved of numerous intergalactic flicks.

But perhaps the opening scenes of a confused and exhausted Ryan Gosling tripping over hi-tech gadgets on board his craft is a harbinger of the comedy to come.

This is not a spoof but rather a mash-up of climate-crisis inspired apocalypse, a take on finding common ground with aliens (is it meant as a parable over the US approach to immigration?), a space thriller with a mission to complete and a down-to-earth humour about our leading man’s wish not to be a hero.

Ryland Grace (Gosling) is an amiable high school science teacher who gets his pupils beautifully engaged in the big questions.

One day a UN-appointed scientist turns up at school and insists he join a top secret project: he had written a controversial PhD thesis that not all life forms need water and carbon. His idea was enough to wreck a research career, hence he is teaching instead.

But it so transpires that a bunch of aliens are draining power from the sun and unless scientists can work out what they are, what they are doing and why, earth has about 30 years of sunshine left.

So Grace, against his wishes, is sent up into the great unknown to find out.

This ridiculously long film – it needs the space to get some twists and turns in – takes an unexpected and wonderfully silly turn when Grace encounters a spider-shaped alien made of galactic stone he calls Rocky. Not only does his new friend offer much-needed companionship but he finds his buddy is on a similar mission from another civilisation – and if they work together, perhaps they can solve the mystery of the intergalactic blobs sucking the energy from stars and putting various lifeforms on various planets on notice.

The story is bolstered via flashbacks – we get Grace’s backstory this way – and then we follow an elongated series of tasks Grace and Rocky must overcome to save the universe.

Gosling, as ever, is wonderfully watchable and he does the comedy well, even if elements such as his continuously wonky glasses and stoner dress sense seem to be hammering home a message made clear in the first five minutes – he is a reluctant hero, but ever so handsome and cuddly, so worth rooting for.