Can beggars be choosers? Can those of us starved for the movies that once came off the Hollywood assembly line consistently — so-called four-quadrant stories that appeal to men and women, the old and young — raise any objections when we finally get a blockbuster that seems to fit that bill? Or should we simply raise hosannas even if the blockbuster seems as if it was based on blueprints, excavated from an abandoned cellar, whose shapes remained but whose details were too faded to recover?
I think that once a movie has made $500 million worldwide, the total gross for Project Hail Mary as of this writing, it doesn’t matter what the critics say, so I can just be truthful. The feel-good hit of the year, starring Ryan Gosling as a high school science teacher on a space mission to save the human race, does everything right except its storytelling. It’s modeling what moviemaking ought to be, but it feels stuck at the stage just before the finished project.
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