Justin Chang
speaker
1,638 appearances
51 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 3d ago
Justin Chang’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Project Hail Mary is about an astronaut who finds himself abandoned in outer space, where he bonds with a cute alien who tries to help him save Earth from climate change.
I hate to describe a movie as a mashup of this and that, but sometimes there's no way around it.
This film is basically The Martian meets E.T.
by way of Interstellar.
That's a handy way of summing up its appeal, but it also points to its very real limitations.
I had high hopes for Project Hail Mary, but it's the most derivative and carefully manufactured crowd-pleaser I've seen in a while.
It doesn't feel like storytelling so much as mechanical engineering.
Somewhere millions of miles from Earth, an astronaut named Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, awakens from a years-long coma to find himself all alone on an unmanned spacecraft.
The two other astronauts on board are dead, and Grace has temporary amnesia, with no idea who or where he is.
It's a fairly chilling premise on paper, but from the start, the movie plays the situation for laughs.
Grace flails and falls all over the place.
Gravity is in full effect.
But although Gosling is a nimble physical comedian, I had trouble buying his performance.
Grace might be all alone in space, but he seems to be mugging for the camera, as if he knew there was an audience watching him.
In time, Grace's memories begin to return.
In regular flashbacks, we see him back on Earth, teaching middle school science.
He's approached by a government official named Ava Stratt, a terrific Sandra Huller, who wants to recruit him for a top-secret mission called Project Hail Mary.
She knows that years ago, Grace was one of the most important molecular biologists in the U.S.,
Long story short, the sun is being devoured by aggressive microbes called astrophage.
If nothing is done, the resulting global cooling will wipe out a huge chunk of Earth's population over the next few decades.
Showing 901–920 of 1,638 · page 46 of 82
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