Project Hail Mary (2026) review: “Astonishing!”

FK Score: 96% · Gary Alcock, Editor-in-Chief, Fresh Kernels · 2026-03-20

There is a moment early in “Project Hail Mary” — Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s ravishing, enormously moving adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel — when Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory, no bearings and no company save for a pair of desiccated corpses strapped in beside him. The camera lingers on Gosling’s face as confusion curdles into something closer to existential terror, and in that sustained close-up you can feel the entire film declare its ambitions: this will not be a movie content merely to hurtle through space. It intends to sit with you in the silence and make you reckon with what it means to be the last hope of a species.

Gosling has never been better. I say that as someone who has admired him across two decades of shape-shifting roles, but what he does here — toggling between slapstick resourcefulness and a grief so private it seems to leak out of him involuntarily — is the finest, most fully inhabited work of his career. He deserves an Oscar nomination, full stop, and so does Sandra Hüller, whose Commander Eva Stratt is played with the coiled authority of a woman who has calculated every human cost and decided to pay it anyway. Hüller’s Stratt is not a villain; she is what necessity looks like when it puts on a uniform, and the performance is devastating in its restraint.

But the film’s secret weapon, its beating heart, is Rocky — and I should note, for the avoidance of confusion, that this Rocky does not train in Philadelphia gyms or run up museum steps. This Rocky is an alien: a five-legged, music-speaking Eridian who communicates through chords and whose friendship with Grace becomes the emotional spine of the picture. The creature design is a marvel, but it is the writing and Gosling’s performance opposite what amounts to a very sophisticated puppet that transforms Rocky into one of the great screen companions. Their scenes together are by turns hilarious and devastating, and I defy anyone to watch them problem-solve across a language barrier — literally building a shared vocabulary note by note — without feeling something crack open in their chest.

The film is funny. Genuinely, disarmingly funny in ways that big-budget science fiction almost never permits itself to be, because Lord and Miller understand that humor is not the opposite of wonder but its nearest neighbor. Grace’s running commentary on his own dire circumstances plays like a man doing stand-up at the end of the world, and the comedy never undercuts the stakes — it makes them bearable, which is to say, human.

I saw “Project Hail Mary” with my daughters, Brooklyn (11) and Vivienne (9), and they were rapt from the first frame to the last — Brooklyn kept grabbing my arm during the Astrophage sequences, and Vivienne could not stop talking about Rocky for the entire drive home. That a film this scientifically rigorous can hold a nine-year-old spellbound is its own kind of miracle, and it speaks to something Lord and Miller have achieved here that transcends genre: they have made a movie about the beauty of the scientific method that is itself beautiful.

As a lifelong devotee of science fiction, I am perpetually braced for disappointment. The genre promises transcendence and so often delivers only spectacle. But every decade or so a film comes along that reminds you why you fell in love with these stories in the first place — why you stayed up too late reading Arthur C. Clarke by flashlight, why you forgave a hundred mediocre space operas for the sake of the one that made you feel infinite. “Project Hail Mary” is that film. It is endearing and thought-provoking and, in its final minutes, so quietly heartbreaking that I sat in the theater after the credits rolled, unwilling to leave.

A tour de force. One of the finest science fiction films ever made.

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