Project Hail Mary (3/5 Stars)

Project Hail Mary is adapted from a novel of the same name by Hard Science Fiction writer Andy Weir. Hard Science Fiction is an especially unforgiving genre. It presupposes that the futuristic technology presented in the book actually conforms to the laws of science. One false move and you are relegated to normal Science Fiction where everything is possible.

The novels of Andy Weir are great reads. I have read two of his three novels (The Martian and Project Hail Mary) and have already seen the adaptation of the former. It was made by Ridley Scott and starred Matt Damon. In my review of The Martian, I noted that the conflicts and drama in the story came from engineering/scientific problems, mainly exactly how Matt Damon is going to survive long enough on Mars in order to be rescued. Because the story was so knowledgeable about the problems and how to actually solve them, there wasn’t any need for further conflict or drama coming from the people. As a result, you had this unique story where all the humans were generally nice people working together towards the same goal. Also, Andy Weir is funny, and Matt Damon is charismatic and Ridley Scott knows what he is doing. It was a good experience. If only more engineers wrote screenplays and more movie producers had a base level of scientific knowledge, we could have more of this type of fun, scientifically literate, drama-less movies.

Project Hail Mary is a movie in this vein. It presents a science problem and has a lot of hard working generally caring people work towards solving it. But the story and the science is also far more complex than The Martian. The book Project Hail Mary, which I read before seeing the movie, really shows the maturation of Andy Weir as a storyteller in plot and character development. He is not simply just an engineer with a blog about how to survive on Mars. Project Hail Mary is a professional novel written by a seasoned writer.

Unfortunately, I don’t think a movie is the correct vehicle for this story. The Martian was simple enough that a feature length-movie could strip it down to its core elemental parts and make a blockbuster out of it without losing any really important details. Project Hail Mary just requires far more scientific explanation for its great moments to really be felt. And the movie, already 2 hours 36 minutes long, does not have enough time to get into it. Everyone who made the movie seems to be the right choices. It looks great and is well-directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and the casting is very good. More than anything else, the visuals and performances add much to a story that cannot be realized in a book setting. Ryan Gosling does great as hero Ryland Grace. Sandra Huller is the perfect casting choice for Eva Stratt, the no-nonsense mission leader. And we shouldn’t forget James Ortiz, the voice and puppeteer of Rocky, who gives a faceless creature plenty of personality.

Who is Rocky? Well, when the book came out it was a well-guarded spoiler that wasn’t addressed in the marketing materials. Instead, the book’s marketing focused on the book’s opening act which was Ryland Grace waking up from a coma in a spaceship nearing a star named Tau Ceti, over ten lights years away from Earth, with no memory of how he got there and finding that his two companions, who he can’t remember either, were dead. He had some sort of mission but doesn’t remember what it is? In the movie, this well-formed conceit is breathlessly zipped through in about five minutes. Why? Because the movie correctly intuits that the heart of the story is the buddy romance between Ryland Grace and an alien life form from the exoplanet Erid that seems to be composed of rocks (hence the name Rocky). Rocky’s companions from his planet’s mission also all died on the journey. He is an alien with an engineering background who needs this scientist human to solve the problem that is bedeviling both their solar systems, an invasive species of bacterium, called astrophage, that is feeding off of their respective stars, thereby dimming them and presenting an existential threat to their respective planets and species.

That is a lot to present. When you are reading a book, you have the ability to go 5-10 pages, set it down, and think about what you just read. You can’t do that in a movie. If the movie does not give the viewer the time and pace to contemplate the information and the problem-solving process, it can’t be done. One is reminded of the difference between reading The Da Vinci Code and watching the movie of the same name. When reading, the book would often present a riddle, and the reader was able to set the book down and try to solve it before moving onto the next page. In the movie The Da Vinci Code, because there isn’t enough time to do anything else, Tom Hanks would solve the puzzle before the viewer could even begin to think about it, thereby depriving the viewer of one of the main pleasures of the book.

It is debatable whether The Da Vinci Code could ever have been a good movie. Project Hail Mary, I think, had the potential because the problems in Project Hail Mary are not the type of problems (say like a riddle) that the viewer can actually solve on his own. They require scientific experimentation, which only the character on screen can perform. But just because the viewer won’t be able to figure it out on his own, he can very much enjoy watching a character go through the scientific process. At least I presume the viewer can, because I did so while reading the book. It just takes time, which this movie does not have enough of.

I think for Project Hail Mary to really work, it would need to be at least a six-hour mini-series. I mean, you could spend an entire hour on Ryland Grace waking up, slowly learning what his mission is, and figuring out how his spaceship works. The movie spends maybe 15 minutes on this, speeding along, trying to get to Rocky as soon as possible. I understand why and do not fault anyone. If all you had was 156 minutes, that is the correct move. Having said that, I really do wonder whether someone who hasn’t read the book will actually understand what is going on and the import of the conclusions the characters reach way too quickly. I already knew the same, so I probably had a better time watching Sandra Huller bust out some good Harry Styles karaoke, a scene not in the book. (I, for one, knew she could do it if only because I had seen Toni Erdmann). The movie didn’t waste any time doing that. Emotionally it makes sense, and in a movie, emotion is the overriding element of any cinematic story. But, boy, there was a lot that was left off the screen. Maybe, if the movie is really successful, it will get the Harry Potter treatment and become a season of TV sometime in the future. But probably not:(

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2/5 Stars)

 

Take any 10-15 minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have part of an impressive movie. But taken as a whole it is both too long and incomplete. It suffers from a bad case of evil producer strategy, whereupon the failures of the movie have less to do with the creators themselves but from certain dictates from on high that force bad decisions in terms of length and content.

A very prominent version of this can be seen in the adaptation of The Hobbit. The evil producers had it in their mind to replicate the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and so they set out to make the new movies exactly the same in length and release strategy. The problem of course was that the source material was a novella, not three books of hundreds of pages each. And the content of the novella didn’t have the action set pieces that the trilogy of tomes had. So, in the end, The Hobbit trilogy was way too long and stuffed with a bunch of blockbuster action sequences that were boring as all hell because they weren’t in the book at all. Why this was done is obvious, the evil producers wanted to market the movies as big events, so they needed to be epic (see long) and there needed to be at least three of them so they could have three big opening weekends. I hope they liked how much money they made immediately because no one in their right mind would ever see those movies again, or for the first time, now. I didn’t bother to watch the third. (In that one, they take a single chapter and draw it out for three hours).

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse has this same sort of problem. It is a sequel to the well thought out and executed 2019 standalone feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but unlike that movie, it starts with a marketing strategy and then tries to fit a story to it, not the other way around. At 2 hours twenty minutes it is way too long and then it ends on a cliffhanger because apparently it wasn't long enough.

Again, take any ten or fifteen minute segment of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and you have what could be part of a good movie. The animation in particular is striking and impressive in its attention to detail and multitude of forms. Like the original (and now live-action Spider-Man too), the spider-people live in a concurrent multi-verse. These multi-verse each have their own art style. The main version, wherein Miles Morales (aka Black Spider-Man) is our hero, is curated in Brooklyn neo-realism. Another version, with Gwen Stacy (aka Spider Woman) is curated in impressionistic pastels. A villain named the Vulture seems to pop out of a universe styled in the writings of Leonardo Da Vinci. Spider-Punk is made out of british paper-mache.

All of these are good artistic ideas that are well done. It’s just that there is too much of it and not enough actual plot. Action sequences go on too long. Even when the movie is out of an action sequence and it's just normal exposition, there is still a lot of action. In one scene with plenty of background exposition, the characters are actually webbing their way through the city at great speed. The thing is, this occurs right after an overlong action sequence, so we are going from action sequence to action sequence to action sequence. Even word-play jokes are set against a scene of blockbuster action. Did you know that Chai is Indian for Tea? And that when you say Chai Tea you are actually saying Tea Tea? You are not laughing, is it because you are distracted by that skyscraper falling/crashing into the Brooklyn Bridge. The action sequences would have felt more exciting if the movie wasn’t wall to wall with them. And certain dramatic moments would have worked better without all this sound and fury. A big reveal involving the emotions of several main characters takes place during a chase and fight on a bullet train racing up a space elevator. Why? Why do it like that?

When the movie does slow down, it slows down a lot, and in repetitive fashion. How many scenes do we really need of a teenager trying to talk to their parents and getting frustrated. I would be happy with one scene per teenager and set of parents. In this movie, there must be at least 5-10 scenes of that kind of thing.

The thing is, these overlong action sequences and all these frustrating scenes where teenagers are not able to communicate with their parents are the same thing: the movie stalling for time, trying to get to an EPIC length and the cliffhanger to set up the next movie. I for one will not be seeing the next movie. I don’t need to see it to know that they could have combined its story into this one resulting in one good movie instead of two way too long bad ones. (I do not understand why evil producers have this strategy. You can always make more movies. Just look at the James Bond franchise.)

This movie doesn’t even have Spider-Ham in it. What a disappointment.

22 Jump Street (4/5 Stars)

The same exact thing but bigger.

According to Urban Dictionary the term ‘meta’ refers to something, generally art, that is characteristically self-referential. The most cliché example ever is the writer who has writer’s blcok that ends up writing a story about a writer who has writer’s block. I have seen this movie plenty of times and it has taken up residence in the shameful corner of my movie critic heart. The reason for this is that the idea seems clever but it is not. Cleverness contains an element of originality and creativity. If the idea has already been done before it cannot be original or creative. There is a caveat to this of course and ’22 Jump Street’ is a particularly good example of it working (at least the first time). ’22 Jump Street’ admits that its meta-ness, i.e. the fact that it is a sequel to a movie that itself was a remake of an old TV show from the 1980s, is not clever.

This is made explicit in the form of the police chief, played by Nick Offerman (the great anti-government crusader Ron Swanson from ‘Parks and Recreation’), who starts off each movie with an explanation as to why this lame excuse of a mission exists at all.  In the first movie with his trademark grouchy annoyance he explained that the 21 Jump Street mission existed because nobody in the police department had any new ideas so they just keep on rehashing old things in hopes that people won’t notice. In ’22 Jump Street’ he explains that nobody cared about 21 Jump Street when they redid it but they got lucky with success, so the department invested a whole lot more money into 22 Jump Street under the stupid impression that maybe if they spent a lot more money they could get that much more success. This influx of new money spent on arbitary shit that has no connection to the success of the mission becomes a running joke in the movie as the sets and gadgets become much more elaborate than they really need to be and characters start drinking espressos for no other reason than because they are more expensive than coffee.

But even this kind of admittance gets kind of exhausting after awhile. Or at least it should be. This is the type of movie that makes fools of movie critics with all their general theories as to what should be better than other things. It’s like a way overpriced tech price that refuses to fall to earth. For my money the reason is that it is genuinely funny and even though it uses a lot of self-referential jokes about sequels, there are plenty of new good one-liners, some great physical comedy, and actual twists in the story that are not predictable. The makers are especially adept at throwing reality to the wind in order to make the whole thing more bright and colorful. For no particular reason the bad guy, Peter Stormare, has a pink backpack. I thought that was funny and applaud such initiative. In other words, this movie like the first one is a much better movie that it should be, and all of these jokes that make fun of the fact that you are watching something that should not have been made seem less like that a writer with writer’s block and more like a cry of help from some seriously competent people that could be doing much better things with their talents.

And they have. The two buddy cops, Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum are very good actors. Jonah Hill has just wrapped up his second Oscar nomination. Channing Tatum has become a Steven Soderbergh favorite. Ice Cube, once a gangster, is now firmly typecast on the other side of the law. He has done well in both cases. The two directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, have so far made a career of taking cynical ploys of studio executives and making actual art out of them. Their last movie was ‘The Lego Movie’ something I did not see but was also praised by critics. ’22 Jump Street’ was too. These movies makes one wish they branched out into an original story just to see what it would look like. I am convinced that they could deliver it if they were allowed to and the epilogue of this movie, at least to me, comes off as a desperate plea to the audience and the studio to do just that, i.e. please please please no ’23 Jump Street.’

I haven’t spent a lot of time talking about the movie itself, but then again I don’t have to. It is the same movie. There is a drug dealer on a school campus and the two cops have to find out where the connection is coming from. You saw this movie already! Most of the jokes are based off of that, just far more expensive this time. 

p.s. Rob Riggle’s jokes went too far again. Everything else was generally funny. My favorite had to be the weightlifting part. 

p.s.s. I failed at college. Well I learned a lot of stuff, but cinematically speaking I muffed it.