Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary comes to the screen, courtesy of Lord & Miller, with Ryan Gosling in the lead role. Here’s our review. You’re in safe hands when you’ve got a Hollywood leading star, and the first time you see them they’re sporting an abundance of facial hair, that you know won’t made if ... Project Hail Mary review | Ryan, we have a problem
Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary comes to the screen, courtesy of Lord & Miller, with Ryan Gosling in the lead role. Here’s our review.
You’re in safe hands when you’ve got a Hollywood leading star, and the first time you see them they’re sporting an abundance of facial hair, that you know won’t made if to the end credits. Think Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, or Denzel Washington getting rid of his goatee in Safe House. Maybe when Christian Bale rids his face of fur in The Dark Knight Rises, too.
Bottom line: when Ryan Gosling stumbles onto the screen, vomiting, in Project Hail Mary, you’re in safe hands. He’s furry, alone, confused and stuck a long, long way from Earth. And! He uses a trackball mouse on his computer. Gawd love the man for that.
The latter point is important. Good science fiction uses the past as much as it does the future (the architecture of, say, Minority Report is a good example of that). And Project Hail Mary is excellent science fiction.
Taking a dose of Silent Running and perhaps unsurprisingly The Martian – at one stage I wrote down the words ’2001, with karaoke’, even – you get two doses of setup for your money.
The current day situation sees Gosling’s Dr Grace – hairy Gosling – alone in a space craft, with unexplained things going wrong, a la an Alien follow-up. Grace does not have a single clue what is going on. Nor do we. And then we see him in a different time, in a classroom, an inspirational teacher, apparently overqualified and typically having written something in his past that alerts stern-looking people.
I’m very conscious that Andy Weir’s source novel has been out there a while, and also that the marketing campaign is being fairly liberal with some of the story’s ‘moments’, but I’m erring on the side of caution in how much plot I talk about here.
What’s safe to talk about is that the Earth is in a bit of trouble. There’s a mystery surrounding why it’s slowly starting to dim, and a mission to be scrambled to try and, well, un-dim it. With the threat in the background that if the sun becomes even mildly less effective, the impact on the Earth might be enough to get Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis training to be astronauts.
There’s all sorts of films that Project Hail Mary then hints at. Given that Weir previous wrote The Martian, which was also adapted – as this is – by Drew Goddard, there’s a tonal familiarity in places. You can draw lines to films such as Interstellar, Contact, Apollo 13, even Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol in moments of chilly silence. But remarkably, through the nested cables and crowded space of an interstellar craft, Project Hail Mary emerges with an identity of its own.
Behind the camera here are Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the duo behind offbeat successes such as 21 Jump Street, The LEGO Movie and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. The pair also have Oscars on their shelves following Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse, but I’d argue that this is as massive a canvas as they’ve attempted on screen. And yet, conversely, it’s also in places, their smallest film. In much the same way that Tom Hanks in Cast Away and Sandra Bullock in Gravity were without human contact for large parts of those respective movies, here, Gosling’s Captain Grace is an intelligent central character wrestling an impossible problem.
Goddard’s script, and Lord and Miller’s direction, refuse to blink at the complexity of this, assuming a base level of interest and intelligence from its audience, in a way that studio executives usually run from. In each of these cases, it feels like the kind of film they wouldn’t have had the tools and steel to make earlier in their career, but they damn well do now.
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It’s fascinating watching it unfold, the story jumping between events years earlier as Gosling’s Grace is recruited for the mission, and the hard and fast reality of trying to complete it. It’s in the former section that arguably the film’s MVP emerges too: a steely, human Sandra Huller as Eva Stratt. Huller is brilliant, as she regularly is, and in many ways she’s the lynchpin of the film. Gosling is the star, and a very good one. Huller is electric.
What’s interesting too here is the inherent positivity that crackles underneath. My colleague, Ryan Lambie, was always taken with Gareth Edward’s 2014 Godzilla movie, and how the military in that film were keen to help, and not presented as the usual, cliched antagonist. Just as in The Martian too, there’s no villain here: there’s a difficult situation, attacked by a character who isn’t always putting across that they’re one button press away from death, even if they are.
Going into Project Hail Mary completely cold, I confess the film wrongfooted me. As much as it’s being pushed as such, I wasn’t expecting The Martian 2, and seeing the names Lord and Miller attached guaranteed it wouldn’t be. What I got was not just narratively surprising, but a really well-chosen film. Needle drops where you might expect score. Deafening silence where you might expect noise. A fisting joke where you might expect solemnity. And an underlying love of the Rocky franchise too.
What a treat. Not short-changing at all the sheer cinematic spectacle of it all – this is exhilarating big screen stuff – it ends up charting what looks like a familiar starfield, but finding something smaller and more impactful in the midst of it.
Perhaps a teeny bit less accessible and crowd-pleasing than The Martian – a good or bad thing, I couldn’t tell you – it’s the first must-see blockbuster of 2026. And it sets a very high bar for others to follow. More like this, please. And more facial hair at the start of movies too…
