Ryan Gosling plays an astronaut in this derivative, carefully manufactured crowd-pleaser; Project Hail Mary doesn't feel like storytelling so much as mechanical engineering.

Programmer-turned-novelist Andy Weir has now cranked out two bestselling sci-fi novels that Hollywood could not resist.

He wakes up alone on a spaceship, barely able to speak, and somehow ends up Earth’s last, nerdy hope — armed with a dry-erase marker, a useless AI, and the kind of scrappy optimism that makes the end ...