Project Hail Mary (3 1/2 stars out of 4)
Reviewing “Project Hail Mary” is a little tricky, because this is one of the rare occasions where I’ve actually read the source material before seeing the film. The good news is that this isn’t one of those situations where the book is a lot better than the movie; in fact, I think the movie might be a lot better. But it does make me wonder if my mind is filling in gaps that the film has skipped over.
Anyway…
“Project Hail Mary” is a ton of fun, and I anticipate it will rate among the best movies of 2026 by next December. Based on the novel by Andy Weir–who also wrote the source material for 2015’s “The Martian,”–“Project Hail Mary” tells the story of another lonely astronaut, this time on a last-ditch mission to save the planet from our dying sun.
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, “Hail Mary” toggles its story between two main threads. In the primary thread, a junior high science teacher named Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up alone on a spaceship in a neighboring solar system. He has no idea why he is there, but luckily his memories start to come back in a series of flashbacks which constitute the other narrative thread.
Eventually, Grace puts enough pieces together to realize he’s on a mission to investigate a “nearby” star named Tau Ceti. Along with a number of other stars in our galaxy, our sun is slowly being drained by a mysterious life form called Astrophage, but for some reason Tau Ceti is immune to the drainage. So Grace has been sent on an 11-year voyage to hopefully solve the mystery in time to save our sun–and our planet–from the effects of the Astrophage.
Grace was originally part of a three-man team, but two of them died before they could emerge from their space-comas. Luckily, Earth isn’t the only planet that has sent someone to Tau Ceti in search of a solution. Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz) is a kind of good natured rock-spider who also happens to be the sole survivor of a doomed crew. So once he and Grace figure out how to communicate, they determine to team up and save their worlds in what turns out to be a fantastic sci-fi buddy comedy.
Weir’s novel wasn’t shy about injecting his story with some needed humor, but Lord and Miller lean into the jokes even more, pairing an enthusiastic and energetic pace with some well-chosen needle drops to show you how much fun it can be when you combine savvy elements with a smart story.
The novel was also extremely procedure-heavy, almost to a fault, but Lord and Miller’s film manages to communicate the gist of what is happening without stripping the story of its tension and logic. Like “The Martian,” “Hail Mary” boils down to a sequence of problems that get solved by science and reasoning. My only question is whether I’m only saying this because my brain already remembers the material that connected some of those dots from the book.
In preparation for the press screening, I watched Ryan Gosling’s last outing as a lonely astronaut, when he portrayed Neil Armstrong in 2018’s “First Man.” That film leaned into Gosling’s more stoic delivery, the same kind of presence he emphasized in “Drive” and “Blade Runner 2049.” But for “Hail Mary,” he gets a chance to kick back a bit more, and emote a bit more joy and quirkiness. It’s a nice match for Rocky, but it also works well against Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), the dry and serious woman in charge of the project we meet through Grace’s flashbacks on Earth.
Combined with some excellent and striking special effects–reportedly Rocky is a real-life puppet instead of a CGI creation–“Hail Mary” adds up to a positive and inspiring story that would be welcome even if we didn’t have anything on the news to drag us down. It’s a movie well worth seeing in the theater–in IMAX, if possible–and one worth re-visiting again down the road.
“Project Hail Mary” is rated PG-13 for some profanity and sequences of action violence.