It’s spring (basically)! Which means lots of buzzy movies and TV shows are coming your way, just in time for blockbuster season and before the Emmys qualifying window closes. I’ve already written about one significant title, The Comeback (read about it here), but here are a couple more suggestions for what to watch this weekend. 

Project Hail Mary (in theaters) 

The ads for Project Hail Mary, from the beloved filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, put an emphasis on zany comedy and big emotional uplift, selling an Everything Everywhere All at Once-esque sci-fi quirk-a-thon with heart. Something about those teasers irked me; maybe because I didn’t like Everything Everywhere and find the contemporary strain of nerd whimsy to be cloying and ill-suited to our decidedly post-”Everything Is Awesome” times. 

But I nonetheless remained eager to see Project Hail Mary, because early buzz was good (albeit largely from fake-critic shills for the studios) and because sometimes geeky movies with a sentimental streak do work on me. (Like The Martian, based on a book by Andy Weir, as is PHM.) And, sure, because Ryan Gosling can be quite charming when he isn’t overdoing it (as he did in Barbie to tiresome effect) or underdoing it (as he did for a decade of his career, in mopey stuff like Blade Runner: 2049 and First Man). The first quarter of the year is nearly done and we’re ready for a gregarious blockbuster to send us into spring with a skip in our step. 

In actuality, though, Project Hail Mary is far more in-tune with the dreary despair of the present tense than it initially seemed it would be. The movie (which cost a reported quarter of a billion dollars to make) is surprisingly downbeat, a lonely and wintry sci-fi adventure that, yes, features a heap of cutesy comedy, but is often plenty content to be pensive and sad. Its moodiness feels appropriate, responsive to a pervading sense of impending doom, but I wouldn’t exactly call it fun. When the movie does take a swing into goofy optimism, it feels strangely out of place.