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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 28 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Grace was chosen to join a crew of astronauts who would venture into deep space, seeking a solution to the astrophage problem.
Now, with his colleagues dead, he really is Earth's last hope.
Before long, the movie's ET component kicks in.
Grace meets an alien from another spaceship, who looks a bit like a crab made of sandstone, and whom he nicknames Rocky.
Rocky's home planet, Arad, is also being threatened by astrophage.
And in time, he and Grace become friends and team up to save their respective worlds.
That isn't easy, since Rocky and Grace don't speak the same language.
But Grace devises a clever communication system using laptop voice translation software.
In this scene, Rocky, that's the gifted puppeteer James Ortiz doing the voice and movements, encases himself in a protective airtight ball and comes aboard Grace's ship.
Like The Martian, Project Hail Mary was adapted by the screenwriter Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir.
But any comparison between the two only makes The Martian look better.
In that 2015 film, the director Ridley Scott let the comedy rise naturally from an inherently tense and suspenseful story.
But Project Hail Mary was directed by the duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who specialize in zippy irreverence.
I've loved many of their earlier comedies, from 21 Jump Street to The Lego Movie, and also their work as producers on the mind-bending Spider-Verse films.
Here, they've made a buddy comedy about saving the world.
And although Rocky and Grace's bond has a lot of charm and moments of deeper connection, it's also more than a little exhausting.
The tone of the story is so flippant and the emotional beats so preordained that the larger stakes pretty much evaporate.
It's as if the filmmakers had cooked up an elaborate, world-threatening scenario just so that our protagonist could go off and have a close encounter of the therapeutic kind.
You could say something similar about Interstellar, but Christopher Nolan's film had an operatic power and a crazy conviction that compelled you to believe in it.
Project Hail Mary feels glib and earthbound by comparison.
Showing 921–940 of 1,638 · page 47 of 82
← Previous
Next →