The commenters here are persuasive. I dissed Andy Weir and his new movie, and I was told that it was entertaining and I should give it a chance. So I did. I went to the theater to see Project Hail Mary.

I loathed it.

Sorry.

The premise is garbage. Weir postulates an “astrophage,” a bacterium that harvests carbon from Venus and then streams to the sun, “eating” the sun, collecting vast amounts of energy, dimming the sun, and threatening humanity with extinction within decades. They send a probe to the line flowing between Venus and the Sun and collect the mysterious black particles, bring it back to Earth, and a middle school science teacher looks in a microscope and figures out that it’s an organism that harvests energy from stars.

Stop right there. I’d appreciate it if someone could justify that plot hook, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1950s hack disaster movie. It’s stupid.

Then astronomers notice that all the local stars are experiencing this same mysterious dimming. The “astrophage” must be infectious! Let’s not concern ourselves with the timing: we observe a rapid phenomenon occurring within the lifespan of a single human being simultaneously in a population of stars scattered over a volume 100 light years across. There’s a complete lack of awareness of space and time in this movie.

Humanity’s response is to quickly build a spaceship to fly to the one star, Tau Ceti, that isn’t exhibiting the mysterious dimming to see if they can find a “cure”. Fortunately, the “astrophages” also store such a tremendous amount of energy that they can form a fantastic, near-magical rocket fuel, enabling the construction of a starship that can travel at something near light-speed. This is the kind of exotic nonsensical space fuel you’d find in a 1930s pulp novel.

The plan is to send a small crew with one engineer, one pilot, and one scientist to a star 12 light years away, to collect information about how Tau Ceti was resisting the infection, and then return to Earth with a solution. That’s going to take at least 24 years round-trip, to deal with a crisis that’s going to doom Earth in 30 years. My problem was that my mental calendar was getting hopelessly lost by this time.

Then the scientist who is expected to lead this critical mission to stop human extinction was the middle school science teacher. This teacher is the charming, charismatic, appealing Ryan Gosling. We’re doomed if that is our selection criterion.

The ship takes off. Next thing we know, Ryan Gosling wakes up from an induced coma (that’s how humans can survive a 12 light-year trip?), the two other crew members have died — no explanation provided, but nice to know pilots and engineers are superfluous — and Gosling has amnesia.

That’s just the setup for the main part of the story, and it’s such radically nonsensical and unscientific garbage that I felt like walking out, and only stayed in my seat by virtue of Ryan Gosling’s charm and the curiosity and need to find out how the story would crawl out of this mass of sewage.

No spoilers. You’ll have to suffer as I did if you want the answers.

Short answer: Gosling finds a cute chatty alien who is there for the same purpose, and they team up. Don’t worry, there’s none of that complicated first-contact rigamarole to establish communication — they just point at things and say words and use a computer to compile a dictionary. Quickly. Mostly off-screen. Can’t let the whole alien complication that Weir has introduced get in the way of the whole star-eating space bacteria problem that Weir introduced!

Gosling also has a Weir staple: a white board that he can scribble on to solve science problems. For example, Gosling discovers a problem that will make the alien’s spaceship break down on the way to its home in 40 Eridani. So he scribbles some stuff on the white board and decides to fly off to the rescue, and somehow find this stranded spaceship somewhere between Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani. Are you surprised to learn that he does? Spaceships are easy! All you need for interstellar navigation is a white board and a collection of colored markers, and a pilot with no training who was hired on the basis of his entertaining middle-school science classes.

Ryan Gosling is a good actor who gave a great performance in an unbelievable role, and the alien (named Rocky) was amusing and somewhat original, but you will never, ever, ever, ever convince me to see another movie based on an Andy Weir book. He’s a hack.

Jesus christ, that movie was fucking stupid.