Movie Review : Project Hail Mary (2026)
I’ve never seen The Martian. I know it’s about an astronaut who McGuyver's his way out of certain death on Mars, which sounds like the kind of premise that should be terrifying but somehow isn’t. It always struck me as science fiction that believes in human ingenuity a little too much to feel real, so I ignored both the movie and the novel it came from.
I also didn’t realize Project Hail Mary was written by Andy Weir. I went in knowing almost nothing, other than that it starred Ryan Gosling as a guy alone and lost in space, which felt like the right amount of information for a story that should, in theory, be about isolation, fear, and the slow collapse of certainty. It turns out that assumption was the most interesting thing I brought into the theatre.
Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace (Gosling), a man who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of who he is or why he’s there, aside from the two dead astronauts beside him. As he pieces things together, he realizes he’s been sent on a one-way mission to stop a microscopic organism from draining the sun and wiping out life on Earth. He’s light-years from home, with nothing to rely on but his own ability to figure things out over and over again. But he sure is the man, as he discovers.
The Cure to Male Loneliness
This movie reportedly cost 200 million dollars to make, which should tell you everything you need to know about it. It’s made to be liked by the largest amount of people possible, but not really loved by anyone. The screenplay was written by industry veteran Drew Goddard (who also wrote The Martian) and it has been commented by every boring office people in Hollywood before the movie started shooting. It has been receiving a lot of praise since its release, but everyone will have forgotten about it in six months.
Except maybe for one odd quirk that was the most interesting detail about Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling doesn't have a love interest. Don't get me wrong, there are female characters in this movie, but none who want to bone him. He is framed as this fundamentally lonely and distrustful disgraced scientist and somehow it’s not a tragedy. He’s not a man who misses people. He’s a man who understands systems. It's just how he is and this makes him perfect for a deep space suicide mission.
What Project Hail Mary really is about is a man finding unlikely friendship in a super intelligent rock, dog, alien thing where there's literally nothing else alive if you discount star-eating space dots. It's a remarkably original idea and a way too optimistic one at the same time. The power of friendship saves planets in Marvel movies, but it's a little harder to believe in a space ship where any mistake can lead you to a lonely and meaningless death. That friendship is cute and feels like it belongs to a whole other movie.
Because there are other pseudo-realistic science fiction stories about the sun becoming a problem like Danny Boyle's Sunshine or Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two that treat such an extinction-level problem with the grim seriousness that it deserves. Project Hail Mary sits uncomfortably halfway between Clarke’s scientific utopianism and freakin’ Guardians of the Galaxy space opera antics and it ends up feeling contradictory.
It wants the stakes of the former and the emotional payoff of the latter, which leaves it feeling fundamentally split. I don’t want to be worried about the survival of mankind in one scene and reassured by a cute alien in the next.
The Part That (Kind Of) Works
With that said, Project Hail Mary is almost physically impossible to hate. It’s engineered to make you feel comfortable, the way McDonald’s is engineered to taste good no matter where you are or how you got there. Every choice is calibrated to go down easy, even when the stakes suggest it shouldn’t.
A lot of that comes from Ryan Gosling, who is essentially playing an alternate reality version of himself in space. At this point in his career, that’s more than enough. He has this built-in likability that smooths out the movie’s rougher edges before they even register. Even when the character is supposed to be isolated or socially off, Gosling makes him feel approachable, almost reassuring, which discreetly undercuts the idea that this situation should be terrifying.
Gosling’s character is the engine of the movie, and the smaller details about Ryland Grace are what keep it grounded. There’s a moment where he holds a funeral for astronauts he doesn’t even remember before sending their bodies into space, and it lands because it captures something specific about him: he’s both deeply compassionate and relentlessly practical. That tension makes him feel like a real person instead of a stock genius hero. For all his genius IQ, he's relatable.
And that’s what makes this frustrating. I didn’t hate Project Hail Mary. I probably should have, based on everything it’s doing that doesn’t work for me. But it keeps pulling you back with just enough humanity to make you go along with it, right up until it asks you to believe in something I never fully bought.
*
I knew nothing about Project Hail Mary going in and I'm probably going to remember nothing about it in six months outside the fact that it was 200 million dollars romantic slop designed to make me want to like Amazon, but I would like if I said that I felt bored or frustrated at any moment in the theatre. For all the posturing, maybe we secretly like Amazon. That the convenience of having 24h hours delivery and the accessibility of blockbuster cinema supercedes our ethical concerns.
We get the movies we deserve.
6.8/10
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