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HOPPERS **½/**** screenplay by Jesse Andrews directed by Daniel Chong
PROJECT HAIL MARY **½/**** starring Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub, Ken Leung screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir directed by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
by Walter Chaw I have great affection for Pixar, even Pixar of late. I think for the most part they do their best with representation, and although their films often feel viciously engineered for maximum emotional devastation now, they’re at least skillful at honouring their role as catalysts for tangible cathexis and catharsis. They’re not all for me–you can keep, for instance, the profit-motive-driven Cars trilogy, the bowdlerized Elio, and the reckless-seeming Inside Out movies, but I still recognize the impact those films have on their audiences as similar to the lasting pull of stuff like WALL·E and Elemental on me. One criterion of good art is if it continues to evolve, nay, metastasize as one revisits it over the years. I will say that Pixar’s worst, most rote films seem aimed at younger audiences, with lessons that are essentially uncomplicated screeds about friendship and acceptance. To that end, I do wonder if their best days, when they consistently delved into real philosophical and/or existential complexities, are behind them. Maybe it’s only time that turned Ratatouille, The Incredibles, and Toy Story 3, all from the Aughts, into masterpieces in my mind. Maybe, but I don’t think so.
Hoppers takes its place in the Pixar canon alongside 2015’s The Good Dinosaur, a weird-almost-to-the-point-of-experimental flick with an uncommonly heady message about the need for oneness with the environment, should we ever hope to save it. Along the way, the new film adds a message of grassroots radicalization that partners with tech to influence politicians in a way that might include threats of violence. We’re probably past simply threatening violence at this point, but Hoppers is, you know, for kids. Its hero is pint-sized activist Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a Japanese-American firebrand who has spent her young life conspiring to stand between bulldozers and the Nature she’s been taught by her Coco-esque grandmother (Karen Huie) to revere. Indeed, it’s only in Nature that Mabel can quiet the steady whip-crack of overzealousness and impotent weltschmerz. She’s attached to one small beaver pond in particular that is unfortunately in the path of a new freeway Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm) has planned. Desperate to foil the onward march of despoiling resources in the name of “progress,” Mabel stumbles upon a top-secret project involving the transfer of human consciousness into the bodies of animatronic animals. Because beavers are a protected species, her plan is to, in the guise of a robot beaver, encourage real beavers to populate the recently abandoned paradise, thus halting the freeway in its tracks. It’s not so much Avatar as it is The Stepford Wives or Opie’s idiot retcon of the Millennium Falcon. Or maybe RoboCop. It’s obviously a fairy tale, because a billionaire Nazi goon on ketamine already gutted our environmental protections.
While I do appreciate children’s entertainment doing its best to avoid pedestrian, hissable villains, Hoppers‘ depiction of its obvious baddie, Mayor Jerry, as wildly popular for his development-first platform strikes me as, again, fantastical in our current hellscape. I get that we don’t want Mayor Jerry to be one-dimensional, that he should perhaps receive an arc indicating growth (or, failing that, a sword through the heart), but I’m not in the mood to ‘both sides’ the state of American politics these days. Choose a path. Hoppers has its heart is in the right place, and its premise opens the door to a genuinely fun, inventive journey into the secret lives of animals, yet its desire to refocus the villain role onto a psychotic pupa (Dave Franco) who assumes the role of “Insect King” when his mother (Meryl Streep) is panic-squished by a stressed-out Mabel, strikes me as too much equivocation at a time of extreme Balkanization. It’s Animal Farm with a happy ending. Imagine if Napoleon and Snowball were merely going through a tough grieving process and just needed some understanding.
Before it lets the air out of itself, Hoppers is frequently hilarious, features an older woman–one Dr. Sam (Kathy Najimy)–as the smartest person in maybe the world, and is lawless in the places it’s willing to go, up to and including the summoning of an “apex predator” to “squish” the Mayor. (I was thinking that was going to be a lion or something… It’s a lot weirder.) The conception of a secret animal society à la Watership Down is pretty cool, too, and I especially took to the King of the Beavers, George (Bobby Moynihan), who may be the Kwisatz Haderach of Lovable Sidekicks™, stealing the show with his guilelessness and good nature. His superpower is kindness and optimism–he reminded me a lot of Ke Huy Quan’s character from Everything Everywhere All at Once in that respect. George’s excitement in welcoming this strange new “beaver” into the fold is infectious, and he enthusiastically shares with it the rules of the animal world, prominent among them the maxim, “If you gotta eat, eat.” Harmless and reasonable until you consider that in Pixar’s version of Nature, what you eat is often another fully sentient, charming, speech-capable animal. That this doesn’t dissuade me from a carnivorous diet says nothing good about me.
The other ‘Pixar movie’ opening this month is a live-action movie from Sony, Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s Project Hail Mary. An adaptation of Andy “The Martian” Weir’s best-seller, it’s an obvious crowd-pleaser featuring a classic Pixar hero, all rumpled looks and big-eyed charisma, and a Lovable Sidekick™ who is responsible for the bulk of the film’s shameless, merciless waterworks. Though I was skeptical about how this film was going about its tearjerking/faux-smart business for a while, my resistance largely fell away when I realized how much I’d like it if it were a Pixar-animated film. I don’t know how to unpack that or whether this is a phenomenon others have experienced, but there’s a casserole of perceptual programming in me that, no matter how hard I’ve tried to quash it, will inevitably associate certain stories–and, perhaps more to the point, their approaches–with specific animated precedents. Sometimes it’s Disney, sometimes Hanna-Barbera. This time, it’s Pixar. The heartwarming Pixar template where the moral is something something buddies. You know the one.
In Project Hail Mary, only the fate of the world is at stake. The Sun is dying because of mysterious black dots sucking the juice out of it. Enter everyone’s favourite science instructor, Dr. Grace (Ryan Gosling at his weepiest and most adorable), who’s currently teaching a Benetton ad’s menagerie of adorable STEM middle-schoolers to flout convention in his best approximation of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. See? He’s brilliant! And approachable. Suddenly, stoic, adorably autistic government spook Stratt (Sandra Hüller) shows up to spirit Dr. Grace away to a top-secret facility. Dr. Grace is evidently a genius with a big mouth who was fired from his previous, prestigious non-teaching position, and that’s exactly the sort of rebel Stratt needs for her Project Hail Mary. What’s that you say? A last-ditch attempt to send a team to Armageddon the shit out of this problem? That’s right. Humanity, led by NASA (haha), is desperately building an interstellar vehicle with which they hope to visit nearby star Tau Ceti after a relatively short, near-lightspeed jaunt of 13 years–which, for Dr. Grace, should be no time at all, except that he’s placed in a coma and has a huge beard when he’s awakened at his destination, meaning that time does pass for him. Which, if he’s travelling at near-lightspeed, shouldn’t be the case. I don’t really understand Relativity, I guess. Neither does Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), a sentient rock monster straight out of Galaxy Quest who’s also on a trip to save his sun from the same space menace. Since travelling at lightspeed is impossible for a being with mass, Dr. Grace has potentially travelled enough below it that, like, a year or two passed for him within the 13 he spent in flight, maybe? I’m shooting around in the dark here.
Dr. Grace and Rocky, the last survivors of their planets’ Hail Marys, join forces to try to save their respective civilizations. It’s not entirely clear to me why the Eridians (Rocky’s people) don’t send a backup vehicle to Tau Ceti, given that they don’t appear to have the same fuel limitations the Earthling does, but, hey, this isn’t the “look under the hood” kind of sci-fi. More Harry Harrison than Hal Clement, savvy? Working together involves montages where Dr. Grace programs his laptop to act as a universal translator, the exchange of detailed models to “puppet show” complicated stratagems (ostensibly to each other but actually for the popular audience Project Hail Mary hopes to (and did) attract), and the evolution of a deep and abiding friendship. It seems Eridians watch one another sleep as an evolved protective response. Isn’t that sweet? And as we learn more about Grace, we realize he’s not the courageous type required of what is designed to be a suicide mission as much as he’s a flawed human who must behave like the hero Rocky thinks Grace is. Suffice it to say, the middle of the film is the gooey centre of a decadent confection that, despite the nutrition label promising some good-for-you sciencing-the-hell-out-of-it competency porn, is awfully saccharine. At least there’s no eating of poop potatoes this time.
Instead, find a few ginormous action sequences, lots of companionable patter packed with amiable mondegreens and more-than-generally acceptable scenes of two bros hanging out and watching the ocean. As a cartoon for children, Project Hail Mary is both really fun and a painful reminder of what these guys could’ve done with Solo: A Star Wars Story had they been allowed to mess around in that sandbox. Deep space isn’t the only thing weightless about it, though, unless you need a reminder that friends are important and Earth is dying under the weight of a handful of assholes. In the final calculus, I have the same complaint about this film as I do about Hoppers: they’re just so Pollyannaish about our chances. The assumptions they make about adequately functioning systems and human cooperation are curiously out of tune with everything we’ve seen in the past six years. Try watching Outbreak in 2026 without breaking into a nihilistic smirk at its portrayal of a government that cares about you and an operational Center for Disease Control. As if, you guys; we can’t even all agree to wear a mask to protect other human beings. Build a spaceship to Tau Ceti? First convince me you could persuade this government and its citizens that the Rapture is a bad thing and science is real. I wouldn’t say that Hoppers and Project Hail Mary are toxic in their optimism, but their optimism does feel like propaganda. It’s good for kids to believe there are smart people in charge, I guess. But sell your crazy elsewhere, as the man once said. We’re all full up here.
