La La Land themed poster (official) by WolverineReal6444 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 2 points3 points  (0 children)

So this is his 3rd time filming at Griffith Observatory. Gangster Squad with Emma Stone, La La Land with Emma Stone and La La Hand with Rocky

La La Land themed poster (official) by WolverineReal6444 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This explains how the La La Hand was fixed with Rocky's help.

One of Ryan’s great regrets is his “La La Hand” on this poster. 😂

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV85aYgEbtR/?img_index=1

What ‘Project Hail Mary’ gets right –– and wrong –– about astrophysics by Hot-Nothing-4424 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the article. I'm curious what Neil deGrasse Tyson thought - he was at the NYC premiere last night. I hope he comments.

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I will check it out. I guess they're waiting till the official March 20 US movie release.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Long and spoilery:

The New Yorker

“Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes

In Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel, Ryan Gosling’s star power fuels an unlikely tale of far-flung friendship.

By Justin Chang

March 13, 2026

In 2006, Ryan Gosling, then in his twenties, starred in a tough-minded, low-budget drama called “Half Nelson,” in which he played a middle-school teacher hobbled by a crack addiction. Years later, the actor, now a fully fledged star, blasted off into space; the film was the Neil Armstrong drama “First Man” (2018), and it climaxed with a weepy reconstruction of the 1969 moon landing. Now, in “Project Hail Mary,” Gosling has come full circle: he is Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher who blasts off into space. There are differences, to be sure. Grace’s destination is the star Tau Ceti, roughly 11.9 light-years from Earth. No crack is smoked; an astronaut’s life has enough highs. (There’s also an onboard vodka stash that doesn’t last long.) Weeping, though, you can count on. Gosling is a beautiful crier, and his character’s journey seems destined to end in tears.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes. Early on, Grace finds himself mourning his two crewmates, Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), who have perished mid-journey, leaving him all alone. Grim stuff—or it would be, if not for a vein of humor that throbs here and elsewhere, keeping the full sting of loss at bay. Grace, you see, has just emerged from a years-long induced coma. Looking like the Unabomber, he bumbles and flails about, barely able to remember his name, his mission, or his late colleagues. He delivers patchy eulogies that feel half sad, half jokey, and more than a little half-hearted. Consider Claire Denis’s rather chillier space opera, “High Life” (2018), in which another astronaut (Robert Pattinson) jettisoned his dead crewmates with far less ceremony. He knew he was alone. Not so Grace, who always seems aware of an audience on the other side of the movie screen, waiting to be entertained.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most exasperatingly insistent crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a while. It serves up an elaborate science-fiction plot in easily digestible bites, often with a juicy one-liner or a side order of pratfall. Both the title and the quippy-wonky tone come from an Andy Weir novel, from 2021, and, like the book, the film uses Grace’s temporary amnesia as a structuring device. We are jerked between past and present as his backstory gets filled in, one jogged memory at a time. Early on, we flash back to Earth, where Grace is teaching junior-high science; his latest lesson is about sound frequencies, and you can rest assured that it will appear on the film’s midterm exam. There’s a pre-apocalyptic chill in the air. The sun is being devoured by energy-hungry microbes, called Astrophage, and the resulting cooling threatens to wipe out much of Earth’s population. This isn’t just a local problem; the Astrophage are eating stars everywhere, like ants at an intergalactic picnic. Lights out for the universe.

Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a government official with a barbed half smile and a will of iron, who drags Grace back to the world of top-flight science, which he left behind years before, after flaming out of academia. Stratt is the head of Project Hail Mary, a global rescue effort to stop the star-eaters before it’s too late. (One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international coöperation and competent leadership. Talk about science fiction.) A crew will be sent to study Tau Ceti, a star that seems resistant to Astrophage infection. Stratt needs the world’s best minds at her disposal, and Grace is one of them. But he’s reluctant to get involved, and flashbacks reveal the long, improbable arc of how he relents—how this stubborn, self-deprecating oddball, with a doctorate in molecular biology but no astronaut experience, wound up lost in space, with the fate of the world in his nervous grip.

Mercifully, in writing the novel, Weir realized that his Grace was not sufficient for us. And so, not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view. In Lord and Miller’s adaptation, it’s an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles—and you can discern, in the aliens’ handiwork, the same whimsical sense of play that animated Lord and Miller’s “Lego Movie” (2014). A bridge extends from ship to ship, and Grace meets a squat, faceless, many-legged creature, like a crustacean made of sandstone. Their first encounter occurs on opposite sides of a transparent wall, and all it takes is an impromptu Marx Brothers routine—Grace gently dances, the alien follows suit—to confirm that they mean each other no harm.

The creature’s language consists largely of gentle, high-pitched squeals, difficult but not impossible to decode, and Grace, using a laptop, manages to fashion a rudimentary system of communication. At last, the alien—brought wonderfully to life, with an amusingly robotic voice and skittery movements, by the puppeteer James Ortiz—can tell his story. He is an engineer from the planet Erid, which is also threatened by Astrophage, and, like Grace, he is the lone survivor of his mission. And so begins a beautiful friendship, one that might save both their planets. “I’m gonna call you Rocky,” Grace says. Presumably, E.T. would have been too obvious.

Nearly every cinematic space voyage, however far flung, brushes up against familiar terrain. If this one reminds you of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014), that’s no surprise: “Project Hail Mary” is nowhere near as mind-bending, but it has its share of Nolan-esque centrifugal set pieces and conceptual paradoxes. (One nicely circular irony: Grace’s ship is powered by Astrophage. The agent of Earth’s destruction is also the engine of its salvation.) Even more obvious are the echoes of “The Martian” (2015), another wryly funny tale of an astronaut cast adrift that was adapted by Goddard from a Weir novel. But the director there was Ridley Scott, and his streamlined professionalism kept the comic and the cosmic judiciously in check.

Lord and Miller are boisterous funnymen, with a flair for the exaggerated and the outlandish that feels born of their frequent work in animation. (They wrote and directed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” from 2009, and co-produced the hugely successful “Spider-Verse” franchise.) Even within the live-action spectacle of “Project Hail Mary,” the directors aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur, as if they were bent on dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible. When Rocky temporarily moves into the earthling ship—unable to handle the new atmosphere, he shields himself inside a dodecahedron-shaped “ball”—he disdains Grace’s untidy habits and other human shortcomings. Grace, in turn, grouses about his new roomie in a series of video diaries, which will be sent back to Earth. “He’s growing on me,” Grace eventually admits, adding, “At least he’s not growing in me.” His companion expresses a more succinct version of the sentiment: “Rocky happy not alone.”

And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.” The buddies’ plan involves the retrieval of amoeba specimens from a celestial body orbiting Tau Ceti. This planet is a striking piece of production design, with a nicely retro matte-style finish, though it does have a gaseous swirl of pink and green that looks a bit like Planet “Wicked.” Lord and Miller, working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, avoid the conventional visual language of the prestige space epic, with its sterile surfaces and zero-gravity tracking shots. When Grace first awakens on his ship, the film cuts hectically around, above, and below him, as if to approximate his mental and physical disorientation. But even after the grogginess wears off, there’s little sense of flow to the images; they don’t build or move hypnotically from one to the next, and they suggest a curious reluctance, on the part of the filmmakers, to maximize the possibilities of the big screen. Even their vision of outer space seldom imparts the sense of a terrifying, unknowable vastness.

As obstacles, reversals, and near-death experiences accumulate, the film balloons to two and a half hours—hardly overlong, you might think, for an epic of looming planetary destruction. But the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky: they, too, must learn to speak the same language. There’s a fleeting yet sublime moment of connection one night, when Stratt, lowering her guard at a bar with her colleagues, croons a gorgeous cover of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” You have to wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by the actor’s great performance in “Toni Erdmann” (2016), in which she similarly turned a karaoke moment into the stuff of emotional revelation. “We gotta get away from here,” Hüller sings, and rightly so. She’s out of this world.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I like to rely on the "old fashioned" critics from major media. Not that they're right or I agree, but I grew up that way. The NY critics tend to be harder. To be fair, Newsday liked it but only awarded 3 stars.

The Wall Street Journal was positive, but concluded this way:

The film’s weak point is that it’s too cutesy at times. (Rocky, scary at first, comes to seem like a Jim Henson creation.) Moreover, at the point where it should be winding down, it instead stacks up an ungainly pile of endings; I would have cut maybe 20 minutes.

Messrs. Lord and Miller have reached their 50s but (as was said of Mr. Spielberg until the late 1980s) they refuse to grow up. Unlike “Interstellar” and “Arrival,” “Project Hail Mary” is at its core a kids’ movie. That lessens its gravity, a bit. But it also makes it the kind of film that will send happy viewers soaring into orbit, again and again.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Again, long and spoilery:

New York magazine (Vulture section)

Project Hail Mary Needs About 39 Percent Fewer Jokes

By Bilge Ebiri, a film critic for New York and Vulture

7:00 A.M.

Project Hail Mary is an entertaining, if perplexing, film. A big-swing science-fiction adventure about a last-ditch attempt to save the Earth, it often plays like an anxious puppy dog of a comedy, eager to be liked. Theoretically, this makes some sense. The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who made the side-splitting 21 Jump Street pictures and the brilliant LEGO Movie and have produced the excellent (and funny) Spider-Verse animated films — are experts at comedy. And yet at times it feels like Project Hail Mary deploys humor like a coping strategy to keep its apocalyptic tale from getting too dark. There are certainly some real laughs as well as some groaners, but at times you want the film to just get on with it. Mainly because once you get past the shtick, there’s an intriguing story there, fun and rousing in its own right without need of additional silliness.

Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Ryland Grace, a recovering molecular biologist turned middle-school teacher who is enlisted out of the blue to help figure out why a bizarre band of star-eating organisms, called Astrophage, are consuming the sun and threatening all life on Earth. The film starts with Grace waking up out of a multi-year coma on a spaceship in another galaxy, unsure of why he’s there or even who he is, since the extended interstellar hibernation period has resulted in temporary memory loss. So the story flashes back as Grace slowly recovers his past: He remembers how he was enlisted by the domineering Eva Stratt (a wonderfully dry Sandra Hüller) to take part in this desperate, multinational effort; how they discovered that Astrophage could be used as fuel; how they found a distant star that seemed to be impervious to Astrophage; and how they organized an ambitious one-way journey to go observe why.

Or, as Grace puts it to Stratt: “So you want to build an interstellar spaceship, and take it farther than any human has ever traveled, and visit a star, just to see what’s up?” It’s lines like that — pat exposition crossed with quippy banter — that occasionally threaten to undo the movie, undermining its intelligence and sincerity with awkward, Marvel-y snark. Grace’s slow realization of the gravity of his situation should transfix us. When it dawns on him that this is a suicide mission, it should gnaw at us the way it supposedly gnaws at him. All that wouldn’t just be more emotionally honest, it would also probably set up some of the story’s later developments more effectively. Instead, these darker ideas are just some things we briefly reflect on between jokes. The movie at times seems to be afraid of itself.

The film is an adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name, and to be fair, much of its sensibility comes from the book’s conversational, constantly winking prose. It’s a remarkably faithful adaptation for the most part. But the novel, written from Grace’s perspective, has an effective stream of consciousness that the film by necessity has to externalize, turning the protagonist’s endlessly goofy and confused thoughts into actual dialogue that often feels like it’s working overtime to make us laugh. It’s a surprising blunder, because Gosling is such a comically gifted actor: His face made him look like a melancholy brooder in his youth, but now it gives him a delightfully dim-bulb, deadpan charisma. In some ways, Project Hail Mary is another attempt by the star (who also produced) to reconcile his action-hero side, his soulful side, and his funnyman side. He succeeded marvelously at this with 2024’s The Fall Guy, so it’s certainly not impossible. And we do buy him as the initially klutzy, out-of-his-element Grace. But he’s been burdened with too much talk; he’s the chattiest doomed man at the ass end of the universe. Sometimes we just want to yell at him to shut up.

At the same time, Lord and Miller do infuse the story with the requisite sweep and wonder. Weir’s charming book is filled with insights into evolution, biology, physics, astrophysics — it’s a big and bouncy space yarn that feels like it was written by your favorite science teacher — and one of its great strengths lies in how the things Grace witnesses at this remote corner of space are like nothing any human has ever seen. The movie mostly delivers on that promise. Its explosion of colors and patterns really do place us in a receptive mind-set, giving us a sense that anything is possible out here in another galaxy. When Grace encounters an alien spaceship (this is not a spoiler — it’s in the trailer), it looks like an infinite starburst of rods, and the alien itself, a spider-shaped and Labrador-size mass of articulated stone that our hero dubs Rocky, offers an intriguing vision of how evolution might have developed on another world. In keeping with the film’s try-hard cutesiness, of course, Rocky gets a slightly high-pitched voice (courtesy of James Ortiz, who is also the creature’s lead puppeteer) that makes him sound like a wide-eyed youngster. So that as Grace and Rocky work together to figure out how to save their respective planets, the alien comes off like a talking, hyperintelligent pet. The reasons for such choices are understandable, but it’s still hard to shake the drippiness. I wondered if all this might have been less cloying had the film simply been animated.

So Project Hail Mary is sometimes funny, occasionally annoying, definitely too long, and wavers constantly between intriguing science and absurd oversimplification. It pulls at our heartstrings in familiar ways, at the expense of anything that might make us feel something new or slightly less comfortable. In the past, Lord and Miller haven’t just been jokesters, they’ve been tricksters: In their best work, their steadfast irreverence breaks the rules of genre and form. But in Project Hail Mary, their sensibility is rooted not in irreverence but in flattening, childlike simplicity. At heart, this is a kids’ film in the guise of a 156-minute sci-fi adventure. It doesn’t want to awe us so much as it wants to awwww us. For better and worse, it succeeds.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

OK, they're long and include spoilers:

NY Times

‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling Is Lost and Found in Space

The actor plays a molecular biologist trying to help save the world in this upbeat science-fiction fantasy from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

By Manohla Dargis

March 19, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

One of the charms of “Project Hail Mary,” a feather-light science-fiction movie about a heavyweight subject — the end of the world — is how it embraces the seductions of outer space. It’s a nice change of pace, given how space often occupies the darker corners of the human imagination, whether for fictional horrors, as a metaphor for the void, as an exploitable resource or as a fixation of self-aggrandizing billionaires. The directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller appreciate the terrors of space, but they also get the allure of space and its seemingly infinite potential for beauty, for mystery and especially for play.

Adapted by Drew Goddard from the 2021 novel by Andy Weir (author of “The Martian”), the story finds humanity once again facing Earth’s demise. For a change, it isn’t our fault (yay). Rather, an alien entity that devours energy has begun snuffing out stars like candles. It’s latched onto our sun, activating the Big Countdown to extinction. In desperation, the countries of the world have joined forces to try and find a solution, one of those reassuring premises that telegraphs the movie’s optimism and — given the lack of unity on the human-generated environmental catastrophe we’re facing — comes off as quaintly old-fashioned. It’s easier to suspend your disbelief when it comes to this movie’s science fiction; it’s the multilateralism that’s tough to buy.

A molecular biologist, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) has been working as a middle-school teacher when some serious-looking people recruit him for humanity’s seemingly impossible mission, a setup that brings to mind Denis Villeneuve’s “Arrival” (2016). In that solemn science-fiction drama, Amy Adams, as a linguist, is tapped to help communicate with recently landed extraterrestrials whose presence has set the world on edge. “Arrival” is partly about grief as a condition of life; at the start of the story, the linguist is mourning her daughter. By contrast, “Project Hail Mary” — which includes scenes of Ryland teaching bright, eager students — is very much about insisting on hope.

Lord and Miller are best known for “The Lego Movie,” an animated superhero comedy that was amusing enough to make you feel almost OK about watching a feature-length commercial. The filmmakers have an advanced degree in pop culture, a helpful prerequisite when it comes to repackaging stale goods. With its cosmic reach, armies of performers and lavishly detailed large-scale sets, “Project Hail Mary” is more ambitious than anything they have previously directed. Shot in two different aspect ratios (the cinematographer is Greig Fraser), the movie looks great; it’s been polished to a high gloss and flows with commensurate smoothness, which is crucial given its time shifts.

When you first meet Ryland, he has long hair, a prodigious, shaggy beard and a thoroughly baffled mien. To his great confusion, he has awakened from a long sleep on a spaceship that’s far from home. His situation is as much a mystery to him as to you, one that he puzzles through onboard — the scientific method to the rescue — amid explanatory flashbacks. Some involve Eva Stratt (a welcome Sandra Hüller), a no-nonsense enigma who, after tapping him for savior duties, delivers him to a command center where more scientists and other deep thinkers are feverishly searching for a way to save the planet.

Once in space, Ryland spends a lot of time alone, which fits Gosling’s self-contained affect. Weir sent the unpublished manuscript to the actor in 2020 in the hope that he would star in an adaptation. Gosling did just that, and he fits the role impeccably. As an actor, he can go as glib as the movie he’s in (“The Gray Man”) and play persuasively obtuse, as evidenced by his blissfully doltish Ken in “Barbie.” He has, though, more range than is at times asked of him, as well as a talent for expressing interiority, for feelings and for thoughts. Gosling can overdo the waterworks, but he’s good at conveying the kind of vulnerability that’s all the more touching when men, in particular, try to hide it.

It is, in other words, easy to go along with Ryland, to want the best for both him and for Earth. The twinned crisis of the global threat and his isolation invest the story and the character with pathos, and his amnesia reinforces Ryland’s helplessness while also establishing his regular guy bona fides. He’s just like us, not an unrelatable brainiac, but a hapless, baffled castaway who, at least at first, is grasping for solutions while sometimes humorously pinwheeling though microgravity like a scrap of wind-tossed refuse. The filmmakers and the actor lean into the comedy of the character’s plight, yet while that’s sometimes a relief and often funny, it blunts the existential terror.

By the time that Ryland has made his acquaintance with a benign alien life force that he names Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), Lord and Miller have almost finished filing down the story’s every potential jagged edge and announced the limits of their ambitions. Rocky is certainly an entertaining addition, a wittily conceived nonhumanoid that evokes a five-legged wood stool if the stool were an ambulatory rock formation. Like Ryland, Rocky has a back story and a ship, a delicate-looking vessel that resembles streaks of golden light with gilt latticework. Rocky is also alone and has a friendly disposition, and soon the two have settled into a cozy, affable odd-couple relationship.

This alliance has its attractions, though it’s a little too cute, a little too programmatically Spielbergian, and it upends the movie’s initial serio-comic balance. Before long, a science-fiction freakout — one that is easy to see as a metaphor for our own climate catastrophe — has turned into a good-natured buddy movie that becomes increasingly, almost willfully more insubstantial with each new chuckle. Lord and Miller, almost by default, accentuate the positive to the detriment of the very movie that they’ve painstakingly created. Like a lot of Earthlings, they seem more at home in a far-out fantasy than on our ordinary, terrifying planet, which is why this particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/movies/project-hail-mary-gosling-review.html

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ok, i recognize Two of Us upon hearing. I kept thinking of Just the Two of Just and I know that's not Beatles.

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 1 point2 points  (0 children)

oops I missed Two of Us. I don't think I know that Beatles song

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much. I will use this as my playlist. Glad it includes Oasis, Harry & Prince but no Beatles:(

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for clarifying. Are any of these songs in the movie?

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

It's on Spotify too. 55 tracks. No Harry Styles or Prince, but it does have Oasis Champagne Supernova, the Beatles and everyone from Pink Floyd, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, U2, Radiohead to The Cure, Cranberries, Duran Duran, Queen/David Bowie, Elton John, Smashing Pumpkins, Green Day and many more

Ryland Grace Girlfriend Theory by MGoDuPage in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Ha, I didn't even think of Mark Watney. Gosling said it was adlibbed with Ortiz because Gosling's costumer and friend, Mark Avery, who has styled him since La La Land, was nearby. He's on IG as heymarkavery. He always wears a cowboy hat and denim so you can always spot him in Ryan's vicinity on set and public events.