Project Hail Mary Review: Hope Burns Bright

It’s hard to remember sometimes, but humans are an inherently hopeful species. Acts of bravery, those are fleeting, but the determination to work toward a better tomorrow – or even the very existence of a future – well, that speaks to something deep within us. It’s the fuel that powers sci-fi drama Project Hail Mary and takes it to places of true wonder.

In Drew Goddard’s script, as adapted from Andy Weir’s Hugo Award-nominated sci-fi novel, the sky is dying. This isn’t the standard ecological catastrophe: An interstellar virus called the astrophage is quite literally eating the stars across the cosmos. That’s why discredited researcher-turned-middle school science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is orbiting the distant star of Tau Ceti, 12 light years from Earth, trying to find out why this one ball of burning gas seems to be the only one immune to this cosmic plague.

The idea of stars getting infected might seem ludicrous, but in the hands of Weir the mechanism for transmission makes sense. There are quite literally more things in these heavens than are dreamt of in our modern science, and here’s Grace, taking in sights that no human has ever seen before. That includes another survivor of another expedition from another seemingly doomed star. That’s how Grace and a five-legged intelligent rock creature from the planet Erid that he dubs Rocky become the unlikely last hopes for intelligent life in the universe.

Goddard’s story is an heir to arguably the best original series Star Trek episode, “The Devil in the Dark,” in which miners live in fear of a creature that they cannot recognize as sentient because it is so alien to them. Rocky (voiced and puppeteered on set by James Ortiz) is a faceless pile of rubble, and yet we have no less sympathy for him than we do for the more familiarly pink and squishy Grace.

In their first movie directing together since being gracelessly ejected from Solo: A Star Wars Story, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller don’t indulge in space opera. Instead, this is a classic hard SF story about science and engineering saving the day, not unlike previous Weir adaptation The Martian. Exactly how this task fell to Grace is told through flashbacks as he reconstructs his memory after the mindblasting effects of a medically induced coma for the near-light speed trip. Most of these memories revolve around Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall), the head of the global scientific movement trying to cure the astrophage while also talking Grace into a one-way trip to the stars.

But just because this is character-driven hard SF, that doesn’t mean there’s no sense of wonder. For two filmmakers best known for their comedic scripts like the Jump Street films and The Lego Movie, they know when to pull back on the humor and instead embrace the spectacle, and find their perfect proxy in Gosling. Grace is galaxies away from the last time he played an astronaut, in space race biopic First Man. His version of Neil Armstrong was taciturn and grounded, while Grace is terrified, awestruck, and giddy. When Rocky’s crystalline ship first appears beside his mechanical vessel, your jaw will drop right along his.

But it’s never just about close encounters. Rocky is never not alien, but at the same time there are constant connections between him and Grace. When they first meet, their mutual fear is not from real terror but confusion and misplaced amazement at meeting something so different but familiar. Weir’s story is about recognition of ourselves in others, and others in ourselves. That Gosling and an animated rock can have one of the most moving friendships in recent cinema may restore a little bit of that rarest of resources: hope.

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This article appears in March 20 • 2026.