Synopsis: Science teacher Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship light-years from Earth. As his memory returns, he uncovers a mission to stop a mysterious substance killing the sun, and save Earth. An unexpected friendship may be the key.
Stars: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, James Boyce, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, Milana Vayntrub, Liz Kingsman, Orion Lee
Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
Rated: PG-13
Running Length: 156 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: Project Hail Mary is old-school epic filmmaking with a beating heart — Gosling is at his most charismatic, Rocky is the best non-human movie companion in years, and Lord and Miller prove once again that the impossible premise is actually their home turf. See it in IMAX.
Review:
Let’s get this out of the way first, because it matters: Project Hail Mary was engineered for Premium Large Format. IMAX. Dolby. The biggest, loudest, most immersive room you can find. Our press screening was in a standard theater — a perfectly comfortable one, beautiful picture, no complaints about the accommodations — and the film was still terrific. But you could feel the ghost of the experience it was built to be, hovering just beyond what the room could deliver.
The opening sequence alone is a full sensory detonation by design, a jet-fueled launch into disorientation that clearly wants to pin you to your seat. In a regular auditorium, it’s thrilling. In IMAX, based on everything directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have constructed here, it would be something close to overwhelming. So: find the biggest screen possible.
Andy Weir Does It Again — With Help From a Dream Team
Andy Weir’s 2011 novel The Martian proved something that Hollywood had half-forgotten: audiences will follow hard science if the person doing the science is someone worth caring about. The 2015 film adaptation — written by Drew Goddard, starring Matt Damon, directed by Ridley Scott — confirmed it at a massive scale. Weir’s 2021 follow-up, Project Hail Mary, takes that same premise and doubles the stakes. One person. Impossible odds. The fate of everything.
Weir shopped the unpublished manuscript to Ryan Gosling in early 2020, right as COVID was shutting down the world, and something about receiving a story built on hope and impossible problem-solving in that particular moment clearly landed. Gosling signed on to star and produce. Lord and Miller — the directors behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Lego Movie, who have spent their careers proving that the impossible premise is actually their specialty — came aboard to direct. Goddard returned to adapt Weir’s work for the screen. The result is one of the most purely enjoyable big-studio science fiction films in years.
The Last Man in the Galaxy Doesn't Want the Job
Ryland Grace (Gosling, Barbie) wakes up aboard a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he is, or how he got there. Two crewmates are dead. The ship’s operating system — Mary, voiced by Priya Kansara — fills in the clinical facts, but the why takes longer. As Grace’s memory returns in fragments, the picture assembles itself: Earth’s sun is dimming, a mysterious organism called Astrophage is the cause, and Grace is the only surviving member of the Hail Mary mission, launched into deep space as humanity’s last play.
Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Sleep), the formidable head of the Hail Mary project, recruited Grace from a middle school science classroom — not because he volunteered, but because his research turned out to be exactly what the crisis required. That’s important to note. Grace is not a hero by disposition or ambition. He never wanted this. He finds himself light years from home precisely because someone decided he was necessary, and he was not in a position to say no. Gosling plays this not as reluctant-hero boilerplate but as something more specific: a man who is genuinely, constitutionally not built for the weight he is carrying, and who keeps carrying it anyway because the alternative is unthinkable.
The crew that launched with him — Officer Steve Hatch (Lionel Boyce, Shell), Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung, Old), and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub, Ghostbusters) — exist primarily in the flashback architecture Goddard builds around Grace’s returning memory. They are well-drawn for the screen time they get, and the casting is sharp across the board. But this is, at its core, a two-character film. And the second character doesn’t arrive until the story is already well underway.
Wilson Has Five Arms and a Genius-Level IQ
When Grace encounters an alien spacecraft in the Tau Ceti system, what emerges is Rocky — a spider-like creature made of something resembling rock, with five limb-arms, no discernible face, and an intellect that matches Grace’s own. If you find yourself flashing to Wilson the volleyball from Cast Away, you are not wrong. The comparison is right there, and Project Hail Mary knows it. What Weir and Goddard have done is take that same dynamic — isolated human forms an improbable emotional bond with a non-human companion — and give the companion a genius-level intellect, a full personality, and an equally desperate mission of his own.
James Ortiz serves as both the lead puppeteer and voice of Rocky — a performance that is, without exaggeration, one of the most technically and emotionally remarkable things in the film. Ortiz and his team were physically present for every Rocky scene, operating a creature that Academy Award-winning effects supervisor Neal Scanlan and his shop built from the ground up, with an animatronic system that reportedly pushed past anything they had previously attempted. Rocky’s design went through hundreds of iterations — small changes in proportion, outer shell size, arm thickness producing wildly different emotional readings — before landing on a character that somehow manages to be alien, expressive, funny, and genuinely moving all at once.
The result is that Gosling was never acting opposite empty air. He had a scene partner, and it shows. The chemistry between Grace and Rocky is the engine the entire film runs on, and it absolutely holds. By the time the story reaches its most emotionally demanding stretch, you are as invested in this unlikely friendship as you have been in any human relationship the movies have offered recently.
Out of this world Craft
It is saying something that the performances still manage to be the thing you are most aware of, given how spectacular the technical work is. Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser (Dune, The Batman) shoots the film primarily handheld and single-camera — an unusual choice for a space epic, but one that keeps the intimacy intact. Fraser’s commitment to in-camera LED lighting rather than green screen means the light hitting Gosling’s face is real, the reflections are honest, and nothing feels like a simulation. The enormity of space is established through Fraser’s framing without ever letting the scale swallow the human at the center.
Editors Joel Negron cut the action sequences with precision — tense and physically disorienting without dissolving into blur. Goddard’s screenplay, his second Weir adaptation after The Martian, has the same ear for when a character would talk to themselves and when the silence is louder. He understands that the science is not an obstacle to the audience’s engagement but the source of it, and he stages problem-solving as behavior rather than exposition.
Daniel Pemberton‘s score deserves particular attention. Built from tactile, physical sounds — stomping, clapping, woodblocks, steel drums, voices pushed into unfamiliar shapes, and according to the production notes, apparently a squeaky water tap that Pemberton sampled into an entirely new instrument — it feels handmade rather than orchestral. It enters within the first few seconds of the film and grows with Grace, beginning in uncertainty and expanding outward as the story widens. It does not tell you how to feel. It travels alongside you.
Production designer Charles Wood (Avengers: Endgame) built the Hail Mary as a ship assembled by multiple nations under extreme pressure, with each module feeling like it was constructed by different hands under different conditions. No sleek minimalism, no monochromatic steel. Fabric and insulation woven into walls. Color used expressively. It feels built, not imagined. Costume designers David Crossman and Glyn Dillon, who worked together on Rogue One and Solo, make a deliberate tonal choice: the Earth-bound wardrobe is drab and unremarkable, the costumes aboard the Hail Mary are works of considered design. The clothes know where the story lives.
Old-School Filmmaking at Its Most Ambitious
What Lord and Miller have made here is something that feels increasingly rare: a massive-budget studio film with genuine warmth and a human story at its center that it refuses to abandon for spectacle. Project Hail Mary is not a superhero film, not a franchise entry, not an IP extension. It is an original science fiction adventure built around a friendship between two beings from opposite ends of the galaxy, anchored by one of the most charismatic movie stars working today.
The trailer, released in June 2025, accumulated 400 million views globally in its first week — the most viewed trailer for any non-sequel, non-remake in that period. That is not nothing. Audiences have been ready for this one, and it delivers. Lord and Miller keep the tone balanced throughout: funny when it needs to be, genuinely tense when the stakes demand it, emotionally open without ever getting maudlin.
Hüller, in her first substantial Hollywood role since becoming an awards season fixture in 2024 with Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, brings exactly the cool authority the film needs — and then lands the single most unexpected emotional gut-punch in the movie in a scene that reframes everything you know about her character up until that point.
Go see this in the biggest room you can. Bring someone who still believes that movies can do things nothing else can. Project Hail Mary is that reminder, delivered at scale, with feeling, and with a spider-alien who will absolutely make you cry. It’s one of the best times you’ll have at the movies in 2026. See it in IMAX if you possibly can, and then go see it again.
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