In Project Hail Mary (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), the sun is being eaten by living space microbes and the only person who can save the world is Baby Goose – and his alien pal. Frankly, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Such is the formula for a massive hit, a $650 million-grossing box office juggernaut with names names NAMES behind it: It began with author Andy Weir, whose 2021 bestselling heavy-on-the-science sci-fi novel of the same name followed precedent with The Martian in being a beloved and successful film. Having co-produced a pair of wildly creative Spider-Verse animated films, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed their first effort since 2014’s 22 Jump Street from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian. Ryan Gosling jumped on to star, with support from fellow Oscar nominee Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) and famed puppeteer James Ortiz, who operated and voiced the alien Rocky, created by FX artist Neal Scanlan (Oscar winner for 1996’s Babe). So it makes total sense that Project Hail Mary is the year’s funniest, most engaging and wholly moving – read: best – film of 2026 so far.
The Gist: Ryland Grace awakens in a plastic bag, intubated, a robot hovering over him with clippers to trim his hobo beard. He’s disoriented and groggy and doesn’t want a robot shearing him like a lamb and the movie’s ALREADY funny because he’s played by Ryan Gosling. Grace was in an induced space-travel coma, and soon realizes he’s about a dozen years’ travel from Earth. The other two astronauts on board the Project Hail Mary craft weren’t so lucky. They get a sweet, heartfelt eulogy from Grace before he flushes their bodies into space and the movie’s ALREADY sad because this is The Gos at work and it’s what he does so well. Grace can’t remember much of anything due to the long sleep. “Am I smart?” he wonders aloud to himself, but if he’s an astronaut, he has to be. He stands at a whiteboard and starts mathing the living crap out of crap so he can figure out where he is in the universe, and he figures it out. So yes. He’s smart.
Recurring flashbacks reveal how Grace got here and why, his memories slowly returning. Grace was minding his own beeswax teaching science to middle-schoolers and very carefully answering his students’ questions about the organisms, dubbed astrophages, that are doing what their name means: feasting on the sun at a rate that means catastrophe for Earth in 30 years. After a day of trying to downplay the potential apocalypse to 12-year-olds, Eva Stratt (Huller) strolls into his classroom. She knows he’s a brilliant mind whose out-of-the-box thinking was far enough out of the box that the scientific community shunned him right into the public school system. Irony: That thinking makes him uniquely qualified to study the astrophages, a skill Stratt needs to, you know, no big deal, save the planet and all its inhabitants. She leads an international conglomerate of big brains that quickly warms to Grace and his goofy eccentricities, especially once his crafty experimentation begins to reveal the nature of the tiny little existential threats.
Back on the Mary, Grace is doing his damnedest not to pilot the ship despite the computer’s insistence (the real pilot died) and bonking around in zero-gravity. He figures out that he’s in the Tau Ceti system and remembers he not only has to save the world by figuring out What’s Up With The Astrophages, but also that – this is a tough one, real tough – he’s on a one-way suicide mission. He’ll run out of fuel eventually, but hopefully will send successful data and samples back to Earth via little autopilot pods.
We jump back and forth between Grace on the Mary and Grace at home, and quickly put together that he’s more brilliant than most brilliant people, that his mind works so fast he often says things before he thinks about what he says, that he’s a freakin’ wizard with cardboard and duct tape. He’s way out in the middle of whereverthehell minding his own business when a big gold ship blips on the radar. It appears to be piloted by an intelligence of some kind. And soon enough, he’s looking through a prismlike construction at something not human, and tapping on the glass: Bonk-bonnk-bonk-bonk-bonnnnnnnnk. Go ahead, hum it. You know how it goes. Trust me.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Yes: Close Encounters of the Third Kind meets The Martian meets some of the great space films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity and WALL-E. And I’m going to go pretty far out on a limb here and say Project Hail Mary just might be the best first-contact film not just since Arrival, but E.T.
Performance Worth Watching: Gosling’s best performance next to a non-human since Lars and the Real Girl reaffirms what we already know: When Baby Goose cries, we cry with him. No choice. Gonna happen. In the Gosling Pantheon of Thespian Greatness, think Barbie and The Nice Guys.
Sex And Skin: None.
Our Take: Project Hail Mary is strange without being off-putting, crafty without being indulgent, goofy without being dopey, smart without being condescending, detailed without being overwhelming, irreverent without being flippant and loaded with the wishful notion that the universe is driven more by benevolence than cold, cruel indifference. Lord and Miller establish a gently insistent pace and massage a distinctly light-but-heavy comedio-dramatic tone in a brilliant and rangy first act, and maintain that M.O. for more than 150 minutes while telling a thematically rich and optimistic story about hope and love, risk and sacrifice, collaboration and communication,the potential for achievement within both the individual and the collective, and faith in not just the human mind but intelligence itself. It’s funny and full of heart, and hits the proverbial spot. Donnie Downers and Negative Nancies and other black-cloud glass-half-full cynics poised to condemn the film for being “too sweet” or pollyanna-ish (note: it’s neither of these things) can take a long walk on a short pier and realize in their sudden dampness that we’ll throw them a life preserver in spite of their nonsense. This is a delightful, wildly entertaining film.
The directors spent a quarter of a billion dollars in order to achieve this extraordinary blend of psychedelic Kubrick and whimsical Spielberg. It’s exemplary visual storytelling, with crisp and efficient editing enabling the narrative to segue smoothly back and forth between two timelines. Their use of montage and music – whether it’s pop songs, Daniel Pemberton’s bubbly score (reminiscent of Thomas Newman’s brilliant work on WALL-E) or Huller bringing down the house during a lovely, melancholy karaoke sequence – is ebullient without being corny. The visual effects, mostly practical, give the film a sense of space out there in space, whether Gosling navigates the exquisite design of the ship’s interior or spacewalks his way into peril.
Of course, I’m glancing off the core dramatic development of Project Hail Mary, where Gosling interacts with a delightful melange of puppetry and CGI that is the alien, dubbed Rocky; the film’s success hinges on maintaining our discovery of and curiosity for this beautifully bizarre character. And it’d all be for naught without a star who’s capable of bullseyeing the sweet spot between pathos and comedy. Gosling bounces off the walls, off the puppet, off a stoic, but never chilly Huller, as the oddball genius Grace finds his purpose.
Don’t underestimate the third-act complication that changes the tenor of Grace as a character, leaving us a little uncomfortable but ultimately open to the idea that imperfections in one’s personality, even glaring ones, can lead to positive, constructive change. Such a development elevates the film well above mere feelgood sci-fi that’s “just” a kid’s movie. Being a kid’s movie is no insult – there’s a wide-eyed purity in this great-for-the-whole-fam story that reminds one of the innocence of childhood at the same time it invokes the wonder of scientific discovery and its role in bringing people, be they human or extraterrestrial, together for the greater good. Hope – it’s an amazing thing.
Our Call: Touchdown. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
