"Project Hail Mary" And Lessons For Family Blockbusters
3/26/20261 hr 14 min
Beam me up…Rocky!? Critical Darlings is back, from outer space, in our new feed, talking about the first blockbuster of the year. Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller for Amazon, is a family-friendly science fiction film about Ryan Gosling on a risky space mission with a cute alien pal. The movie is a critical and commercial success and feels livelier than so many would-be blockbusters. But what is it about Hail Mary that works where last year’s Gosling-led The Fall Guy failed? Is this the return of the ’80s-era cute puppet friend movie? Is Gosling t...
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
[trumpet music] From Blank Check Productions, this is Critical Darlings, a podcast about the movies everyone's talking about, one new release after another. [cymbals crashing] Please welcome your hosts, Richard Lawson and Alison Willmore.
Richard Lawson· Host0:24
[applause] Marie Barti, thank you for that introduction. It's great to hear your voice again.
Alison Willmore· Host0:29
It's been a long time.
Richard Lawson· Host0:30
Uh, we're here with producer Ben Frisch.
Ben Frisch0:32
Morning.
Richard Lawson· Host0:32
And the three of us took, what, a four-month vacation.
Alison Willmore· Host0:35
We've been traveling the world.
Richard Lawson· Host0:36
Yeah. W- 'cause when you go to the Oscars, when you present, as we did famously, um, they- you get a gift basket, and one of the gifts is, like, that crazy trip.
Alison Willmore· Host0:45
It's the cruise, right, where you just, like, you go around the world- Yeah, yeah ... and then, um- There was a murder mystery on the boat. [laughs] I thought there was a real murder, actually.
Richard Lawson· Host0:52
[laughs] No, no, it, it turns out- And, uh, like, the really, if you're in first class, uh, they make it a real murder for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Alison Willmore· Host0:57
Um.
Richard Lawson· Host0:57
It's very Triangle of Sadness kind of thing.
Ben Frisch0:59
Did you catch the bug?
Richard Lawson· Host1:00
[laughs] The, yeah, mm-hmm, un- unfortunately. [laughs] Uh, but we're back now- Yeah ... um, in sort of a new shape. You know, our, our last season was talking about the Oscars and the Best Picture nominees, and that was really great, but now we can turn our, our, our gaze forward and look at new movies coming out, which is really exciting. And sometimes we'll talk about Oscars. Like, the movie we're talking about today, Project Hail Mary, has already been by some measure slotted in, like, people