Film Review - Project Hail Mary (2026)

Project Hail Mary is based off of the novel by Andy Weir and stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Grace a middle school science teacher who is recruited by the US Government to help them on a long form mission in space to save Earth from the slow death of the Sun due to a mysterious substance, along his journey he meets another nomad which he names Rocky due to him being an alien rock creature and the two begin working together to save their home worlds from extinction.

Project Hail Mary is a long film but it is also very good and first off credit belongs to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller the talented directorial pair who also gave us The Lego Movie and the 2 Spider-verse films and this movie is as enjoyable and as fun as those movies were, they bring a light sensibility to the film and along with Drew Goddard’s script they balance heart and humour very well.

Speaking of Goddard’s script it is very good also as like he did with the Martian in 2015 (also based off an Andy Weir novel) he seems to understand how to adapt Weir’s novels for the big screen and like the Martian there is a lot of warmth, a lot of comedy and a lot of science here and all 3 elements are blended together well.

The film also has a great central performance by Ryan Gosling as Dr Grace and he is asked to anchor this movie with a rock creature for a lot of the runtime and he steps up to the task very well handling the films comedic and sincere moments with ease while also making us believe in his friendship with Rocky who is no Payakan the Whale from James Cameron’s Avatar sequels but is still a memorable character in his own right.

Where the film does fall down a little for me is the length, the film is 156 minutes in length and I felt it a lot of the time, what also doesn’t help this feeling is the back and forth structure of the screenplay which felt like to me something that works better as a novel than it does a movie as you would get invested in Grace and Rocky saving Stars and then it would cut back to Earth before the mission began and those scenes after a while lost my interest.

And so that was Project Hail Mary a film that I enjoyed very much despite its script issues, 3 and a half out of 5.