Project Hail Mary (Daniel Pemberton)
What is it?
Project Hail Mary (2026) is the latest sci fi comedy outing from director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie), starring Ryan Gosling as a man on an (involuntary) interstellar space mission to save the earth, and his encounter with an alien lifeform.
I’m clearly the odd one out, because this didn’t connect with me the way it has connected with audiences and critics so far – overwhelmingly positive reception across the board. While I do enjoy Lord & Miller’s comedy stylings in the TV show The Last Man on Earth (2015-2018), and their clever tone shifts along the way, it didn’t quite work for me here.
Maybe it’s due to a rather whimsical narrative structure, an overreliance on flashbacks (thus robbing the excellent premise of its rich ‘solitary confinement’ potential) and tone shifts wherein the payoff feels undeserved or unorganic. But they deserve credit for lacing their story with scientific mumbo-jumbo, “meet cute” elements, goofy physical comedy and endless montages accompanied by pop songs. Everything but the kitchen sink, really.
The music is by Daniel Pemberton (b. 1977), who’s rapidly become one of the most sought-after composers in the industry, and who seems just at ease with electronics as he is symphonic idioms.
How is it?
Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first – at a ridiculous two hours, the album is excruciatingly overlong. The lack of proper curation here is a sign of our times, but is particularly troublesome when the score simply doesn’t have the richness to deserve it. Keep your ‘delete’ button ready when you whittle this down, you need to remove two thirds of the material. There’s maybe a decent 40-minute programme hiding in here somewhere.
A problematic consequence of this type of presentation is that tracks which would normally work as “bridges” between top points are padded out to become THE thing instead. That’s true for an endless series of whimsical, percussive loops and figures (tracks like «Invalid Operation», «Water Based» or «Box in a Box», for example), and it’s true for the many pulsating space drama cues in the style of Steven Price’s Gravity (like the 7-minute «Time Go Fishing» or «Excessive Centrifugal Force»).
The highlight, nay the takeaway from this score is, without question, the beautiful, ethereal bits for choir that seep into the score with periodic intervals – to connote the humanity that expands into new, almost religious territories, and the more serious tone shifts the film tries to pull off. This is on proper display in tracks like «Ryland Grace, Cognition Assessment», «Humanity» or «You Were Loved (Burial)», where they organically ebb in and out of prominence amidst dreamy synths and even organ (Interstellar-style).
If Pemberton had organized his album presentation around these, with the other bits as interstitial material, and in a more succinct overall statement, he would have succeeded in creating the comical-religioso hybrid feeling he was after, I think. As it is, however, it’s drowned out by its sheer excessiveness. (PS. For a better, more thoughtful and concise album, do check out our review of Pemberton’s excellent Brian and Charles from 2022).
