SCI-FI; 2hr 36min
STARRING: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz
Switcheroo: Gosling
When molecular biologist and junior high school science teacher Dr Ryland Grace (Gosling) comes to from a years-long coma, he is all alone on a spacecraft going who-knows-where. Grace’s first amnesic response is one of panicked bewilderment. He needs to figure out quick smart why he is flying through the deepest imaginable space, although with communication time to Earth clocking in at 11-plus years, according to the ship’s computer, Mary, there’ll be no help from his home planet.
Grace is hardly reassured when his memory begins to click into gear: it seems that, like it or not, he is on a one-way mission to save Earth from microbes known as Astrophage that are slowly but surely devouring the heat of the sun and who knows how many other infected, light-years-distant, stars. Only one star appears to be immune, which raises the life-saving question of why that would be, and it is there that Grace is headed.
Hewing closely to The Martian author Andy Weir’s compulsive 2021 novel, The Lego Movie directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller zip neatly between Grace’s radically upended backstory — in which The Zone of Interest’s Hüller is a supercool key player — and the incredible ride on which he finds himself. The hands-on special effects are spectacular, but what really rocks this alternate world is Gosling’s goofy, nerdy, wholly human and thought-through portrayal of a regular geek up against the unimaginable. And given — spoiler alert! — that Grace is Not Alone out there, the miracle of connectivity is this rescue mission’s emotional centre, with Ortiz capturing hearts as the lead puppeteer and perky voice of fellow traveller Rocky. Subject matter doesn’t come any weightier than the survival of life as we know and imagine it, while self-discovery through sacrifice has to be right up there with the noblest of evolutions. But the geek and the alien as interstellar besties? That is truly a relationship to fall for.
