'Project Hail Mary' And The Best Space Movies Of The 21st Century
After just one week in cinemas, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary is already tracking to be an enormous hit for Universal Studios and the first great blockbuster of the year. Some writers (myself included) are even wondering if it might have the legs to make it all the way to next year’s awards season.
But like intergalactic travel itself, that all seems way, way in the future. For now, the Spider-Verse co-creator’s space epic — in which a science teacher (played by Ryan Gosling) wakes up in a distant solar system and soon figures out he’s not alone and that he’s there to save the world — can sit pretty with its 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes and wait to count up the box office receipts.
While we wait to hear more on all that, it all kind of got us wondering what other space films have had that kind of impact since the turn of the millennium. In the list below, I’ve rounded up the very best the 21st Century has to offer.
For anyone who marvelled at Project Hail Mary’s whole “let’s do Cast Away, but in space!” vibe, the next obvious film to watch has to be The Martian. This was the last Hollywood movie based on a Weir novel, and while there’s nothing as unusual as a talking, joking, rock-shaped alien in this one, there are certainly lots of A-list stars playing characters who enjoy solving problems using science.
The Martian was also directed by the great Ridley Scott — a filmmaker who, for all his talents, does not exactly boast Lord and Miller’s goofball energy. But hey, if you grated against some of that humour in PHM, Ridley is definitely going to be your guy.
Similar things could be said for Whiplash director Damien Chazelle’s First Man — a biopic of sorts on the famously humourless Neil Armstrong that digs in deep with the practicalities and challenges of the early years of space travel.
This one, of course, was also the first space yarn in which Ryan Gosling played the lead — and even if Armstrong hasn’t got the hunky, Hollywood charms and colourful wardrobe of Gosling’s PHM character, Ryan Gosling’s hunky, Hollywood charms still manage to shine through.
Alfonso Cuaron won Best Director at the Oscars for this immersive rollercoaster of a movie — a film that basically promised audiences the most realistic space experience ever in a major motion picture.
With groundbreaking sound and imagery and a dazzling use of 3D, the Roma director largely delivered on that promise. The love story between Bullock and Clooney’s astronauts is a little on the gooey side, but there’s no doubting Gravity’s technical wonders.
No need to put it off any longer — from its overwhelmingly evocative teaser trailer to the moment that Cooper pulls off that spinning docking situation, Interstellar captured and excited the moviegoing public’s imagination regarding space travel like no other film had in a very long time.
This, of course, was Cristopher Nolan’s whole plan. The director has spoken on many occasions about how Kubrick's 2001 changed his life, and Interstellar was his attempt to pass that experience on to a new generation. Mission accomplished.
If you like a space epic with a little more psychological and metaphysical meandering, James Grey’s 2019 film, Ad Astra, might just be the one for you.
Starring Brad Pitt as an astronaut who journeys deep into space, essentially on a mission to find his dad, Gray’s film can feel a bit like Apocalypse Now mixed with Solaris — with all the thoughtfulness and the self-seriousness that goes with those kinds of references — but it was also shot by Hoyte Von Hoytema (the man who filmed Instellar) and is a consistent marvel to look at.
Alien fans didn’t quite know what to make of Prometheus when it was first released — why explain the mystery, you had to wonder, if the mystery gave fans of the franchise so much wonder and entertainment?
Now 14 years on, I think it’s safe to say that Ridley Scott’s prequel to his 1979 classic has endured and is now seen as a bit of a flawed classic. A lot of this is down to Michael Fassbender’s fascinating performance as the android David — a role he reprised in Alien: Covenant in 2017 — and, like any great Ridley space epic, the incredible production design.
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Bong Joon-ho’s hotly anticipated follow-up to his all-conquering 2018 classic, Parasite, might have fizzled with audiences when it finally came to cinemas last year, but in terms of the last decade of space movies, few, if any, have been as technically inventive and tonally surprising as Bong’s Mickey 17.
The story (which is adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel) follows a down-on-his-luck guy (played by Robert Pattinson) who agrees to become an ever-dispensable (and ever-cloning) version of himself to go into deep space and pay off some loan sharks. A lot of it is about as much of a stretch as it sounds and, like Mickey’s deep space ship, not everything works as well as it should — but when this thing gets going, it really does fly.
It’s not so easy to recall, but there was a time in the years that followed the release of District 9 when Neil Blomkamp looked like he was going to be the saviour of blockbuster sci-fi cinema.
As we all know, that never quite came to pass — but we will always have District 9 and, to a lesser extent, Elysium (hell, even Chappie has its moments). This is both an action-packed and a socially and politically-conscious film in which Matt Damon must get from the polluted and overpopulated surface of our planet and onto the orbiting, 1%-r world of Elysium in order to save his life and bring balance to the world… etc., etc.
If you liked Project Hail Mary for the touching, central bond between Gosling’s Grace and his alien pal Rocky, this Adam Sandler Netflix production did something quite similar — albeit with more melancholy results.
That, of course, was by design — if less a feature than a bug. But while we’re on the topic of bugs, Spaceman is, however, still worth seeing for the creature that Sandler’s Czech cosmonaut befriends – an intergalactic spider of some sort who is voiced with a great deal of charm by Paul Dano.
