Film Review: Project Hail Mary

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | April 18, 2026

For those of us who missed the existential human reverberations of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, the recent successful Artemis II mission has brought us a glimmer of that awe to whole new generations. 

At the time of Apollo 11, the cinema had just been blown away by the mysterious futuristic depictions of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps there’s no coincidence that at the time of Artemis II, the cinema has just been reinvigorated in similar fashion by a very different kind of sci-fi in Project Hail Mary, a fully satisfying ride still playing to solid audiences in theaters and expected to stream exclusively on Amazon Prime Video (Amazon Studios produced the film, their most successful opening ever).

Based on Andy Weir's 2021 novel, the film follows Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up on an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of who he is or how he got there (but who managed to pack a dazzling array of Big Lebowski style sweaters on his space journey). As his memory returns in bits and pieces, Grace begins to realize he’s the sole surviving crew member of a one-way suicide mission, hurtling toward a distant star as Earth’s last hope against an extinction-level solar crisis.

It’s a film about the isolation of space, the ingenuity it requires (the title says it all), and—in one of the more genuinely surprising cinematic turns in recent memory—the potential friendship that might await us in that vast universe we still know so little about.

It’s also a delightfully tender comedy, made realistic (if one can call sci-fi that) by the central performances of megastar Ryan Gosling playing the embattled Grace, the genuinely remarkable portrayal of an alien named Rocky, and a supporting ensemble of restrained and nuanced performances.

Always surprising, actor Gosling here is nerdy, rumpled, and emotionally unguarded. He carries long stretches of screen time alone and pulls you in with a warmth and goofy, self-deprecating charm. Grace’s rapport with his non-human counterpart, Rocky, performed mostly in real-life by famed puppeteer James Ortiz, has such genuine feeling that you’ll almost forget it’s not real. Ortiz’ portrayal was so animated, the filmmakers recruited him to also do the character’s voicework as well.

Sandra Hüller—the German actress who rocketed onto the international scene in 2023 with back-to-back performances in Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest—here plays Eva Stratt, the no-nonsense project director who recruits Grace for the mission with a quiet, compelling practicality that displays again why she’s one of the most interesting actors of our time.

In the talented hands of directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the inventive minds behind The LEGO Movie and Spider-Verse among others), Project Hail Mary shows beautiful timing and rhythm, a love for the characters and premise, and an incredible visual landscape against which anything can, and does, happen in the course of a 2 hour 37 minute epic.

The script comes from screenwriter Drew Goddard, who already proved with The Martian that he knows how to make one scientist’s desperate MacGyver-ing feel thrilling rather than ridiculous (and does it again here). It’s a story of collaboration, curiosity, and the radical idea that two very different creatures can find common ground if they can trust each other. And in multiplexes full of franchise noise and repeats, that’s not just refreshing—it feels almost transformative.