In Review: ‘Project Hail Mary,’ ‘Mirrors No. 3,’ ‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come’

Project Hail Mary
Dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
156 min.

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) doesn’t know what he’s doing, but nobody in Project Hail Mary really does. Living on a near-future Earth in the early stages of an existential crisis caused by a mysterious force that’s slowly but irreversibly dimming the sun’s power, Ryland spends his days happily teaching science to middle school kids after effectively being drummed out of academia following the publication of a controversial paper. Though apparently content to leave that world behind, Ryland finds his students growing increasingly worried about the uninhabitable future that awaits them. It’s a fear he cannot assuage and, as a scientist, understands to be undeniable. That makes him easy to persuade when he’s recruited to help figure out the source of the crisis and if it can be reversed, though the very fact that Ryland’s been tapped for the task suggests an underlying desperation. Those who thought they knew what they were doing now understand otherwise. It’s time to start thinking outside the box. Maybe way outside the box.

Based on a 2021 novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary alternates between scenes depicting Ryland’s recruitment into the desperate planet-saving attempt that will come to be known as “Project Hail Mary” and the ultimate result of that recruitment: a lonely, one-way, and (after a mid-flight accident) one-man journey to the far reaches of space, specifically the Tau Ceti star system, the one place in the galaxy that seems to be immune to whatever is killing our sun and every other sun like it. But once Ryland arrives, he finds he’s not alone anymore. Another voyager from far away has arrived at Tau Ceti before him, seeking answers to the same questions.

Scripted by Drew Goddard (who also wrote the screenplay for Ridley Scott’s adaptation of The Martian), Project Hail Mary is the first live-action film directed by the team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—who broke through with the animated hit Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, enjoyed further animated success with The Lego Movie and the Spider-Man films, and scored live-action hits with 21 Jump Street and its sequel—since their departure from the Star Wars spin-off Solo. That also makes it the team’s first non-comedic live-action film, though much of Project Hail Mary’s success comes from the skill with which it brings a light touch to heavy material. The heaviest, really: It’s at heart the story of a man on a suicide mission whose failure would mean the end of life on Earth as we know it. But, though the film never loses sight of those factors and all they imply, it’s also pretty fun, even before evolving into a buddy comedy in which one half of the buddy team, an alien Ryland dubs “Rocky,” looks like a pile of rocks and can’t share an atmosphere with his human partner.

Created by a combination of practical and digital effects, Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz, who also served as the creature’s on-set puppeteer) is a (at first at least) truly alien creation who becomes endearingly familiar as his relationship with Ryland evolves while they work through the problem that threatens both their worlds. Like countless movies, Project Hail Mary concerns an effort to stand up to a world-destroying nemesis (albeit an unconventional one), only here it’s cooperation and applied science, not violence, needed to get the job done. The threat is galactic. The solution is human- and rock alien-sized. Though scaled to blockbuster proportions (and gorgeously shot with an emphasis on the darker end of the spectrum by Greig Fraser), it’s the film’s intimacy, both in scenes in space and on Earth, that set it apart.

Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man. Lord and Miller alternate scenes of Ryland’s time in space with the lead-up to his journey as he aids an international task force assembled by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, also excellent), a European space program veteran. On Earth, they take the first steps on a journey to save the planet, which means determining what sort of problem they’re confronting. In space, Ryland attempts to take the journey’s final steps and again discovers that it’s intellect, reason, and friendship that will make this possible. Project Hail Mary is a movie in which characters face a problem that seems unsolvable until they put in the work to figure it out, in the process demonstrating that this, in movies and elsewhere, might be the only way to save the world. —Keith Phipps

Project Hail Mary opens in theaters tonight in various formats. This review is based on an IMAX screening, but it will also be shown in 70mm in select theaters.

Miroirs No. 3
Dir. Christian Petzold
88 min.

Like the Maurice Ravel piece that gives the film its title, Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 unfolds in a minor key, leaning toward the small and refined gestures of Petzold’s more recent work, like Afire and Undine, than the relatively bigger swings of Transit and his masterful post-WWII melodrama Phoenix. Petzold’s thematic obsessions are more or less intact—like Transit and Phoenix, this is basically a riff on Vertigo, only much more stripped-away and lightly enigmatic—but it’s odd to see him continue to retreat into work that’s conspicuously less ambitious. The emotional turbulence of his best films has been replaced here (and in Afire and Undine) by a glancing inquiry into human nature, pleasingly subtle yet nothing that sticks to the ribs. He’s become the Olympic diver who’s chosen to dial down the degree of difficulty in order to hit the water without a ripple. 

In her fourth collaboration with the director—essentially replacing Nina Hoss, the brilliant star of Phoenix, Barbara and Jerichow—Paula Beer spends much of the film carrying a melancholy that trails her like Pigpen’s cloud, even before an incident that changes the course of her character’s life. Beer stars as Laura, a piano student at a Berlin academy who reluctantly agrees to join her boyfriend on a boat trip out in the country, only to beg out when they get to the docks. On the way back, they get into a car accident that kills him and leaves her to be discovered by a local woman, Betty (Barbara Auer), who takes care of her until the ambulance arrives. To the medics’ surprise, Laura expresses a desire to stay with Betty instead of going to the hospital and Betty agrees, which is the first indication that they need each other in ways they cannot express. 

The ease with which Laura and Betty fall into a cozy domestic rhythm together is peculiar, given that they were total strangers before the accident, and it gets even odder when Betty invites her husband Richard (Matthius Brandt) and their adult son Max (Enno Trebs) to dinner one night. Why do Richard and Max not live in the house any longer? And why has she brought them back now for this awkward event? Petzold doesn’t care much about hiding the reasons, and he offers up a head-scratching subplot about Richard and Max’s mechanic business, which involves luxury cars and under-the-table cash payments. But Miroirs No. 3 is more interested in allowing the behavior of this quartet to be the prevailing mystery of the film and it’s utterly compelling, even if it’s not that challenging to figure out. The true puzzle here is grief, that nebulous process where there’s no clear answer or road map, just behaviors and rituals that feel distinctly removed from the flow of everyday life. Petzold and his cast spend time in that stream, and it’s an alluring feeling to drift along with them. — Scott Tobias

Miroirs No. 3 opens in New York and Los Angeles this week and expands from there.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
Dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett
108 min.

The notion of an America run by a band of sadistic, perverse, Satan-worshipping elites has only grown more potent since the reasonably clever horror-comedy Ready or Not was released in 2019. Now that the fanciful QAnon fever dream of Pizzagate has been replaced by the agonizing slow drip of the Epstein files, it really does seem like pedophilic oligarchs are in charge of everything, just not the ones that right-wing fringe-dwellers led themselves to believe ran the world. And so there’s a natural, built-up antipathy that should hit Ready or Not 2: Here I Come in stride, especially now that the filmmaking team—screenwriters Guy Busick and R. Christopher Murphy, and directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett (known together as “Radio Silence”)—have expanded their premise beyond a single wealthy family that subjects their son’s new bride to a deadly game of Hide and Seek. Now that all of the elite have a stake in killing this poor newlywed, the audience has plenty of off-screen motivation to root for their demise. 

Yet the John Wick-ification of the Ready or Not franchise spoils much of what made the first film a compact, nasty piece of cartoonish fun, confined entirely to a puzzle-box estate where various sticks-in-the-mud try to murder our plucky protagonist. Having survived this onslaught in her blood-caked wedding dress, Grace MacCaullay (Samara Weaving) would seem primed to turn the page and choose her next fiancé more carefully, but this sequel needs to figure out how to put her through the paces again. Now that Grace’s in-laws, the Le Domas family, is wiped out, Busick and Murphy strain to come up with a new plot involving an entire, interconnected network of rich families that have to kill her in order to protect their own vast fortunes. 

There’s a satanic order that must be maintained, and at the top of the pyramid is Chester Danforth (David Cronenberg, delicious in an all-too-brief role), who’s so all-controlling that when he sees war footage on a cable newscast, he can order a ceasefire as quickly as he can change the channel. If Grace survives to see another dawn, then Danforth will have to concede that power to her, so he enlists his vicious twin children, Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar), to join various others in the line of succession to take aim at Grace on another estate. Complicating the situation is Grace’s estranged younger sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who reluctantly shows up at the hospital as her emergency contact, but winds up getting roped into this deadly cat-and-mouse game. 

There’s a typical more-is-more mentality at play in Ready or Not 2, with various well-to-do maniacs coming at Grace and Faith in waves as the siblings argue over who betrayed who years earlier. The kills are slickly executed and often amusingly gross, since any hiccups in the line of succession lead to spontaneous combustion, with characters bursting like an engorged tick. Elijah Woods seems to be having a good time, too, as a master of ceremonies who’s dedicated to carrying out the demonic script as written, but doesn’t appear to have a dog in the fight. Yet the satirical promise of Ready or Not 2 leads to few comic payoffs—or even much resembling a joke, despite the film’s irreverent tone—and the snippiness between Grace and Faith seems forced after they’ve been taking fire together for so much of the film. Here’s hoping that Ready or Not 3: Olly Olly Oxen Free better meets the moment. — Scott Tobias

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come opens in theaters everywhere tonight. It's the movie our current cabal of billionaire satanists don't want you to see.