Project Hail Mary ★★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- 4 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Availability: Showing in theaters worldwide. From Amazon MGM studios, it’s expected on Amazon Prime late this summer. The studio’s productions usually go to streaming 40 to 90 days after theatrical release (March 20), but given the film broke the studio’s record for biggest opening, it likely will stay longer exclusively in theaters. See JustWatch here for future purchase and rental availability.
Romancing the Stone
The most common label for “Project Hail Mary” is sci-fi adventure. To be sure, there’s plenty of both in this tall tale, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, collaborators on “Clone High” (TV, 2023-24), “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” (2009), and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse” (2018). It is also, and perhaps essentially, a rom-com. Ryan Gosling is in top form as the engaging, funny, clever, slightly crazed, and sentimental Ryland Grace, the middle-school science teacher, molecular biologist, and amateur astronaut at the center of the story.
Ryan Gosling is in top form as the engaging, funny, clever, slightly crazed, and sentimental Ryland Grace,
There’s only one woman in the film with whom Grace (as he’s referred to throughout) could couple: Eva Stratt, the low-affect, no-nonsense ball-buster in charge of a worldwide effort to prevent Earth’s population from extinction (Sandra Hüller, at 47 two years older than Gosling, fresh off star-turns in the deeply serious 2023 “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest”). They’re an unlikely match. The narrative toys with a relationship in a boat-deck conversation that concludes with Grace retreating with a literal salute, a gesture that acknowledges Eva as an authority figure rather than a friend or potential mate. The couple will be made, but it won’t be this one.
Grace is, for a time, a radically isolated protagonist. As Eva says to him, “you don’t even have a dog.”
The film opens with Grace waking up aboard a spacecraft after 11+ years in an induced coma, lurching around like a college freshman after that first binge, discovering he is the sole survivor of the 3-person expedition to a distant star. Grace has amnesia, from which he’ll slowly recover so we can learn, through flashbacks, how he got there and what kind of a guy he is. The amnesia serves another purpose, reducing Grace to a tabula rasa, separated from his recent past (and troubling ethical questions), focused on the present (and its practical requirements). In this and other ways, Grace is, for a time, a radically isolated protagonist. No wife, no kids, no girlfriend, no father or mother, no one to go home to. As Eva says to him, “you don’t even have a dog.”
Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) entertains his middle-school students as much as
he teaches them science.
Most adventure films match their protagonist with an antagonist—a nasty, deranged, or brilliant person committed to doing evil. In this work of “hard” science fiction, the adversary is a purely scientific phenomenon: a microorganism known as Astrophage that has formed a belt—the Petrova chain—from the Sun to Venus, sucking energy from the Sun and putting Earth’s population into a 30-year death spiral. Grace is among the scientists recruited by Stratt to study Astrophage and come up with a solution. He has a reputation as an outside-the-box thinker (he’s been booted out of the academic scientific community for that, and for thumbing his nose at authority—teen behavior again), and he proves an adept chemist, a practical, hands-on scientist in the tradition of American tinkerers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, right) enlists teacher/scientist Grace (Gosling in hazmat suit, left) to experiment on unknown substances from outer space. He asks if they care if he dies.
"The consensus is we prefer you not die," she responds from a place of safety outside the lab.
Although the film flirts with religion (the name of the Project, and of Grace and Eva), its “religion,” if you will, is a secular one: science. Grace is a non-believer. As we suffer a president whose ignorance culminates in a distrust of vaccines and denial of global warming, and whose insecurities prevent him from valuing knowledge and expertise, the film’s reverence for science is more than welcome.
Back to the spaceship, which for some reason has multiple spaces and rooms—more like a space station. A control room houses dozens of screens and dials and switches that Grace will have to figure out (he’s now the pilot as well as the chief scientist), which of course he does, or seems to. His poor driving and messy housekeeping are additional markers of the teen side of his character.
The lone astronaut aboard the spaceship, Grace (Gosling) is forced to be
not only the scientist but the pilot, surrounded by
hundreds of instruments he improbably learns to manipulate.
And then, the rom-com. As the craft approaches Tau Ceti—the only star in the Petrova chain that remains undimmed by Astrophage—an alien ship appears and docks with the Hail Mary. Its pilot resembles a combination of a rock (or a collection of metal blocks, or something out of a Jenga game) and Mr. Potato Head, has 5 appendages, and moves like a spider. Not E.T. cute, and not the big-head repulsive Xenomorph of the “Alien” franchise. Like Grace, he’s alone (22 companions having died during the journey).
Gosling was born for this role.
We’re eager for Grace and Rocky (as Grace will call him) to establish a relationship, even if Rocky (voiced and manipulated by puppeteer James Ortiz) has no discernable language, not even a mouth. An overly-accommodating script achieves sophisticated communication in short order, beginning with Grace introducing Rocky to (Earth) time by way of an analog wall clock (there’s one on every space ship), then having Grace’s laptop (which sits next to a retro whiteboard Grace furiously writes on) miraculously translate Rocky’s incoherent quasi-musical sounds into legible English. In a minute or 2 they’re like buddies in a foxhole, sharing humor (“fist a bump”) and, soon, ideas about what has become a shared mission. Forged in isolation and around the critical task at hand, their relationship is the core of the film: funny, intense, equal, caring, trusting, creative, self-sacrificial, schmaltzy, even loving. It’s mostly Gosling, of course, working with a Drew Goddard script based on sci-fi wiz Andy Weir’s best-selling book. (Goddard proved his writing mettle with the script for “The Martian” [2015] and the very different “Bad Times at The El Royale” [2018].) Gosling was born for this role. And the inert Rocky is an ideal straight man in dialogue reliant on the “com” in rom-com and adept at puncturing the schmaltz with irony.
The alien from the other spaceship, dubbed "Rocky" by Grace, manages to be a worthy, funny companion even though he has no mouth.
A combination of rock and Mr. Potato Head, Rocky comes partly from CG
and partly from puppeteer James Ortiz.
Not all of this works. Rocky’s suggestion that they lower a ball-like collector on a 5-kilometer chain into the atmosphere of Tau Ceti is a fantasy too far. Grace’s ship wouldn’t carry the old-school drum used in the endeavor and shown in the film, and it’s difficult to imagine how large the drum would have to be to carry and retract that much cable. Grace also too easily accepts Rocky’s word that the glowing beads he has given Grace—in the shape of 2 Os—will supply all the O2 (clever!) the Earth-bred astronaut needs, and allow him to safely take off his helmet.
One of the few humans with more than a handful of lines—Carl (Lionel Boyce of TV’s “The Bear”)—seems as out of place as that analog clock. His function in the plot is to serve as a sounding board for Grace’s Astrophage experiments. The character doesn’t exist in Weir’s book; instead, the nature of the novel allows Grace to articulate his thoughts about the experiments. Because film doesn’t do “thoughts” well, Carl is there to externalize what’s in Grace head. Carl the character seems artificial in part because his function in the production is so obviously a technical one. The original design called for Carl’s role to be filmed in one day; instead, the writers kept writing, the role kept expanding, and a month of lights/camera/action days later, the result is a mishmash.
If there’s no one to fight—no fistfights, no laser battles, no alien invasion, no quest with its challenges for the hero, no Darth Vader—where is the excitement to come from?
The film’s lack of a physical enemy is at once refreshing and problematic. If there’s no one to fight—no fistfights, no laser battles, no alien invasion, no quest with its challenges for the hero, no Darth Vader—where is the excitement to come from? There are a few moments of danger for Grace, but they don’t amount to much: removing his helmet; a fuel tank rupture caused by Taumoeba (an Astrophage-consuming organism) eating through xenonite containers (don’t ask); wrestling with the bucket on the chain; Tau Ceti’s field of gravity, which momentarily threatens to contain the Hail Mary and end the mission. The science is so confusing, and any action scenes so incomprehensible that the “real life” flashbacks come as a relief.
In place of the usual high-octane scenes, the screenplay resorts to a series of twists and endings—not one too many, but several: Grace may be left in space, he’s saved, he’s headed home, he goes to save Rocky, he’s…well, you get the point.
At 156 minutes the movie is too long, especially when there’s no combat to be had, no villain to be dispatched. As you wait for the credits to roll, keep in mind that there’s a “fi” in sci-fi; that nobody plays the ordinary hero better than Ryan Gosling, the smart but humble, reluctant but willing, earnest but ironic, handsome but not too handsome everyman of American cinema. And that what you’ve been watching is a rom-com.
He says: You would think the film would depend on special effects. Instead, it’s the script that matters most.
She says: I had to be dragged to this, and walked out loving it, flaws and all. Maybe like the rest of the US, I was longing for some fun in the theater.
Date: 2026
Directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, voice of James Ortiz
Country: United States
Language: English
Runtime: 156 minutes
Other Awards: 1 win and 1 other nomination to date