REVIEW: Project Hail Mary - not even Ryan Gosling's charm can save this one

It’s epic in scope, it’s brilliant to look at and it’s full of imagination. Best of all, it has got one of the coolest, most charismatic actors around playing virtually a lone hand.

And yet, and yet… if sci-fi isn’t for you, then this really isn’t a film to convert you. It’s got so much in its favour and yet manages to forget the essential. For the most part, Project Hail Mary is dull, not helped by a bum-numbing running length which increasingly seems like sheer self-indulgence – especially as so little seems at stake. Which is odd really – given this is a film, potentially at least, about the end of the world.

The sun is dying – and shaggy, bearded molecular biologist Dr Ryland Grace (played with endless smiling charm by Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship to discover himself the sole survivor of the mission. He sends the corpses of his fellow astronauts out into the ether before settling down to save every single one of the rest of us.

And yet the thing that is missing throughout is any real sense of urgency, let alone jeopardy.

Grace is all alone, so far away from earth that communication with those back home is impossible. Instead he’s got to work it all out for himself – helped, bizarrely, when he teams up with an odd rocky crab-like creature which turns out to be, once they suss out the communication problems, kind-hearted and rockily supportive. But it’s slow progress as they work out how to chat and then slowly bond.

Meanwhile Grace is working out the science that might just give us all a chance of surviving. Meanwhile also, in flashback, we get the story of how he’s come to be here – a quirky big-hit-with-the-kids schoolteacher who was once a brilliant scientist unafraid to hack off the establishment with maverick theories which, wouldn’t you just know it, might just turn out to be right.

But with little sense of danger and endless conversations with the rock-like thing, it’s difficult not to find your own mind hurtling light years away from the film in front of you. In fairness, I should point out that my wife absolutely loved it, adoring its inventiveness, its quirky humour and the gorgeousness of the pictures it paints.

But if it’s not for you, it’s not for you – though there is a massive reward for patience a couple of hours in when we get a blast of The Beatles, a song brilliantly chosen and brilliant anyway.

However, it felt a long, long time getting there. At least Grace was lucky enough to be put into a coma until the big moment…