directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
written by Drew Goddard
based on the book by Andy Weir
As one of the more hyped-up movies of 2026, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's Project Hail Mary had a lot to live up to, as an adaptation of another book by Andy Weir, who penned the book The Martian, which inspired the highly successful Ridley Scott film starring Matt Damon over a decade ago. The good news for me is that this film pretty much lived up to the hype.
The film opens with a disheveled man (Ryan Gosling) waking up in deep space to discover that he is the sole survivor of a manned space mission with no memory of who is or how he got there. As he slowly wakes up he remembers that he is Dr. Ryland Grace is a mild-mannered, middle-school science teacher who, after one of his classes, was approached by government agent Eva Stratton (Sandra Huller), with a mission to save the sun from a mysterious phenomenon that seems to be consuming it. This is happening through the Petrova line, a mysterious trail of organisms stretching the sun to the planet Venus, filled with some kind of creatures that eat suns. Ultimately, the solution that Earth's best and brightest have come up with is to have astronauts travel to a distant star, 11 light years away from Earth, which also has a Petrova line but is not dimming, as the sun is. As Grace remembers more and more of how he ended up here, so far away from hoe, he is startled by the discover that someone else, in another ship from another planet has traveled to exactly the same place. He will soon discover that they are there for the same reason, and that they need to cooperate if their worlds are to have any chance of survival. Fortunately, Grace and his new colleague, whom he names "Rocky" after his stone-like appearance, hit it off pretty quickly, but they'll need more than just good vibes to save the day: they'll need ingenuity, courage, and the willingness to basically lay it all on the line.
I loved The Martian back when I watched it in 2015, so when the trailer for this film dropped, even though I had yet to read the 2021 book on which Project Hail Mary was based, it was an easy call to go check it out at the nearest movie theater.
Like The Martian, which was also adapted by screenwriter Drew Goddard, this movie features an affable, relatable lead character in Ryland Grace, who is very much out of his element as a science teacher who has been sent on a deep space mission for reasons that we, the audience, only discover quite late in the film. He's an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and his journey is utterly compelling. Ryan Gosling does a brilliant job of playing Grace as an everyman, even though he actually holds a doctorate in molecular biology, the fact that he is terrified of the challenges that lie ahead makes him far more relatable than the character would be had he been infused with confidence in the face of what feels like an insurmountable task. He basically carries the film on his shoulders, as his co-star Rocky is part puppet, part digital effect and part voice actor (James Ortiz). It helps, though, that his earthbound co-star Sandra Huller plays an effective "straight" man to Grace's wisecracking schoolteacher. Lord and Miller do an outstanding job of exploiting the chemistry between their actors, which is not the easiest thing to do in film like this, with such limited human interaction.
Visually, the movie is a treat, with art direction and visual effects which still manage to give the film its own distinct aesthetic at a time when science fiction movies set in space like Dune and the Star Wars film have already thrown down the gauntlet in terms of how space should look on the big screen.
For me, though, the technical standout of this film was Daniel Pemberton's soaring musical score. Even though it admittedly felt slightly heavy-handed at times, it was wonderfully evocative and, like the film's unique visual design (best exemplified by Rocky's ship), it really made sure the movie was its own thing, and not just some redux of the astronaut-in-peril trope that we've seen fairly often over the last decade or so (e.g. Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, to name a few). The movie's strongest selling point, for me at least, is its humanity, which is embodied in the bond between Grace and Rocky. Kudos therefore go out not just to Gosling but to the team of puppeteers, effects artists and the voice actor who gave him something palpable to play off, even when he was probably just talking to a tennis ball.
It's not often I say this about a science fiction movie, but it's something that the whole family can enjoy. There's no swearing, sex or extreme violence, and thematically, it's actually got the kind of values that parents would want their young children to imbibe like selflessness. So in short, to the Gen-Xers and millennials worried about where to leave their kids, rest assured, you can take them to see this with you.
When I rewatched The Martian on DVD years after I had enjoyed it in theaters, I was pleased to see how well it had aged. I am pretty sure I'll be able to say the same thing about this movie.
10/10
