PROJECT HAIL MARY
2026
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
Written by Drew Goddard (based on the novel by Andy Weir)
It feels like it's deeper into every new year that I pick back up with the current releases, and somehow this is always after watching fewer movies than ever from the year before. That's entropy, I guess, though maybe waiting paid off: my first movie of 2026 turned out to be my best "first movie of the year" in many years. This (and the box office even suggests you might agree with the above assessment) would be Project Hail Mary, a burdensomely ugly name for a pretty wonderful movie, I think, though you can take that up with novelist Andy Weir who named his book that in the first place, and is probably heretofore most famous for writing the source material of The Martian—another see-they-can-too-make-original-hits sci-fi blockbuster, though the success of Hail Mary in this respect, coming in 2026 instead of 2015, is perhaps even more impressive—and therefore an author whose very favorite thing in the universe appears to be to strand dorks in outer space and see what shakes out of them. It's a good genre with, I'd like to say without really making a whole analysis out of it, a noticeably higher-than-average success rate, and I would hold this one as a nearly across-the-board improvement over The Martian (while even the "nearly" I put out there is only that The Martian is substantially harder science fiction, and if such a thing is important to you then Hail Mary is still harder, or at least wishes to present itself as harder, than many); and if you'd told me ten years ago that Ridley Scott's effort at the grandeur of the otherworldly, and at the cosmic loneliness of a man separated from all the rest of humanity by a void best measured in AUs or in light years, would be superseded and pretty trivially by the two dudes whose last live-action film was 22 Jump Street, I'm not totally sure I'd have believed you. (Even with the Spider-Verses, which are of course animated films, the grandeur is of a different sort.) On the other hand, it's equally easy to pin down "Phil Lord and Christopher Miller" as the pair of problems it still possesses, or at least their inability to transplant their approach into a very distinctive mode is the source of most of its irritations, basically down to "if this were about 50% less of a comedy, this would be a really great movie instead of just a very good one."
Not that their instincts can be wholly disregarded, considering that it was presumably their intuition to cast Ryan Gosling as the most isolated man in the cosmos, and so we find Ryland Grace (that's Gosling) awaking from a medically-induced coma, something like a low-tech kludge to sub in for the cryonic suspension that humanity hasn't invented yet, in the bowels of a space vessel. Grace is not the only person aboard, but he is the only one who survived the transit, and for the moment he's badly amnesiac about what's even happening, though the short version is that he's the mission's astrobiologist, sent to Tau Ceti, twelve light years distant, in a desperate bid to solve the problem with Sol back home, this being the sudden crisis of a plague of spaceborne alien microbes that are eating our sun, and most of the other stars in our stellar neighborhood, but for some reason—that everyone sure hopes can be replicated—not Tau Ceti. Let us briefly pause here to consider the "hard sci-fi" I mentioned because it's mainly just that it luxuriates in procedure; and I hope you can see what I mean by this being a significant step down from The Martian, because I feel like it's almost a step down from, like, The Phantom Menace's midichlorians, or the Star Trek with the giant amoeba. I don't know if I'm missing something, or what, but this seems like some extra implausible shit.
That, anyway, is the short version; we get the long version in a series of flashbacks interspersed throughout, taking us back to the beginning of this "astrophage" plague and the associated doomsday countdown that's now seeping into the public consciousness, and now we find Dr. Grace drafted by the international community to study a sample of astrophages because of a groundbreaking and radical dissertation, though they're drafting him out of a middle school, because he appears to have committed some kind of bodily violence upon a colleague in academia, or faked the data in some kind of boron abiogenesis experiment, or something, since it's difficult to understand his difficulty without one or both of those two things. (He's an astrobiologist—a speculative one, obviously—and through his speculation he stumbled into a controversy over the possibility of non-carbon-based life that ended his career, which is simply baffling. Anyway, when he's tapped to test these astrophages it turns out that the microbes eating the sun are... carbon-based and mostly water. Which isn't any bit baffling. Though let's be serious: the actual reason is "we wanted a relatable loser to be our hero." Still, not to skip ahead, but Grace shall be vindicated in different way.) So, while his initial hypothesis about the astrophages' composition will turn out to be way off, what he figures out instead is even more valuable, which is how to breed them, and how they produce an extraordinary amount of energy, which makes them a magical spaceship fuel for a near-lightspeed vessel, and, as the foremost authority on the life cycle of astrophages, that would suffice to explain why he is where he is twelve years later, even though he's something of an untrained buffoon, especially without his now-dead mission-critical crewmates. But he has arrived; the turn comes when he realizes he's not the only one who has, when another vessel, this one clearly not of his world, finds him, readily neutralizes his panicky attempts to escape, and makes contact. This vessel also had a crew, but only one survivor of the rigors of spaceflight; this is an alien engineer, a bit like a granite spider, named A Ridiculously Long Whistling Noise Mixed With Stridulation, if I comprehended his verbalization organs correctly, and whom Grace, lacking such organs, calls "Rocky" instead (James Ortiz).
And it's here that the movie proper starts, not so long into the runtime, though it feels like long enough, mostly because of those problems with mode I talked about, though some of it's the structural gambit. Now, the script was actually written by Drew Goddard, who previously adapted The Martian, and while I have read neither of Weir's novels (and, you know, maybe I should), it would seem likely from the adapted products that a sense of humor does attend to both of them; but it would seem even likelier that Lord and Miller, though not screenwriters here, still nudged Goddard towards the funniest, or "funniest," would-it-be-inappropriate-to-just-call-it-a-sci-fi-comedy? version of itself that Project Hail Mary could be. And this makes for a ragged experience during the first half-hour-or-so, as brain-addled Grace careens about his ship—it's surprisingly pratfall-heavy—while we are frequently reminded all his friends are dead and learn, shortly thereafter, his entire planet is doomed, and not long after that, that whether his mission is successful in saving his planet or not, he's not going home either way, with all the astrophage fuel used to get to Tau Ceti as quickly as possible, with the calculus being that the needs of the many obviously outweigh the needs of the few or the one. This will be interspersed with reasonably patient moments where Gosling, though still groggy, remains capable of austere sci-fi, contemplating the emptiness of infinity and his infinitesimal existence within it.
These, unsurprisingly, are uniformly the best snippets of the early going, and it's uniformly worse when we snap back to Earth for backstory, where we actually get a fuller picture of Grace's personality which for some reason is a yammering Cringe Millennial in an MCU vein, despite Lord and Miller's Marvel (or Marvel-adjacent) movies and their other comedies not really banking on this, though if they ever had designs on "Peter Parker as a public school science teacher" I guess this served to scratch that very specific itch. This is forwarded by DIY, larky science experiments that I think are intended to be more charming than they come off in context, which recall is "the extinction of all life on Earth." The really abrading thing, however, is the way this means we kind of get the wrong Gosling: Ryan Gosling, you know, is possibly the single most valuable brooder we've got in American cinema, but instead of the Gosling of Drive or Blade Runner 2049, the movie about 1)the apocalypse and 2)being a million times father from his fellow human beings than anyone has ever been gets the Gosling of The Nice Guys and The Fall Guy, except that even "the Ryan Gosling of The Fall Guy" might be overselling how effective (the often-terrific comic actor) Gosling can be when he's required to deal with the contradictions in this screenplay, though at least he is effective when he's allowed to do what comes most naturally, and be depressed in space. It is, anyway, a lot like Moon (up to and including what feels like an intentional hat-tip via a probably-not-sapient, semi-helpful assistant robot (Priya Kansara) whose part-of-the-ship physicality, while quite practical for a spaceship, is basically a 1:1 recreation), but also if Moon were badly modulated.
So, in a certain sense, the flashback structure that Goddard (whether prompted by Weir or not) has adopted is as elegant a solution as we're going to get, because it gets us to the actual movie a lot quicker than otherwise, if we needed all the exposition, and since I think we probably needed most of it, I won't gainsay it on that account. It's not as elegant a solution as it clearly could have been, because Goddard and Lord and Miller simply don't realize it's expended its utility relatively quickly—I'm not sure it's not still a drag on the story, even when it gets better, and the relationship between Grace and his science boss Stratt (Sandra Hueller) becomes slightly friendlier, thus permitting some emotions (for instance, emotions about the end of the world) to enter into its earthbound phase—and instead the flashbacks continue past their useful lifespan for, damn near, the entire film, with the frequency of interruptions thankfully decreasing, at least, though by the last batch of flashbacks, they've become actively overexpository, blurting out some "new" information that has already been made perfectly accessible by Gosling's performance, in order to try at making his entire character arc (which, again, is pretty visible!) into some kind of plot twist, which it grafts onto the ongoing story in a way that makes it feel like what it essentially is, some naked, ugly screenwriting machinery.
But that isn't really "the movie," and more like a little more scaffolding than was actually needed for the movie to exist, so let's not hold it too much against Hail Mary for having it. (Even if it also means its generous runtime of 156 minutes gets spent suboptimally.) As soon as Rocky enters the picture, it starts working effortlessly—including as a comedy!—though even before that, it's worth mentioning that plenty else has already been "working" on the level of craft. Grieg Fraser, a very talented cinematographer, most recently of some of the best-received space movies of the last few years with his two Dunes, gets a more, let's say, varied workout here, not necessarily "better" than those but certainly after a less punishing kind of awe, with a baseline of some moody spaceship interiors (sort of two spaceship interiors, with a fair amount of the movie occurring in an umbilicus that Rocky's built that by biological obligation requires the two scientists' to be segregated by refracting crystal walls), and hitting some very nice peaks with the overwhelmingly colorful space phenomena generated by the extravehicular excrusions, once Grace and Rocky join forces to figure out the astrophages' deal, plus more of a willingness to use the focal plane as an actual narrative tool than is common these days. Meanwhile, the flashbacks' single best downstream effect is the steady drumbeat of match transitions that Joel Negron's whipping out, which, in the accumulation of images of earthly life, usually full of people, suddenly cutting to absolutely nothing but Gosling all alone in a hostile cosmos, does more to impose a sense of being lost forever in space and time than is even altogether fair. (It's somehow a movie with gorgeous editing that occasionally slumps into outright bad editing, with a sometimes-suspect sense of geography and temporality in the regular old transitions.) And though I'm not always sold on the needle drops Lord and Miller have decided best suits their movie, I kind of love Daniel Pemberton's score, which does "soaring adventure" well but has cleverly divined that the best accompaniment for a movie that's mostly scientific procedure in pursuit of averting galaxy-spanning death is to treat Hail Mary like the holiest possible episode of How It's Made, driving "technological" themes with choral backing for the oomph. It can strike one as a pity that Lord and Miller can't help themselves from mugging at the audience, because they're not at all bad at striking the right tones for a movie about the terrifying emptiness of space, but it gets mixed up into atonality a bit anyway, at least until they arrive upon the element that's going to even their movie out.
And basically that is Rocky, a curious-looking small alien played by very-persuasive puppet (as I understand it, Ortiz leading a team of puppeteers in addition to providing the voice), whose advent more-or-less instantly fixes Hail Mary, providing an appropriate outlet for the sillies as Grace and his new friend struggle to communicate; Ortiz's voice is, technically, a laptop translator that Grace laboriously builds over the course of the middle stretch of the movie, providing a constant background of light comedy on the basis of two creatures alien to one another speaking through barely-functional facilitative language. The one laugh-out-loud joke in the whole trying-to-be-a-comedy movie, for me, was Rocky correcting Grace's idiomatic "not bad!" with the phrase, "fully good!"; but all of their interactions are fun and fascinating, and allowed to come organically out of their clumsy-but-earnest attempts at finding common ground amidst bio-cultural clashes (there's a distinction in the way humans and Rockies sleep that's initially amusing and gets extremely poignant; there's a distinction in the way they eat that I imagine most people will be glad they only show it once; and Rocky is, in fact, a bit genuinely rude to his host aboard the human ship, though always in a likeable way), and while their eyes are mostly on the prize, the screenplay contrives enough downtime with their required trips around the Tau Ceti system that a deeper friendship is all but inevitable between the two beings. I'm of two minds about it, but that "suboptimal use of runtime" is felt in how surprisingly little we learn about the civilization of 40 Eridani (like, really little: I felt like the implication is that this was basically their first spaceship ever, they didn't understand how to build it, and they were only able to build it at all because their spit is metallic xenon, but I don't think Hail Mary ever confirms any of that, and I'm dead certain it doesn't elaborate on what the possible fuck "metallic xenon" is**), because on one hand it never demystifies Rocky but on the other I suspect an astrobiologist would be so aflame with questions he would never, ever shut up. I'd think there might also be a small disappointment in there being so darned little to the astrophages themselves, though I'd also have to think I'm being unfair to be disappointed by what is basically a maguffin for the plot to revolve around, and has never really been suggested to be anything more interesting.
It's lovely stuff, all told, and maybe not the most surprising stuff—not till the end, anyway, and I adore the ending, which reorients the stakes entirely away from Earth and towards friendship and the human value of an entirely alien world, and the denouement, finding Grace as an alien zoo exhibit but not merely content but happy, was the ending I was hoping for without actually expecting the movie to have the guts to do it—but "surprising" isn't everything, and (with all the aforementioned caveats) a flawless execution of an 80s-style magical friend movie with enough intellectual heft for adults is surprising enough all by itself, all this fake science struggled over but always with sincerity and seriousness, as a proxy for a foundational optimism about bridging divides light years across and intelligent creatures being able to solve seemingly insurmountable problems together. And, like I said, it's no little surprise that I got to enjoy my first movie of the year this much.
Score: 8/10
*Except maybe when this "MGM" (Amazon) movie fully cross-brands with one of the two IPs the defunct studio had served as a vessel for, the Rocky films, and Grace insists Rocky's mate back on his Eridanian homeworld simply must be named "Adrian." But, honestly, even that's not so awful, and I wouldn't be shocked if it were just already in the novel.
**In other gassy observations, it's an exceptionally nice scene about offering a gesture of trust, but if I were Grace I'd have still asked some clarifying questions about the precise composition of the "human-friendly" atmosphere Rocky made for him in the umbilicus! "Oh, you cannot handle 10% CO2, question? But it comes out of your mouth! Oh, you are dead."
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