Project Hail Mary Review: A Stellar Sci-Fi Adventure

Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up groggy, floating in a white capsule aboard a ship called the Hail Mary. He doesn’t know his name, his mission, or why the two other crew members are dead in their pods. Memory returns in fragments: a childhood fascination with science, a dismissal from a prestigious lab, a shoe-string teaching job in middle school. Then comes the heavy truth. The sun is dimming. Something in space - a strange, energy-sucking substance nicknamed the Astrophage - is slowly starving Earth of heat. Humanity threw together a desperate interstellar mission, and Ryland, a science teacher with nothing to lose, was volunteered for the one-way trip.

As his memory resurfaces, Ryland discovers he isn’t alone. A planet away, another ship has launched from a dying solar system. On it lives Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz), an alien built of rock-like chitin who breathes ammonia and communicates through a series of pure musical tones. The two species cannot breathe each other’s air, cannot touch, cannot speak a syllable - but they are the only chance either world has. Together, they must figure out how to stop the Astrophage before their respective suns go dark forever.

Lord understands that Project Hail Mary is, at its core, a story about problem-solving as an act of love. Every scene is a miniature engineering puzzle: How do you create an atmosphere Rocky can survive in? How do you harvest fuel from a dying star without incinerating yourself? How do you teach an alien the concept of a “trade” when he perceives you as a squishy bag of water? Lord stages these sequences with the same propulsive energy he brought to Miles Morales learning to swing through Brooklyn. The spaceship Hail Mary feels tactile, its corridors cramped and cluttered with jury-rigged equipment. The zero-gravity sequences - shot with a combination of practical rigs and subtle digital manipulation - never feel weightless in the cheap, video-game sense. There is real consequence to every tumbler and near-collision.

Gosling is a marvel. His Ryland Grace starts as a blank slate - amnesiac, terrified, fumbling through a ship he doesn’t understand - and slowly re-inhabits the confidence of a man who once taught seventh graders the periodic table while juggling beakers. His comedy is bone-dry (a scene where he tries to explain the concept of “tables” to Rocky by miming a flat surface is pure physical farce), but his desperation is never far beneath the surface. When he records a goodbye message for the students he never thought he’d see again, Gosling lets the tears come without sentimentality. It’s a grown man’s grief, and it guts you.

Sandra Hüller, as the ruthless project head Eva Stratt, appears mostly in flashbacks. She plays Stratt as a necessary monster: unflinching, willing to sacrifice a colleague for a percentage point of efficiency. Her scenes with Gosling crackle with moral tension. But the real revelation is James Ortiz’s vocal performance as Rocky. The alien’s language is a series of pitched hums and chimes, subtitled in English, and Ortiz modulates those sounds with a warmth and playfulness that makes you forget you’re watching a puppet made of digital crystals. The moment Rocky “sings” back a melody Ryland has been tapping out - a crude approximation of a lullaby - is the most emotionally direct scene in any film this year.

Lord does take liberties. The novel’s sprawling middle section - weeks of trial and error on an alien planet - is condensed to a montage that loses some of the methodical joy. And at 157 minutes, the final act drags slightly during a long sequence of landing mechanics. But these are quibbles with a film that otherwise nails its tone: hopeful without being saccharine, scientific without being dry, and human without being sentimental.

Pros

• Ryan Gosling delivers a career-best blend of physical comedy and raw vulnerability.
• The alien Rocky is an instant icon - beautifully designed, brilliantly voiced, and written with genuine empathy.
• Phil Lord’s direction finds visual poetry in equations, fuel calculations, and repair chores.
• The score, by Mark Mothersbaugh and a choir of theremins and percussion, perfectly mirrors Rocky’s musical language.
• Faithful to the novel’s spirit while smartly condensing for cinema.

Cons

• The 157-minute runtime feels its weight in the final act, with a landing sequence that could shed ten minutes.
• Sandra Hüller’s Stratt is underused in the second half; her moral complexity gets simplified.
• One late-film twist involving a third alien species feels rushed and slightly incoherent in execution.
• Not all of Lord’s stylistic flourishes land - a few wacky cutaway gags jar with the otherwise grounded tone.

Project Hail Mary is that rarest of things: a science-fiction epic that cares more about its characters than its spectacle, and yet still delivers spectacle that feels earned. It asks a question that has haunted humanists for centuries - “What if the only being who can save us is fundamentally different from us in every way?” - and answers it not with war or conquest, but with a shared protocol for extracting fuel from a star. Phil Lord has made a film about the kindness of problem-solving, and Ryan Gosling has given us a hero who is smart enough to be terrified and brave enough to keep trying. If you have a heart that beats, you will leave the theater wanting to hug a friend from another world. Essential.