The follow-up to Andy Weir's Science-em-up The Martian offers more of the same clever problem solving and scientific extrapolations, but this time with much bigger stakes at play.
Where The Martian was about saving one unlucky explorer, Project Hail Mary posits a future where the Sun is in peril thanks to what appears to be a ravenous space microbe, which would eventually doom humanity to a new ice age and eventual extinction.
The film handles this backstory through a flashback structure so we initially get to meet Grace (Ryan Gosling), who wakes on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere with just the corpses of two other crew members and a robot arm for company, and no memory of how he got there or even his own name. Through a combination of flashbacks and Grace's investigation of his surroundings we learn that he is a schoolteacher who wrote a thesis on some obscure exobiology that meant he might have the insight required to help the global effort to stop the Sun being snuffed out.
Blasted out into the void towards Tau Ceti - the one star seemingly unaffected by the threat - Grace is on a suicide mission to gather as much data as possible, pop it into a probe back to Earth and then hope it will be enough to save his home. What he, and Earth-based project leader Eva Stratt ( Sandra Huller) did not expect was that he would be the sole survivor of a radiation leak and be stranded millions of miles away from anyone. OR IS HE?
Ok, HE ISN'T. This would be more of a spoiler were it not in the trailer but Grace makes contact with another being trying to save their own world - an alien from the Eridanis solar system who he names Rocky, due to it resembling a sort of spider made of rocks.
A few slightly handwaved translation montages later and the pair become fast friends, resolving to work together to save both their planets and, just maybe, help Grace avoid the suicide part of the mission.
This film was a big-hearted family blockbuster that managed to be both gripping with high stakes and just light enough to breeze by. Rocky is a marvel of puppetry and CGI with a great vocal performance from puppeteer James Ortiz. Not your usual anthropomorphic wrinkly-forehead monster, he comes across as warmly human while still very much alien.
Lord and Miller keep things rolling along at a great pace but make sure to embrace the wonder of space travel and discovery. Amaze, amaze.