There's a certain bang-whiz-wink-gotcha characteristic to millennial Facebook humor that's always grinded my gears. When comics bemoan the struggles of "adulting" or posters fawn over "the cutest heckin' doggo," anything universal (the troubles of aging or the sweetness of a nice dog) is buried under the muck and lingo of something painful, outdated, and simply unfunny. 

That's, unfortunately, the reality of much of Project Hail Mary, the movie adaptation of Andy Weir's 2021 novel of the same name directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. A solid showing from Ryan Gosling and the inherent talents that Lord and Miller have flexed over the years — including as directors of the raucous 21 Jump Street reboots (in 2012 and 2014) and producers of the wonderfully inventive Spider-Verse films (which this publication loved most recently in 2023) — are muddled by screenwriter Drew Goddard's cringey dialogue based on Weir's cringier novel.

The story itself isn't the strongest to begin with. Ryland Grace, played by Gosling, wakes up, amnesic, speeding through space alone. Despite his background as a schoolteacher, he appears to be the sole survivor of some mission that's rocketing towards space, millions of miles from Earth. He's confused, and we are too, but a series of flashbacks piece together his role in analyzing a disastrous "astrophage" that, back home, was dimming the Sun and promised to catastrophically cool our home planet past the point of survivability in a matter of years. Grace had been sidelined by the scientific community due to some unpopular research that is coincidentally crucial to understanding the astrophage, and he's recruited by hardo international bureaucrat Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to rescue Earth. 

How exactly he got on the space mission alone isn't clear, but we watch more flashbacks of Grace bumbling through some suspiciously simple experiments with security guard and fast friend Carl (Lionel Boyce). Meanwhile, in the present, this spirit of inquiry takes Grace aboard a spaceship he encounters, on which he meets "Rocky" (puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz), an alien spacetraveler he soon learns is also assessing the astrophage for his home planet Erid. As they get deeper in the analysis of the astrophages, what begins as a cool, scientifically-rooted concept quickly becomes relegated to a hand-wavy fuel source and convenient material-ex-machina. 

The relationship between Grace and Rocky is the emotional heart of the film, though, and it's sweet to watch the two foreign lifeforms learn more about each other, collaborate on language, science, and thorny interstellar problems, and mourn their respective planets both terminally threatened by the astrophages. But in its bottom-heavy 156-minute runtime, Lord and Miller really drag out everything back on Earth, and use the crutch of flashbacks to reveal information in a way that is neither earned nor, frankly, surprising. Multiple plot twists and near-death developments are telegraphed from miles out, and just bulk out the path to what we know will be a victorious resolution by the end. Ample time spent with Grace's uneven voiceover or with interpersonal conflicts years in the past all feels wasted.

It doesn't help that especially in these moments, the audience has to dodge awful one-liners and wincing jests. Describing the astrophage, Grace shrugs: "It's no big whoop. It's a small whoop. It’s a small-to-medium whoop." Stratt, straight-faced, tells him when he's in a training lab, "The consensus here is that it would be preferable if you did not die." Carl, when Grace asks him if he's sitting down for surprising news, says smirkingly, "No, I’m standing like a grown man." Grace, on the spaceship, sniffs a toxic gas and makes the exact same goofy dumb-guy reaction as his better role as Ken in Barbie (2023) — except here we're supposed to believe he's a world-saving scientific mind. Rocky's version of a thumbs-up is "jazz hands," which Grace tells no end of jokes about. And so forth. None of these comments is delivered like an actual person would speak, and yet also none are sufficiently stylized to propel forward the film. These hamfisted decisions also carry over to the score, whose needledrops from the likes of The Beatles and Neil Diamond are designed in a lab for Facebook reacts. (There's no question I was crankier than the average member of my audience — a few of these one-liners and song choices got big dad-joke laughs from the others in the theater — but I couldn't find much merit in most, if any, of these bits.) Luckily some of the worst impulses of Weir's source material were left on the cutting-room floor, but still, lots of dreck to wade through.

Lord and Miller are capable filmmakers at the end of the day, though, and the movie looks great, from up-close physical effects to create and personalize Rocky to soaring outer-space VFX of xenon bridges and luminous cosmic radiation. And elevated by Gosling's undeniable movie-star charisma, even without much in the way of things to say, Project Hail Mary passes the time fine enough. But it'll land even better for anyone who loves talking about their Harry Potter house (and how they "missed their owl") or fist-pumps and says "for the win!" on Taco Tuesdays.