Tag: film

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Project Hail Mary isn’t a bad movie. It is clearly well done — quality technology creating the splendor of outer space, an interesting but flawed character, and an actor (Ryan Gosling) who winningly captures this character. But it doesn’t work for me.

I will confess it isn’t my type of movie to begin with — a Sci Fi movie with a lot of action moving the plot along. The sun is being eaten away by some mysterious microbe and someone has to go on a suicide mission to figure out why. Will they make it on time? So even though I wouldn’t normally go to this type of movie, I saw some potential there.

The main problem I have is there just isn’t enough plot and/or action to keep this movie going for the 2 and 1/2 hours plus running time of the movie. But what are directors (there are two of them — Phil Lord and Christoper Miller) to do when they have all this fabulous technology that can recreate outer space? They show it with way too many minutes of blaring choral music of Grace looking with awe. I get it. Yes, it is awesome but repetition makes it a little less so. It began to bore me after about the mid-point of the movie.

This boredom lead to me picking apart the plot. Most movies depend on suspending a certain amount of disbelief. A movie about spacecraft in outer space and meeting with aliens then would require much more than the normal movie. Keep the damn thing moving or else you will lose your audience. So, as I was plodding through these beautiful shots of space, I used this time to find plot holes.

Like how the hell was Rocky (the alien our lead character, Grace, encounters in his trip) is Grace going to reconnect with Rocky in the vast expanse of space when they have no communication after Grace departs for earth. Or, given the time needed to save the earth and the time Grace needs to get where he needs to go and his own inability to make it back, how is their enough time for him to save Earth. There was a very short time frame to work with.

Now normally these are not big issues in a movie that is moving along because you are paying attention to what is happening on screen but it is the death knell for movies when you start thinking about them in the middle of the movie you are watching because it means you are no longer watching the movie.

So while Project Hail Mary is in no way a bad movie, it just isn’t a great movie either.

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Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Coleman have a new movie out called the Roses. In the movie, there is a scene where Cumberbatch’s character gives Coleman’s character a food she is allergic to and then refuses to give her her epipen when she reacts until she signs their divorce papers. Apparently the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation is upset because depriving someone of their epipen while having an allergic reaction just isn’t funny. This seems like another mountain out of a mole hill situation. The movie is a satire on how divorce proceedings get out of hand and the terrible things that people might do to gain an advantage.

The movie wasn’t endorsing murder by epipen as much as pointing out the potentially horrible things a desperate person might do who finds themselves in a messy divorce. Withholding an epipen to someone who needs it to fits nicely into one of those potential horrible things. There are thousands of ways this might be done. Would it be any funnier if he was holding a gun to her head?

And I am pretty sure I have seen it before in movies and in television without comment. It is in fact an ingenious way to murder someone. Why then has the Natasha Allergy Foundation got their panties in a twist over this is a bit of mystery until I read that the movie had lukewarm reviews and weak box office.

Then the light bulb went off over my head, this is just a PR trick to get the movie into the headlines. Nobody is really mad at all. Now I have no proof whatsoever regarding my speculation but it is the only thing that makes sense. It is a movie after all, a movie where people do outrageous things, depriving a person having an allergic reaction of their epipen is outrageous and wrong but it also fits right into the movie being made.

I am betting there is no there there but kudos to the movie’s marketing department for keeping it in the headlines.