Project Hail Mary a jaunty space adventure, anime fantasy Scarlet puts twist on Hamlet

Project Hail Mary (PG13)

156 minutes, opens on March 19
★★★☆☆

The story: American biologist Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) awakens from hyper-sleep on a spacecraft light years from humanity. His crew mates are dead, but he befriends an unexpected companion on his desperate mission to study a mysterious micro-organism that is devouring the sun.

If the plight of the solitary astronaut in Project Hail Mary sounds like Matt Damon’s in The Martian (2015), that is because both the Hollywood blockbusters are adapted from American novelist Andy Weir’s science fiction by screenwriter Drew Goddard.

But Ryland is no astronaut. He is a comically unheroic high school science teacher: flashbacks recount how he was recruited by a dour European Space Agency administrator (German actress Sandra Huller of 2023’s Anatomy Of A Fall) for the intergovernmental Hail Mary project, then bundled off, kicking and screaming, on the one-way suicide expedition.

Nor is he alone. An alien the shape of a boulder (voiced by James Ortiz) arrives mid-voyage, having also journeyed far to save his home planet.

Ryland names him Rocky. Together, the interstellar allies race towards a solution to the extinction-level threat in a first-contact buddy romp set against staggering vistas of the cosmos: Ryland has a PhD plus Canadian actor Gosling’s galactic-sized charm, geeking out on radon and propulsion, and Rocky is adorable in his inquisitiveness.

This is another jaunty adventure on creative problem-solving from American co-directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord of The Lego Movie (2014). It is zero-gravity family entertainment absent dangerous thrills despite the stakes, a funny and heart-warming fable about friendship, communication, hope and the possibilities of science that opts for utopian uplift.

Hot take: Watch this handsome spectacle on the largest screen. The wonder, though, is the emotional connection amid the vastness of space.

Scarlet (PG13)

111 minutes, now in cinemas
★★★☆☆

The story: Princess Scarlet (voiced by Mana Ashida) of 16th-century Denmark is on a swashbuckling quest to avenge her king father’s (Masachika Ichimura) murder, when she, too, is slain by her power-hungry uncle (Koji Yakusho) and continues her vendetta in the afterlife.

Hamlet is having a moment. Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (2025) was recently feted at the Academy Awards, and the epic action fantasy Scarlet is the classic William Shakespeare tragedy whether or not the Melancholy Dane recognises himself in the pink-haired anime heroine.

Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda reshapes others’ works into his distinct own. His 2021 blockbuster Belle (2021) was a multi-versal Beauty And The Beast, and such shifting planes of existence is another signature of his in The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and Mirai (2018).

Scarlet’s hand-drawn mediaeval realm hence transitions upon her death into a photo-real computer-generated desert purgatory with an ocean for sky and a cloud dragon.

Bandits and bedouins roam this borderless underworld. So does a compassionate modern-day medic, Hijiri (Masaki Okada), who becomes the vengeful warrior-princess’ unlikely companion as she pursues her evil Uncle Claudius nemesis through violent battles.

Hosoda could use writing tips from the Bard. The narrative sprawl risks losing the audience, even before the confusing moment of Scarlet suddenly dancing at Tokyo’s Shibuya Crossing.

But the Japanese writer-director’s visual imagination is boundless. And the teaching on forgiveness never loses its power.

Hijiri steers Scarlet towards the possibility of a life beyond hatred and anger, freeing her from her suffering in an unexpectedly touching rebirth.

Hot take: To see or not to see? Do, because one flawed Shakespearean adaptation does not lessen Hosoda’s stature as an animation force.