Nearly ten years after being fired from “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” Lord & Miller finally get to make their space movie!

“Project Hail Mary” is based on the book of the same name, and follows a molecular biologist (Ryan Gosling) who is sent up into deep space in order to figure out why the sun is dying. Sandra Hüller also stars as Phil Lord and Christopher Miller direct.

I’m a really big fan of Lord & Miller’s work dating back to their “Jump Street” series, but in recent years the pair has focused more on writing and producing the “Spider-Verse” series and films like “Cocaine Bear” (as well as getting hired and then for one reason or another leaving big-budget films like “Solo” and “The Flash”). They finally make their return to live-action directing with “Project Hail Mary,” based on the popular sci-fi novel from the author of “The Martian,” and it is colorful and whimsical as anyone could have hoped for (and reaffirms Disney was foolish to fire them during the filming of “Solo” because their filmmaking was “too unserious”).

As our lead, Ryan Gosling is at his Ryan Gosling-est. I have been a little disappointed in the direction his career has taken in recent years (I think he is truly great in “Barbie” but I miss the Gosling who made “Drive,” “The Ides of March,” and “The Nice Guys,” not “The Gray Man” and “The Fall Guy”). “Project Hail Mary” remains closer to his recent string of films (he has said he wants to make movies that his kids will enjoy watching), but Gosling is able to bring some levity to his role, while delivering the deadpan humor he has become known for. His interactions with Rocky, an alien he encounters on his mission, are amusing, even if we never fully buy into the emotional connection toward a puppet.

Lord and Miller made a point to use practicals and sets as much as possible (they claim to have used no green screens), and the result is a film that looks real. And I don’t mean that in the sense of fully buying into what we see on-screen, but that compared to the flat backgrounds of a Netflix original or over-CGI’d world of a Disney product, you can tell Gosling is actually in a real room and interacting with more than just a tennis ball. Since the filmmakers couldn’t actually go up in space they did have to create those scenes in a computer, but they are wonderfully done by cinematographer Greig Fraser (one of my favorite DPs, who worked on the “Dunes” and “The Batman”). Full of bright neon colors, you grasp the scope of our universe with all the majestic wonder that it fills us with as kids, and if you’re lucky enough to see this in IMAX (and especially 70mm like I did), the colors really pop and the aspect ratio widens every time we step foot outside the spaceship.

What holds “Hail Mary” back from being an all-timer for me is the sense of importance of the plot. In “The Martian,” the entire story is centered on saving one man but you feel the clock ticking and that failing would be emotionally ruinous. In “Interstellar,” Nolan shows the devastating conditions of Earth and why we must find an alternative planet, as well as giving us a father-daughter relationship that we want to see reunited. “Project Hail Mary” should have the most pressing and dire stakes of any of these (the sun is dying and all life in the immediate universe will come to an end), however at no point did that really feel like the case. We get a single scene of Gosling telling a classroom full of kids that “maybe” the sun will start to change, and then are suddenly thrown into boardroom meetings and science montages. It is also hammered home that Gosling has no friends or family and thus is expendable, so the film again shoots itself in the foot by handicapping our emotional investment in his success, and the non-linear storyline hurts some of the momentum as well (to be honest, I think even “Armageddon” managed to do both the global scale and family elements better).

“Project Hail Mary” is a fun space movie helmed by a charismatic yet deceptively vulnerable Ryan Gosling performance, and from what I’ve heard from friends it is a fairly loyal adaptation of the source material. I can’t recall having any “oh wow” moments like the docking sequence in “Interstellar” or be inspired by its depiction of space travel like “Ad Astra,” but in a world where we get almost exclusively AI algorithm slop dumped onto streamers, this still remains a breath of fresh air.

Critics Rating: 8/10