NASA’s Artemis II wasn’t the only thing sending people into space this year. While millions watched astronauts make history by travelling around the moon this past month, movie watchers were taking trips of their own into outer space through the two record breaking space themed movie releases. From Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, theaters showed that space stories are fan favorites both on the big screen and in real life.

Although both movies had major commercial success, critics reviewed them very differently. Project Hail Mary was praised for its emotional storytelling, impressive visuals, and standout performance from lead actor Ryan Gosling. On the other hand, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie was disliked by critics for its overly fast-paced, lazy storytelling that relied heavily on nostalgia ending up sacrificing a coherent plot. Still, strong reviews or large audiences don’t automatically make a movie great, and weaker reviews don’t always mean a movie isn’t enjoyable. I watched both films to see if they really lived up to what their critics were saying about them.

Project Hail Mary

This film grossed over $600 million worldwide, becoming the second biggest non-franchise film of the decade at the time of its release. It got an impressive 94% critic score and 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. I saw this movie in late March with my family, and I didn’t know what to expect going into it. As someone who doesn’t care much about space I was ready to be somewhat bored, but as I sat through the two and a half hour movie my lukewarm expectations were heavily beat. The film follows high school science teacher Ryland Grace, who wakes up from a coma in outer space with very little memory of his past and realizes he is the only survivor on a deep space mission to save humanity from extinction. The thing that stood out most to me was the acting, specifically Ryan Gosling who is in nearly every scene and delivers a performance that is convincing and heartfelt while still staying comedic. The strongest aspect of his performance in my opinion has to be his connection with the secondary character Rocky, his alien sidekick who he meets in space. A combination of puppetry, animatronics, and CGI make this character come to life. What’s so impressive about this in relation to Gosling’s performance is that even though Rocky looks non-human and speaks a language not understandable to the audience, the acting was so good that it truly felt like these two were inseparable best friends who would give their life for each other. I’ve seen films attempt this kind of connection between two humans and it falls flat. That goes to show how impressive it is that the makers of this film were able to make this type of connection between a man and a CGI Rock puppet feel so convincing. That was extremely difficult to pull off but it worked well and enhanced the movie overall. The visuals and soundtrack were beautiful and did a good job of making the audience really see how alone the main character was out in deep space, the music was easily my favorite part outside of the movie itself. 

My only complaint would be the pacing of the movie, while I did love the ending it felt strangely paced compared to the rest of the film. Lots of moments that could’ve been longer felt rushed and moments that could’ve been cut dragged on at times. Overall, I would rate this movie a 95% and highly recommend everyone go see it. 

The Super Mario Galaxy Movie

This film became the highest grossing movie of the year so far, earning over $800 million worldwide in less than a month. However, despite the success, it got a 44% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes while getting a much stronger 88% audience score. This movie is a sequel to another box office hit, The Super Mario Bros. Movie which became the highest grossing video game movie ever at $1.36 Billion worldwide. Despite both pulling record breaking audiences, both of these movies have a similar issue, the fans love them, and the critics hate them. I went to see this sequel movie with my 8 year old brother, who is a massive mario fan, with the understanding that it wasn’t getting the best reviews and I wanted to see for myself why. This movie was a very different experience than Project Hail Mary and not just for the obvious reasons about the age range each movie is meant for. This movie was nearly a whole hour shorter than Project Hail Mary while contrastingly instead of being stuck to one space ship for the entire movie, jumped between many locations recognizable to video game fans. This was a major critique of the movie, that instead of taking time to build up its characters and plot, it speeds through nostalgic references to dangle keys in front of the audience’s face and keep them entertained. While I do see some validity in this argument I feel that this point is overly reductive, boiling down a movie into its worst aspects and ignoring the genuine value it has. The way critics are describing it would have fans believe the movie is a bunch of random scenes of video game references poorly stitched together to make something that should barely even be considered a film. While I do admit, the plot was not the strongest, I do think this movie is receiving a disproportionate amount of hate. I have taken my little brother to almost every kid movie that has come out in the last year and I can say for a fact this is one of the most visually appealing, creative, funny, and action packed kids movies I’ve seen in a while and it was surprisingly really enjoyable. The nostalgic references didn’t feel forced, they were very organic, the characters were likable and unlike most kids movies I’ve seen recently I laughed at a good amount of the jokes. I believe due to the box office impact this movie is having, it’s being unfairly judged by critics who aren’t used to watching modern day children’s movies causing it to be reviewed on a scale that it just doesn’t belong on. It is impossible to compare this to a movie like Project Hail Mary because they are two entirely different types of media, but that is what a lot of these critics are attempting to do, which explains why their scores are so much lower than the audience score. 

When a children’s movie gets to a certain level of popularity it reaches the eyes of people who don’t know how to review it correctly. Overall if you want to have a fun time seeing a silly movie with the family this is a great watch and I’d recommend, but if you are looking for a plot driven movie with great writing, a movie like Project Hail Mary might be better for you. I’d give The Super Mario Galaxy Movie a strong 80%.

While both these movies took their audiences to space, they offered completely different journeys, which is what made both worth watching.