Project Hail Mary Is the Clearest Threat to The Odyssey Right Now

That distinction is why it remains the most obvious released-film threat to The Odyssey.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's adaptation of Andy Weir's novel arrived in March carrying the baggage that usually follows expensive science fiction. It needed to satisfy readers, turn a long stretch of isolation into a movie-star showcase, make an alien friendship emotionally credible, and sell an extinction-level story without becoming oppressively solemn.

The critical response was not unanimous. Variety found it too long and formulaic. The Guardian thought Ryan Gosling's charm was doing much of the heavy lifting. The New Yorker criticized its glibness and tonal inconsistency.

And yet the consensus settled somewhere much more useful for an awards campaign.

Rotten Tomatoes describes the film as a "near-miraculous fusion of smarts and heart," and its audience response has been similarly enthusiastic. That line gets at why the movie is still here months after release. Project Hail Mary is designed around pleasure. It gives viewers science problems they can follow, stakes they can understand, a star they already enjoy watching and, eventually, a relationship that becomes more moving than the disaster-movie premise surrounding it.

Oscar voters are not immune to pleasure.

The current prediction boards show both the strength and the limitation of the film.

Next Best Picture's Aug. 7 panel had all 17 forecasters predicting a Best Picture nomination, although none had it winning. Its broader user model placed it third in Best Picture, behind The Odyssey and La Bola Negra. Gosling remains in the Best Actor conversation. Sandra Hüller appears in Supporting Actress predictions. Greig Fraser is competitive in cinematography, Daniel Pemberton in score, and the film sits near the top in visual effects and sound.

That is a serious package.

It is also a different package from The Odyssey.

The Odyssey currently looks like the film that can dominate a ballot. Project Hail Mary looks like the film that can survive one.

That distinction matters because the preferential ballot rewards consensus. A movie does not have to be the largest number of voters' favorite if it appears near the top of enough ballots and generates less hostility than the alternatives.

Project Hail Mary is built for that kind of affection.

Its secret weapon is Gosling.

The performance works because the film asks him to use nearly every version of the persona audiences already know. He is funny without turning the movie into parody, vulnerable without becoming self-pitying, physically credible enough for the survival material, and charming enough to maintain momentum when he is acting against machinery, memory and eventually a creature that communicates in musical tones.

That sounds like movie-star work because it is.

Awards conversations sometimes treat accessibility as a lesser achievement, as though a performance becomes more serious when the audience can see the strain. Gosling's job is the opposite. He has to make a complicated science-fiction structure feel easy to inhabit.

Hüller gives the film another kind of credibility.

As Eva Stratt, she is not playing the emotional center in the traditional sense. She is the person willing to make decisions the movie's more immediately sympathetic characters cannot. Hüller's severity keeps the Earthbound material from becoming generic exposition, and her presence gives the flashbacks a harder edge than Gosling's natural warmth would create on its own.

The Supporting Actress category is crowded, and Hüller is not currently as secure as Anne Hathaway. Still, her candidacy matters to the film's larger profile. A science-fiction blockbuster with an acting nomination is one thing. A science-fiction blockbuster that can place actors in multiple categories begins to look like a Best Picture film.

The same is true of the craft categories.

Project Hail Mary is currently among the strongest predicted contenders in visual effects and sound, and it appears near the top in cinematography, production design, editing and score. None of those categories guarantees Best Picture strength. Together, they make the movie difficult to ignore.

The Oscar question is whether admiration can become urgency.

That is where The Odyssey still has the advantage.

Nolan's film feels like an event in the industry as much as a movie. Project Hail Mary feels like an exceptionally successful piece of popular filmmaking. There is a difference between the two, particularly when voters begin asking themselves what the year will look like in retrospect.

Lord and Miller also face a directing problem. Next Best Picture's current top five for Best Director does not include them, despite the film's strength in Best Picture. That is not fatal, but it creates a ceiling. If Project Hail Mary becomes the film that everyone likes but relatively few voters identify as a directorial achievement, it may end the season as a very strong nominee rather than the winner.

The counterargument is that its greatest achievement is precisely the invisibility of that direction.

Lord and Miller keep an enormous amount of machinery moving without making the audience feel the engineering. Flashbacks, exposition, comedy, creature work, visual effects, grief and scientific problem solving keep passing the baton. The film is long, but its storytelling rarely feels confused.

That may become more valuable as the season gets heavier.

By December, voters will have watched ambitious dramas, historical epics, literary adaptations, political films and several late-breaking prestige releases. Project Hail Mary will still be the movie where a frightened man and an alien learn how to save each other.

There are worse places to be.

The film's strongest route is not to out-Nolan Nolan. It is to become the consensus alternative when the field starts looking for one.

If The Odyssey begins to feel too inevitable, Project Hail Mary is already sitting there with a beloved star, a broad technical package, strong audience affection and one of the year's easiest emotional pitches.

That is why it remains the clearest threat among the films we have actually seen.