The Media Tourist

Ryan Gosling stars as a reluctant astronaut on a wild ride to save the sun.

Project Hail Mary
Starring Ryan Gosling and Sandra Hüller
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 20

Ryan Gosling is far out—far, far, far out—in this sweeping sci-fi space epic that heads to the edge of the universe before reaching down deep into your heart.

The La La Land star plays Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who becomes a reluctant astronaut. “I put the not in astronaut,” he protests. But his resistance is for naught, as he’s…well, conscripted for a NASA mission to a distant solar system, nearly 12 light years away. His specific science smarts are needed to find out how to defeat a rapidly growing organism that’s gobbling up solar energy…from our sun as well as others. Unless it’s stopped, he’s told, in 30 years life on Earth will be over and out.

The mission is called Project Hail Mary, because it’s a desperate, deep throw into the cosmos, a fraught last chance at staying in the game of life. Acclaimed German actress Sandra Hüller (The Zone of Interest) has a significant role as the head of the project, back on Earth.

At one point, we get a glimpse of the mementos Grace has brought with him on the trip. One is a T-shirt from his teaching days with a play on the periodic table; it reads, “AH! The element of surprise.” There are several surprises in this splendidly engaging and wildly entertaining tale, including its generous seasoning of sly, spry humor. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller—collaborators on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The Lego Movie, the Spider-Verse franchise, and 21 Jump Street and its sequel—certainly know how to sprinkle the wit around. Watch and listen closely to catch the nods to Alien, Close Encounters and an iconic franchise about a boxing champ, and the gal he’s fighting for.

But this mission’s secret weapon is Gosling, a truly versatile actor with an arsenal of likeability. Grace is shocked to discover, after his induced hibernation, that he’s the sole survivor of his spaceship’s crew. Then he comes across another space traveler, an alien who moves like a spider made of stone. Grace nicknames him Rocky—and learns that he’s also the lone survivor of his own mission to save his planet’s star from a slow death.

The core of the movie is the growing relationship between Grace and Rocky as they learn how to communicate and collaborate, becoming soulmates and friends in the process. Told in flashbacks as well as “real time,” there are twist and turns, thrills, elation and tears before it’s all over. Trust me when I say you might find yourself reaching for your hankie.

Project Hail Mary has the eye-popping scope, spectacle and scale of a modern-day 2001: A Space Odyssey, blended with the resonate emotional heft of ET. I particularly dug the music, from the ethereal soundtrack by award-winning British composer Daniel Pemberton to the well-chosen needle drops with songs of Harry Styles, The Beatles and Kris Kristofferson.

Movies have been going into space for well over a century, all the way back to the dawn of the 1900s and French filmmaker Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon. (Gosling himself starred, in 2018, as astronaut Neil Armstrong in First Man.) But Project Hail Mary is a modern standout, one of the first truly great, impressive films of the year, an uplifting assertion that we’re all in it together, no matter what corner of the sky we call home, that bravery—and friendship—can take many shapes and forms.

And that students anywhere—and I mean anywhere—would love to have Ryan Gosling as their supercool science teacher.

Project Hail Mary scores a movie touchdown.

—Neil Pond

Page-to-screen adaptation travels a road full of plot potholes, in an orange Ford pickup

Reminders of Him
Starting Maika Monroe and Tyriq Withers
Directed by Vanessa Caswill
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 13

Fans of the romantic fiction of author Colleen Hoover likely already know that her 2022 novel Reminders of Him has been movie-tized, the third adaptation of her work to hit the screen. And they’ll likely lap up every movie morsel of this sappy saga about a young mom fighting to reconnect with her four-year-old daughter after serving time in prison for causing the car crash that resulted in the death her boyfriend, Scotty.

Maika Monroe stars as Kenna, who returns to her Wyoming hometown and a not-exactly-warm welcome, especially from Scotty’s parents (Bradley Whitford and Lauren Graham), who now have custody of their granddaughter, Diem. Things get complicated—and steamy—when Kenna meets the hunky former NFL player-turned-bartender Ledger (Tyriq Withers), who happened to be the best friend of her former lover.

How it all works out won’t surprise readers of Hoover’s treacly prose. Reminders of Him is predictable, pedestrian romantic glop, with some glaring questions in its plot potholes and few surprises, except perhaps seeing country hitmaker Lainey Wilson in her acting debut, playing a twangy supermarket manager.

The dialog is cringe-worthy pablum, with characters saying things like “While you’re obliterating your liver, you might as well keep an eye on your chlamydia,” and “I want to meet the human that Scotty and I made.” Whitford and Graham, two well-established actors, are given pitifully little to do, and Laney Wilson’s character drops completely out of the story after a couple of scenes. The little girl who plays Kenna’s daughter, Zoe Kosovic, gets plenty of “cutey-pie” camera closeups, a few more than the mewing little feline who plays Kenna’s kittycat.

If you catch my drift that I didn’t really like Reminders of Him, you’re right. But I always remember something my kindergarten teacher, Miss Alma Jackson, told me eons ago, about how if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything. So here are a few nice things about the movie.

– Withers’ character tools around in a Ford pickup painted bright orange, like the General Lee in The Dukes of Hazzard, for no explicable reason. Perhaps his character grew up watching Bo and Luke and singing along with Waylon Jennings to “Good Ol’ Boys.” And maybe Laney Wilson’s song, “Heart Like a Truck,” was really about Ledger’s ride.

– Maika Monroe is a bona fide scream queen, with a resume that includes It Follows, Longlegs and and Resident Evil Requiem. Seeing her in Reminders of Him reminded me of seeing her in other movies that had some real chomp and bite, and maybe a serial killer or zombies.

– It’s an hour and fifty-some minutes long—mercifully, just under two hours. Longer would have been excruciating.

– It’s the only film I’ve ever seen bold enough to think someone saying “a friggin’ pigeon” is repeatedly funny. So, it at least has the conviction to stand up for its punchlines, even as viewers scratch their heads and wonder, “Why is that funny?”

– Tyriq Withers is cut. You could hear an audible swoon from the overwhelmingly female audience when he took off his shirt. That’s some serious torso power. I can’t image the number of sit-up reps he did to get those washboards.

It won’t win any awards or catapult its actors to the next strata of stardom. But Reminders of Him might scratch an itch for moviegoers who want to gorge on some empty cinematic calories, gaze upon the rare sight of an orange pickup—and get out a good shirtless swoon or two.

—Neil Pond

Paranormal podcast triggers a hellzapoppin’ dive into deep-dish delirium

undertone
Starring Nina Kiri & Michèle Duquet
Directed by Ian Tuason
Rated R

In theaters Friday, March 13

For decades, horror movies have fright-fueled our fears of technology run amok, with haunted TVs and videotapes, and supernatural spins on telephone calls, toys, artificial intelligence and the internet. This stylishly terrifying tale adds a new link in the chain of hi-tech horrors with an after-hours podcast that becomes a portal for unspeakable evil to flourish.

Nina Kiri (she played Alma in The Handmaid’s Tale) gives a bravo solo performance as Evy, a podcaster who has moved back home to take care of her dying, barely breathing mother (Michèle Duquet).When Evy and her co-host partner (a heard-but-never-seen Adam DeMarco) dive into some audio files a couple has anonymously sent them for their 3 a.m. paranormal podcast, strange and unsettling things start to happen.

The movie’s title (also the name of the podcast) is intentionally lowercase, suggesting something underneath and unheard, lurking below and hidden.

In a most impressive debut, director Ian Tuason weaves a masterful minimalist tapestry of creeping dread and doom, using only two characters onscreen and never going outside the rooms of their house. As befitting a movie built around a spooky podcast, the sound is a major component of the mounting terror. We hear what Evy hears, through her headphones or inside the house, forcing us to use our imagination about what might be going on.

There are screams, crying, bangs and thumps in the night, whooshes and other weirdness. The whistle of a teakettle, the tortured tick of the hands of a clock, and the alarmed ring of the telephone are potently chilling. Tuason meshes religious iconography (an open Bible, a painting of The Last Supper, a subplot about prayer) with ancient demonology, murderous moms and infanticide, and the suggestion that children’s nursery rhymes are backward-masked with horrific hidden-message wickedness.

And Evy announces at one point that she’s pregnant.

As she spirals into madness, the movie builds toward a lights-out climax that…well, you’ll have to use your ears to fill in what your eyes can’t see. But in this case, hearing is certainly horrifying enough.

undertone dares you to come along for its hellzapoppin’ dive into deep-dish delirium, a place of demons and death rattles, with a guarantee that you’ll never hear “London Bridge” or “Baa Baa Black Sheep” the same way again.

—Neil Pond

Dreams can get you in deep trouble in this boldly visual Chinese ode to the cinematic experience

Resurrection
Starring Jackson Yee, Shu Qi & Gengxi Li
Directed by Bi Gan
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Jan. 22.

(Chinese, subtitled in English)

This hypnotically existential, boldly baroque sci-fi ode to cinema is set in a parallel world where people have stopped dreaming in exchange for immortality, like how a candle can “live” forever if it’s never set afire.

Dreaming, we’re told, is bad; it burns up your life with unreal nonsense. And dreamers (called Deliriants) are hunted down, tortured and dispatched by “seekers” who can see through their worlds of illusion. The Deliriants opt to live in the escapism of fantasy, memory and hope instead of the bleak, often painful real world. Sometimes they even watch movies, which is also considered a subversive activity.

We follow one Deliriant (Jackson Yee) after a seeker (Shu Qi) apprehends him, replacing his heart with a projector and a reel of film that lets her watch his subconscious like a movie on a screen. (You don’t get that with your Regal Club Card.)  She grants him a few more dreams before sending him on to the great beyond. She wants to see what makes this dreamer tick.

We get to watch, too, as the dreamer goes on a bonkers surrealistic tour of experiences unhinged from time and space—as an opium-addicted ogre, an accused murderer, a worker breaking down an ancient temple, a con man trying to shamboozle an aging gangster, a street-smart slum hood cavorting alongside a fellow Y2K reveler (Gengxi Li) with a dark secret.

Yee, a former boy-band member, plays every part “dreamed” by his character. It’s a performance that puts the “wide” in wide-ranging. And director Bi Gan masterfully unspools the story with salutes to other filmmakers and classic movies, from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, to the film noir of Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train and the body horrors of director David Cronenberg.  

Resurrection puts a lot on the screen to ponder and gives viewers two hours and 40 minutes to do it. It’s an immersive, hyper-visual, wildly imaginative arthouse-movie experience, suggesting—among other things—that watching a film is a lot like dreaming, seeing into other worlds, viewing experiences that aren’t our own. Perhaps life itself, our existence, is merely another illusion, a movie of the mind. And what happens when that movie ends?

There’s a maze of labyrinthine alleyways, a house of mirrors, lots of fog and cigarette smoke, a suitcase with a musical instrument that drives people mad, a vampire and an encounter with The Spirit of Bitterness, who wonders what sin tastes like. Each of the dreamer’s five vignettes hinge on one of the five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. And even in dreams, we learn, farts are funny.

As one character tells us toward the end, in a karaoke bar, you might live forever, but still not get the answers to life’s many riddles. You certainly won’t get all the answers, either, after nearly three hours of Resurrection, but golly gee, you’ll get one helluva mind-blowing ride.

—Neil Pond