"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."
"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."
"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."
Ryan Gosling stars in the film adaptation of Andy Weir's science-fiction novel Project Hail Mary. The movie follows Ryland Grace, a genius goofball who befriends an alien named Rocky in space. While the film occasionally delivers humor through their language barrier and bickering rapport, critic Justin Chang argues the comedy and stakes cancel each other out rather than enhance the narrative. The film functions as an interspecies buddy comedy with heartwarming elements. However, Chang finds it less effective than Ridley Scott's 2015 adaptation of another Weir novel, The Martian, where comedy served the story more effectively.
Read at The New Yorker
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