Knee-jerk review: "Project Hail Mary"

1. It's really, really good.  A sure-fire audience pleaser with lots of humor and suspense and sci-fi spacewalk action.
2. But is it a cinematic masterpiece?  Eh.  Some fans may be overstating things just a little.
3. On the other hand, some of the moviegoers criticizing the movie come across as weirdly bitter and sullen nitpickers.
4. The music is pleasantly quirky at times, lending a goofy charm to a fairly serious situation.
5. We knew we knew Carl from somewhere.  Wasn't until later we realized he's the pastry chef on "The Bear."
6. Ryan Gosling really has it, doesn't he?
7. Honestly, it's probably hard for us to be completely objective since we read the book a couple of years ago.  It was pretty amazing.  The story has more than one pretty great plot twists.  So for us, watching the movie in a way was a lot of waiting for the next narrative moment from the book to happen.  (What must it have been like for Ms. Cheese Fry to experience all of that for the first time?  For the record, she loved the movie.)
8. Rocky is great, of course, as you may have heard.
9. It's probably a little cringey for the savior of the world to be a rumpled middle school science teacher with a wiseass personality, but that's part of what makes the movie great.  A nobody without faith in himself who rises to the occasion.
10. Any good writer just wants to put their characters in impossible situation where there is no good choice.
11. The flashback structure is cliche, but cliches are cliches because they work.
12. Incredible that they kept the ending.
13. Everyone's surely familiar with 2015's The Martian (which kind of is a masterpiece), another adaptation of a science-heavy Andy Weir novel.  Weir also wrote a sci-fi suspense thriller set on a moon base called Artemis which is really good.

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