I have been burned by adaptations of books I love. I went into this one with my guard up, fully expecting a competent, slightly hollow version of a story that lives in my head as something warmer than any studio would allow. Two hours and thirty-six minutes later I was sitting in my seat with my hands over my mouth, waiting for the lights to come up so nobody could see my face.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller made a movie about a middle school science teacher who saves the world by making a friend. That is the whole engine. Everything else, the scale, the IMAX frame, the hundred million dollars of light and vacuum, exists to serve that one idea, and it works so completely that I want to talk about it for the next six months.
The Setup Still Rules
Ryland Grace wakes up on a ship eleven point nine light years from home with two corpses for crewmates and no memory of who he is. Ryan Gosling plays the amnesia stretch without a single cheap shortcut. You watch a man rebuild himself out of muscle memory and lab instinct, figuring out he is a scientist before he figures out he is Ryland Grace. There are long stretches where he is the only human being on screen, and he carries them like it costs him nothing. This is the best work of his career, and it is not close.
Drew Goddard did the same trick he pulled with The Martian. He takes a book that is essentially a very charming man doing math at you for four hundred pages and turns it into something you can watch with your parents. The science is intact. The Astrophage explanation is clean. Nobody stands in a hallway explaining the plot to a character who already knows it. Sandra Hüller shows up in the Earth flashbacks as Eva Stratt and plays her like a woman who has already decided that being liked is a luxury she cannot afford right now, and every scene she is in has a floor under it because of her.
Rocky
Here is where the movie stops being good and starts being something I will still be recommending in ten years.
Rocky is a five-legged rock spider from Erid who breathes ammonia, communicates in musical tones, and lost all twenty-two of his crewmates before Grace ever met him. On paper he is a merchandising problem waiting to happen. On screen he is one of the great screen characters of the decade.
James Ortiz built and puppeteered him and gave him his voice, and Lord and Miller made the correct call by keeping him physical whenever they could. Rocky has weight. He clicks against the hull. He casts real shadows on a real set. When Grace reaches out to touch the wall between their two atmospheres, you feel two bodies in the same room, because two bodies were in the room.
The stretch where the two of them build a shared language from nothing is the best forty minutes in any movie this year. It is two lonely people, and I am using that word on purpose, inventing arithmetic and vocabulary and eventually jokes, and the audience learns Rocky’s language at exactly the same speed Grace does. By the time you understand what a particular chord means without a subtitle, the movie has quietly made you a participant. The theater I was in was making noise. Not laughing at, laughing with, the way people do when they are rooting for someone.
And the friendship earns its ending. Rocky is not a mascot and he is not a coping mechanism. He wants things. He is grieving. He is scared. He makes decisions that cost him. The movie treats a faceless geode as a full person with an interior life, and then asks you what you would give up for a person like that.
The Spectacle Actually Deserves the Word
Greig Fraser shot this thing, and the Hail Mary interior was built as a real, standing, practical set, so the camera moves through the ship like it belongs there. No weightless soundstage sheen. Nearly two hours of the movie is presented in the full 1.43:1 IMAX frame, and Lord and Miller use that extra vertical space the way it should be used, for scale that makes you feel small rather than for a bigger picture of a guy’s head.
Daniel Pemberton’s score is the other half of it. Recorded at Abbey Road, it does the impossible job of being enormous during the space sequences and almost embarrassingly tender during the quiet ones, without ever telling you how to feel. There is a cue during the arrival at Tau Ceti that made my chest tight.
I saw it in a premium format and I would tell anyone to do the same. This is a movie built for the biggest screen you can find, and the home release is going to lose something real.
Ten Out of Ten
I have seen it three times now. It is funnier than I remembered, sadder than I expected, and the only sci fi movie in years that left me feeling better about being a person than when I walked in. It sits on the shelf with E.T. and Arrival and The Martian, and I do not think that is recency talking.
Go see it with somebody you like. Then talk about it in the parking lot for an hour, which is what I did, twice.
10/10
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