Project Hail Mary, adapted from Andy Weir’s latest novel—the sci‑fi author best known for The Martian—began with Ryan Gosling. In 2020, before the book was officially published, Weir sent Gosling a manuscript and suggested turning it into a film. Intrigued, Gosling signed on as both star and producer.
The film opens with Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) waking alone on a spaceship tens of light‑years from Earth. A former middle‑school science teacher, he must piece together how he wound up there.
He’s aboard because of a microbe called astrophage. The astrophage feeds on a star’s energy as it reproduces, gradually dimming the sun. Grace makes a crucial discovery about the organism that draws the attention of Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), who recruits him for a top‑secret global mission, dubbed “Hail Mary,” to try to save Earth.
In football, a Hail Mary is a desperate long pass with slim odds of success. Stratt assembles a one‑pilot, one‑engineer, one‑scientist crew and sends them to survey a star where astrophage reproduces less rapidly than it does around the sun. Survival odds are effectively zero. Project Hail Mary depends on that infinitesimal, desperate chance to rescue humanity.
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As he recovers his memories aboard the ship, Grace buries his fallen crewmates. Alone, he spots a strangely shaped vessel and soon encounters an alien. True to his scientific training, he rigs a system to communicate: he maps the alien’s sounds to English words and converts them into speech. He dubs the limb‑covered, rocklike creature “Rocky” and discovers Rocky was also sent from his home world, Erid, along with fellow scientists.
Their obstacle is brutal: each species’ atmosphere is essential to one and deadly to the other. Despite that, they pair up, conduct experiments together, and work to save their respective homes. The film treats Rocky’s inner life—sacrifice, friendship, even affection—through a human lens, yet the bond between Grace and Rocky feels authentic and earned. There’s a sweetness and purity to their friendship that’s hard to resist.
Visually, Rocky isn’t the familiar mollusk‑ or insectlike alien of many sci‑fi films, nor is he portrayed as unfathomable. He looks like a small pile of stones with appendages and lacks human features. Yet through the translation system, Grace and Rocky become genuine companions. They empathize, trade jokes, and become indispensable to one another. Watching a solitary man struggle to connect with an oddly endearing extraterrestrial is both touching and charming.
Grace goes into the mission without immediate family or even a pet—he’s a lonely figure, which makes him a pragmatic choice for the assignment. In space, he unexpectedly finds something like a family. The film celebrates the human capacity to love and change, whether the object of that love is human or not. Project Hail Mary packages that humane, hopeful imagination in a warm, often humorous tone that stirs the emotions.
Above all, the movie delivers as a space‑set sci‑fi picture. It gives viewers what they expect from the genre and then some. The filmmakers manage to make the isolated, cold void of space feel like a warm studio apartment once Grace has a friend at his side—an emotional shift that ties directly to the film’s central theme. Runtime: 156 minutes (2 hours 36 minutes). It opens on the 18th.
