Space travels of an unlikely duo

    On its surface, Project Hail Mary sounds like another large-scale space adventure, a movie in which a lone traveler must save the Earth when a virus threatens to dim the sun. A mysterious microbe known as Astrophage is responsible for this doomsday scenario.

   Fortunately, Earth has hope for survival, albeit a slim one. The future of humanity depends on a molecular biologist -- Ryan Gosling's Ryland Grace -- traveling 11.9 light-years to Tau Ceti, a star that’s immune to Astrophage. Perhaps an antidote can be discovered and brought back to Earth. 

    It's a last-ditch, long-shot effort with no guarantee  of success, but it's the only option.

   Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse) shift away from the usual space-genre tone, bypassing ominous cosmic references and occasionally indulging in sentiment.

    Distinguished by its use of sets and avoidance of green-screen work, the movie has a down-to-earth flavor, even as it vaults toward a distant galaxy. The approach is in keeping with Drew Goddard's screenplay, which immediately confronts Grace with the series of problems that propel the story. 

   When he awakens from his induced slumber, Grace can't remember who he is or how he happened to find himself on a spaceship. Job one: Read the clues that will help him recover his memory.

    Grace seems an unlikely hero. The story begins with him teaching seventh-grade science, after having been rejected by scholars for advancing a thesis the scientific establishment scorned; i.e., that life needn't be water-based. Grace's brilliance was mocked.

     Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller) heads an international organization that recruits Grace for the Hail May Project. Eva admires the fact that Grace is willing to think unconventionally, even if others don't accept his conclusions. 

     So, Grace enters deep space, quickly learning that his companions on his voyage had failed to awaken from their induced sleep. He becomes the solo savior of his planet.

     Well, not quite.

      En route to his destination, Grace encounters an alien ship on which a creature he names Rocky also has been traveling.

     James Ortiz does the voice work for Rocky, filling the character with innocent charm and making the most of the way Rocky struggles to understand a new language, sometimes to comic effect.

   Grace's alien buddy may look like a leggy rock, but by no means is he as dumb as one. An engineer by trade, he builds a bridge between the two ships. Rocky, we learn, misses the spouse he left on his home planet; he, too, has lost his crew, and, like Grace, he has tried to adjust to being alone.

   The screenplay adds poignancy because scientists on Earth have equipped Grace's ship with enough fuel to reach its destination, but not enough for a return trip. (The ship, by the way, runs on Astrophage, an odd bit of irony.) Additionally, Grace must mourn the death of his fellow travelers (Ken Leung and Milana Vayntrub), both of whom he hardly knew.

     Project Hail Mary is based on a popular 2021 novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, which became another big-screen space adventure built around loneliness and ingenuity. 

     By the time Rocky enters the picture, screenwriter Drew Goddard has begun employing flashbacks to allow Huller's character to develop and to provide additional insight into Grace's pre-flight life. Gosling carries the movie with ease in a showcase role.

     A set piece in which Grace and Rocky try to recover fuel is built for excitement, but other space shots lack the feeling of dark emptiness that can make life feel puny, meek, and insecure.

    Entertaining and involving -- if overly long at 156 minutes -- Project Hail Mary occasionally struck me as silly. Rocky, after all, isn't the most intriguing looking of creatures. I also found the cuteness of the movie's epilogue off-putting, making me think I'd witnessed an adventure that couldn't resist painting a smiley face on its intergalactic surface. 

     Still, Project Hail Mary offers relief from the interplanetary bloviation of other space epics, serving as an antidote to the self-seriousness with which Hollywood usually plies the depths of space. 

     The message also merits consideration: Forget Aliens and its many successors; other forms of life just might turn out to be our BFFs.

      

Bob's Cinema Diary: 6/25/21 -- 'Werewolves Within' and 'Kenny Shcarf: When Worlds Collide’

 Werewolves Within

A spoof-like take on werewolf movies, Werewolves Within tips its hand with its title. While  delivering a few jolts, the movie takes satirical aim at the predatory instincts of a group of residents in a small town where an oil company dangles major money to secure land for a pipeline. Director Josh Ruben assembles a strong cast and follows a familiar strategy, isolating his characters in a sleepy inn in the fictional town of Beaverfield. Sam Richardson plays a nice-guy forest ranger who arrives in the town at the film's outset.  Richardson's Finn  forms an immediate alliance with the town's mail person (Milana Vayntrub). She clues him into the secrets of the small population, which includes a married couple, the corporate guy who wants to build the pipeline, and others. An ominous trapper (Glenn Fleshler) lives outside the town and serves as the story’s principal red herring. Could he be the werewolf that's gradually depleting the town's population? More amusing than fall-down funny, Werewolves Within introduces sprinklings of topicality. Richardson's wonderfully sincere performance goes a long way toward keeping the movie on track.

Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide

If you're looking for a movie that understands and revives the chaotic feeling of the 1980s art world, Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide has plenty to offer. Focusing on Scharf, a graffiti artist who also works in a variety of other media, the movie tells the story of an artist who became known but never acquired the rocket-fueled fame of figures such as Keith Haring or Jean-Michel Basquiat. Directors Max Basch and Malia Scharf (the artist's daughter), tell the story of an era and of an individual whose work is steeped in pop-culture. The movie includes plenty of images of Scharf's work, as well as interviews with critics and fellow artists who help define Scharf’s place in the ever-flowing art stream. The directors include a  touching account of Scharf's loss of close friend and former roommate Haring to AIDS . It wasn't easy for Scharf to watch his friend anointed by an art world that never did as much for him. What finally sticks is Scharf's amazing productivity and his devotion to making art -- on canvas, on billboards, on walls, and on ordinary household objects. He came of age in a world in which trend sometimes outweighed trenchancy. But no matter which way the art winds blew, Scharf kept working and following his own path. He's still at it and still committed to the notion that to be meaningful art needn't be stripped of either playfulness or (heaven forbid) fun.