My brain ignores the beauty inherent to our shared human experience so it can instead search for things to be mad about.

 

Project Hail Mary

“How popular should popular entertainment be?” is a strange question to ask. If the word is in the name, you should probably be maximizing it. Imagine if a waiter brought you a filet mignon that was neither a cut of beef nor particularly cute. You would feel betrayed.

But can this logic be applied to movies? It’s not exactly like the filet mignon situation. At a restaurant, you’re trying to give the customer exactly what they asked for. Are you trying to give the audience exactly what they asked for? What did they ask for? Do they even know? Do you? Are there unspoken expectations between you and your viewers? How would they even know if they wanted something they’ve never seen before, unless they were first shown that thing? If you were this existential about your Bloomin’ Onion, people would worry.

I present this deeply stupid and poorly structured argument because I just watched Project Hail Mary, a movie that is neither deeply stupid nor poorly structured. It is, in fact, dialed the fuck in. It’s so dialed the fuck in, actually, that my brain started going to weird places as I watched it.

Hear me out:

Lord and Miller have basically perfected the art of being insiders and outsiders at the same time, right? This feels like the consensus – those two make bangers that send up the very notion of banging while actually harvesting that same bangification energy/anti-energy dynamic to maximize their Added Bang Over Expectation (ABOE) without ever pushing it too far and accidentally de-bangerizing themselves. Their mastery of the culture has fucked with my brain so badly that I actually considered writing that last sentence to be a good idea.

But, “this movie is so well-made that it loops back around to being poorly-made,” isn’t what I’m saying, because that is both stupid and objectively not true. Project Hail Mary isn’t so good it’s bad, it’s so good it’s really fucking good.

So what am I getting at?

I think it’s this: can you perfect popular entertainment? Unlike, say, avant-garde stuff, popular entertainment has a fairly knowable gauge: how many people it appeals to. So if you have a style that appeals to essentially every human alive, did you just, uh, win at entertainment? And even if you could win at entertainment, would you want to? Can Lord and Miller push awesome, big movies further by continuing their fine-tuned approach, or can new avenues only be discovered by making something weird and shitty on purpose, just to test the waters? Why is a movie about Ryan Gosling doing science with a dancing rock challenging my very notion of reality? I’ve never even had a Bloomin’ Onion before.

The End

Here’s a compromise: whether or not perfection is an admirable goal depends entirely upon the field in which you operate. You wouldn’t want to be the world’s best toilet salesman, and Keith Richards’ favorite drug dealer probably never has a moment to himself.

But it feels like there should be more to the argument – it’s just that I’m not sure more what. I’m going to chew on this for a while longer, which is more effort than I put in for most blockbusters. That’s a feather Lord and Miller’s cap, even if it’s a weird feather, and an even stranger cap.