2026 - PROJECT HAIL MARY, it's really long

Extreme over length finally kills what could have been a good science fiction story.  The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have been very good providers of crowd pleasing entertainments with films like 21 Jump Street, 22 Jump Street, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs and The Lego Movie. They were fired off of the Star Wars spinoff Solo because they thought they were hired to make a comedy which apparently isn't what Disney wanted.  Believe me considering how Solo turned out their approach would have made a much better movie.

 

For Project Hail Mary they were working with a big budget based on a novel from the author of The Martian.  They mounted a very elaborate science fiction epic with a screenplay by a top writer Drew Goddard.  Ryan Gosling was cast as the hero astronaut who has to save the planet earth.  Current flavor of the month German actor Sandra Huller is the scientist in charge of Project Hail Mary  She plays the usual stoic who secretly has a heart of gold.

 

Even with all the elaborate and at times dazzling visual effects, Ryan Gosling is the whole show.  He has to virtually deliver a monologue throughout the whole film and act next to some kind of puppet rock creature.  He does this very well and keeps the film watchable for about an hour.

 

However Project Hail Mary is cursed with all of the problems these current big screen films have.  It has a very meandering script with a lot of plot exposition.  In this case there's  lots of jumping back and forth in time and a whole lot of screen time hanging out with the space alien.  This finally drags the film into major boredom.  It also has one of the worst issues all these recent big budget films have as well, the inability to know when to end the damn story.  There are at least three endings in the last half hour.  This film isn't bad it's just tedious.

Project Hail Mary runs 156 minutes.