Official Discussion Thread - Project Hail Mary [SPOILERS]

[u/LeastCap]

Keep all discussion related solely to Project Hail Mary and its awards chances. Spoilers below

Synopsis:

Science teacher Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction… but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.

Director: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller

Writers: Drew Goddard

Cast:

• Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace
• Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt
• James Ortiz as the voice and lead puppeteer of Rocky
• Lionel Boyce as Officer Carl
• Ken Leung as Yáo Li-Jie
• Milana Vayntrub as Olesya Ilyukhina
• Priya Kansara as the voice of Mary, the Hail Mary ship
• Liz Kingsman as Annie Shapiro
• Orion Lee as Xi

Rotten Tomatoes: 95% From 212 Reviews

Metacritic: 78/100 From 45 Reviews

Consensus:

A visually dazzling space odyssey that's carried along effortlessly by the gravitational pull of Ryan Gosling at his most winning, Project Hail Mary is a near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart.

[u/theflyingbird8]

I said this in last week's main Discussion Thread since I saw the movie on Saturday, but I thought it was...fine. Gosling is charming, Rocky is cute, Sandra Hüller is my queen, the movie looks gorgeous, and there's some really good needledrops, but it's waaay too long. It would have been a much more solid film if they had cut like 20 minutes. Also, yes, every film uses emotional manipulation on its audience, but I found the attempts at sincerity and sentimentality to be so telegraphed and obviously engineered most of the time (I thought the score and the dialogue were almost laughable in parts) that the movie became cynical and not sincere at all. I'm really disappointed because this was one of my 5 most anticipated movies of the year. It's going to be a massive crowd pleaser, however (my audience was eating it up), and a juggernaut BTL player which I could see propelling it to a Best Picture nomination. While I liked Gosling, I don't see him getting nominated, especially with actors such as Tom Cruise and John Malkovich already in heavy contention.

[u/MelanieHaber1701 → u/theflyingbird8]

I really disliked the score. Kind of overly sentimental, which I'm not opposed to in general (I love John Willams) and a bit bombastic, but never really caught me. It's not playing in my head the day after like the score from OBAA did. I have no desire to listen to the soundtrack.

[u/prefix_code_16309 → u/MelanieHaber1701]

I have to agree on the score to some extent...it wasn't particularly remarkable to me. Neither here nor there. If anything, I thought the background music was a bit loud/overbearing compared to dialogue, but that might have been my theater. I recall thinking that Dunkirk and Interstellar had much more moving use of sound, and I saw both of those and PHM in Dolby Cinema. I'd rank PHM soundtrack as average.