Ryan Gosling’s Space Movie Doesn’t Land

To promote his new film, Ryan Gosling recently threw a football from across a huge, trafficky intersection into the hole of L.A.’s famous Randy’s Donuts sign. Viewers, myself included, were dazzled. Except he didn’t actually do it—the video of the stunt was edited. But it says something about Gosling that we all believed he could. This is a man who has made a hit movie almost every year for the past fifteen years, displaying a remarkable range of characters. His latest, “Project Hail Mary,” which comes out tomorrow, is a big-budget adaptation of a beloved science-fiction novel. Our critic Justin Chang, who reviewed it, seems to have been more impressed by the football video.

Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

There was a lot of excitement around the release of this movie. Did it turn out as good as so many people said it would?

I suspect I may be in the grinchy minority on this one: it’s the most smoothly engineered crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a minute, and I don’t mean that entirely as a compliment. All I could see, in the end, was that engineering. It’s a science-fiction comedy in which the science and the comedy—which is to say, the stakes and the humor—don’t feed each other so much as cancel each other out.

That said, fans of the Andy Weir novel it’s based on will probably be satisfied.

Did any of the jokes land?

The film is occasionally funny. Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, is both a genius and a goofball. He has a nicely bickersome rapport with Rocky, an alien he befriends in space. And their language barrier is a continual source of amusement.

Mostly, though, it left me with newfound appreciation for “The Martian” (2015), Ridley Scott’s adaptation of another Weir novel. Scott used comedy to grease the narrative wheels; here, the laughs tend to gum up the works.

But there is something quite heartwarming about an “interspecies buddy comedy,” as you call it.

Indeed. The genre goes back at least as far as “E.T.,” which has fewer jokey bro-down moments, thankfully, but is nonetheless an obvious reference point here. And now the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies are like the maximalist-buffet version. Hats off to the puppeteer and voice actor James Ortiz, who brings Grace’s alien comrade persuasively to life.

Did you have a favorite—or least favorite—part?

My favorite scenes are those with Sandra Hüller, who plays the government official who recruits Grace. Hüller has a marvellously dry wit, at once playful and no-nonsense, that you miss whenever she’s not onscreen. It’s wonderful to see a big Hollywood production make use of her gifts.

My least favorite thing about the film is that, despite a plainly enormous budget, it conjures so little real sense of wonder. Even a comedy set in outer space should transport you or impart some of the grandeur of interstellar travel.

I have to admit that, even if this movie isn’t great, I am amazed by Gosling’s career. And not just for the obvious “Notebook”-related reasons. Do you think he still has what it takes?

Gosling is a superb actor. He can do bruising drama, as he does in “Half Nelson” (2006) and “Blue Valentine” (2010), and he showed real killer instinct in “Drive” (2011). For all that, I don’t think he’s at his best in “Project Hail Mary,” and he appears to have been (mis)directed to lay it on a bit thick. At times, he seems to be playing for obvious laughs in a way that he didn’t in, say, “The Nice Guys” (2016) or even in “Barbie” (2023).

He should stay grounded is what you’re saying.

Oh, I don’t know—I’m not one to give a movie star advice. Given how fun it was watching him plummet twelve stories in “The Fall Guy” (2024), he should probably keep setting his sights as high as he wants.

Read the review »