Movies seen in March
Apr. 1st, 2026 08:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessIt was only one movie, and that was Project Hail Mary. The trailers felt very much like a presentation of the 12A blockbusters Hollywood has for us this year. I’m glad that I first saw the Dune Part Three one in the cinema, featuring scale, intriguing details and shorn heads. It was followed by another Zendaya flick, sorry, the latest Spider-Man movie, and I was all, ‘Are Spidey’s three stages Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland? Oh, hi, Bruce,’ and then I remembered that I haven’t seen the last Spidey film and was reminded of my distanced relationship with most Avengers movies these days.
As for Project Hail Mary, although I felt I’d been stalked by promo clips for it going in, that wasn’t a problem when I watched it. The reductionist take is it’s Gravity meets The Martian only even goofier. Well, it is directed by Lord and Miller, after all. It’s entertaining, in a word. Gosling has the chops and charm to carry it. It looked fab, I chuckled, I was engaged, but no more. It repeats some of the beats of The Martian – arrogantly supersmart guy is a disarming, even relatable dork, while Sandra Huller’s character is very much Captain Melissa. But the narrative is somewhat different – Grace has forgotten much of his past when he wakes up from an induced coma to carry out the titular project, but we get to see it in flashbacks, and probably piece it together more quickly than he does. It’s not about reuniting Our Guy and his team, instead it’s a buddy movie as he meets an alien (voiced by the puppeteer, which is cool) on the same mission (and that part is a goofier Arrival.) I will admit to getting less and less emotionally engaged towards the ending, as it went through various plot contortions.
I have time over the next week and a half to go to the cinema, but it looks as though the choices are mainly kids films and horror. (I’ve seen the trailer for The Drama, yet another Zendaya film, and based on that, I don’t think I want to watch the whole thing to find out what her character was meant to have done.)
As for Project Hail Mary, although I felt I’d been stalked by promo clips for it going in, that wasn’t a problem when I watched it. The reductionist take is it’s Gravity meets The Martian only even goofier. Well, it is directed by Lord and Miller, after all. It’s entertaining, in a word. Gosling has the chops and charm to carry it. It looked fab, I chuckled, I was engaged, but no more. It repeats some of the beats of The Martian – arrogantly supersmart guy is a disarming, even relatable dork, while Sandra Huller’s character is very much Captain Melissa. But the narrative is somewhat different – Grace has forgotten much of his past when he wakes up from an induced coma to carry out the titular project, but we get to see it in flashbacks, and probably piece it together more quickly than he does. It’s not about reuniting Our Guy and his team, instead it’s a buddy movie as he meets an alien (voiced by the puppeteer, which is cool) on the same mission (and that part is a goofier Arrival.) I will admit to getting less and less emotionally engaged towards the ending, as it went through various plot contortions.
I have time over the next week and a half to go to the cinema, but it looks as though the choices are mainly kids films and horror. (I’ve seen the trailer for The Drama, yet another Zendaya film, and based on that, I don’t think I want to watch the whole thing to find out what her character was meant to have done.)
