Project Hail Mary review – Rocking science!

If I had a nickel for every time one of Andy Weir’s novels, with their densely detailed science-fiction-by-way-of-science-fact stories, was somehow adapted to screen in rousingly triumphant fashion, I would have two nickels. That isn’t a lot, but it’s still odd that it happened twice.

Just as with 2015’s The Martian, Project Hail Mary was translated to screen by Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, The Cabin in the Woods). Now two-for-two, the screenwriter has seemingly cracked the impossible code for bringing Weir’s ideas to life in immensely crowd-pleasing fashion. He is helped along in uproarious fashion by co-directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, The Spider-Verse films), whose deft skills at balancing wildly divergent tone allow them to run audiences through the full emotional gamut. They also film Project Hail Mary with an astounding eye, and a preference of practical sets/effects over CGI tinkering whenever possible to ensure that this film will almost certainly still be a looker years from now.

But despite their plainly obvious talent, the three men behind the screen are not Project Hail Mary’s biggest weapon. This whole endeavour would simply collapse under the weight of its ambitions with the wrong person at its centre. Luckily, we have Ryan Gosling, leading it all with deific levels of charm, comic timing, and layered emotional depth. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, Gosling will have you reaching for your sides in riotous laughter as much as he has you reaching for the tissues. It is, in my opinion, the best performance of his already celebrated career, and he spends most of it talking to a rock.

In Project Hail Mary, Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up from an induced coma, disheveled and alone on an interstellar spaceship, with no idea of who he is, how he got there, and what he is supposed to be doing. As Grace gets to grips with the operations of the sprawling craft (with entertainingly droll running commentary), his actions also prompt his memories to slowly return piece by piece, and we learn that he was once a molecular biologist, laughed out of academic circles for proposing an unconventional theory about extraterrestrial life. After becoming an American middle-school science teacher, Grace and the rest of the world were gripped by a historic discovery: the appearance of an infrared line stretching between Venus and the Sun.

Dubbed the Petrova Line, this astronomical phenomenon, containing billions of tiny microorganisms dubbed “astrophage”, appeared to be causing the Sun to dim. If left unchecked, this dimming would result in catastrophic global cooling in just 30 years, ending human civilization as we know it. What’s more, the astrophage is not local. It’s been traveling through the galaxy, leaving a path of cooled down stars in its wake. All except for Tau Ceti, a star mysteriously still burning bright despite the presence of its own Petrova Line. Under the stewardship of the stoic Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), an international task force of scientists was rapidly assembled, with Grace roped in due to his once derided theory now potentially having merit.

While Grace initially believed the group’s goal was to just unlock the inner workings of the astrophage, he soon discovered an additional, mind-bogglingly ambitious part to the plan: mounting a manned mission to Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years away, to discover its secret defence.

What follows is a two-pronged narrative as we learn of the events that led to Grace ending up on the spaceship (he was never supposed to be crew), and what he uncovers about the astrophage around Tau Ceti. And for the latter he has help. Much to Grace’s gigantic surprise, another ship is already at Tau Ceti, a massive alien craft manned by a single extraterrestrial creature. Dubbed “Rocky” by Grace due to him literally looking like a limbed boulder, this E.T. is sure to be your next cinematic obsession. And that’s all I’m willing to say as I won’t spoil the details of Rocky’s story, his interactions with Grace, nor how they overcome their initially insurmountable differences of language and environment, as its best to be discovered on your own.

To be perfectly fair though, Goddard, Lord and Miller do shortchange us a bit here. Well, some of us. Those who have read the book know how painstaking the various processes are that Grace employs to understand both Rocky and the Tau Ceti astrophage. It’s diligent scientific competence of the highest order. But days of experimental trial and error don’t make for the most riveting blockbuster screenplays and would have pushed the runtime beyond the constraints of the average bladder. The Martian had a similar screenwriting hurdle to overcome, but due to the different narrative circumstances of that film Goddard could lean harder into the scientific geekery. Here, some details are condensed, glossed over, or just outright ignored for the sake of brevity.

For those who haven’t read the book, they probably won’t notice these script elisions outside of an occasional pondering. However, if you’re one of those sticklers for films having as perfect fidelity to their source as possible, this will probably bother you. I would counter that, though, by saying that arguably the film’s best scene – a masterful musical moment that punched me in the chest with the force of a rocket ship launch – was not even in Weir’s novel.

As I deem Project Hail Mary to be one of the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read, there are naturally some plot points in the movie that I would have liked to be more detailed, and one or two dramatic beats I would have preferred hewing closer to the more devasting source. But that being said, I can’t deny that the filmmakers know just when to embrace the book’s geeky minutiae and when to pull back for cinematic efficiency. The end result is a movie where the physics of orbital mechanics are equally as engrossing as the drama of humanity defiantly staring a frigid extinction in the face.

Filled with an optimism for said humanity that positively crackles off the screen, and making no secret of its soapboxing for both science and selfless cooperation, Project Hail Mary is a movie that could not come at a better time. It holds an IMAX-sized mirror up to all the ignorant chaos and tribalism we see in our world right now, and reminds us that anything can be overcome, no matter how impossibly bleak it appears, if we work together. Overflowing with filmmaking creativity and thespian charm thanks to the superlative showing of Gosling – not to mention the infectiously likeable Rocky – the film is a feel-good blockbuster that is one of the best films of 2026 thus far. In the roughly translated words of Rocky himself, “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!”.