Hard Sci-Fi With a Soft Heart

A blockbuster about optimism, empathy, teamwork, and scientific principles sounds like the longest of long shot in 2026. I can’t imagine a sci-fi movie less in touch with the collective mood as Project Hail Mary, in which a humble math teacher attempts to save the world with math equations, microscopes, and ingenuity. But maybe that’s why the film packs a punch despite its sometimes sedentary pacing. It not only takes the viewer away from our planet for two and a half hours, it actually gives them hope that maybe there are still things worth saving here, along with a few smart people who might actually rise to the occasion if given the opportunity.

One of the interesting elements of Project Hail Mary, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Andy Weir, is that the smart person at its center is not a cold, aloof egghead. He’s Ryan Gosling, an actual living Ken doll with an aw-shucks affect and gloriously tousled hair that seems to defy gravity even when he’s not floating in outer space. When the film begins, Gosling’s Dr. Ryland Grace awakens on a ship in deep space with no memory of how he got there, or what he’s supposed to do.

He finds the rest of the crew dead in their cryogenic pods or whatever it is you use to sleep away the years on a trip to a distant star. Without them, Grace doesn’t know how to pilot his rocket or use its equipment. He wanders the ship, drinking bagged vodka and bumbling around. He may be smart, but especially in the early scenes, he’s also kind of a doofus — a structural choice that really helps bring this genius scientist down to Earth, at least metaphorically speaking.

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Flashbacks help piece together how this unqualified astronaut wound up in his unique predicament. In the past, Grace was an overqualified middle school science teacher who got drummed out of academia for his confrontational and provocative theories. That’s why he’s approached by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), the head of a multinational effort to figure out how to reverse a strange phenomenon called the “Petrova line” that is gradually dimming the Sun. If the Petrova line continues its work for a few more decades, massive global cooling will result in the extinction of half of all life on Earth.

On Earth, Grace joins the team that discovers the alien microorganism, dubbed “Astrophage,” that causes the Petrova line. Back in space, Grace must recover his memory, identify the source of Astrophage, and engineer a way to reverse the Petrova line. It is truly a Hail Mary effort, but Grace’s odds improve slightly after he arrives at his interstellar destination and encounters an alien refugee from another planet with the same Petrova line problem. If Grace and “Rocky” — named for his stony, spider-like body — can figure out how to communicate with one another, they might be able to work together to save both their worlds.

The scenes between Grace and Rocky form the soft heart of this hard sci-fi film, which, like the earlier movie based on Weir’s The Martian, is filled with scientists who must problem solve their way out of one can’t-win scenario after another. To leaven all the talk about Periodic tables and relativity, Project Hail Mary’s script (by The Martian screenwriter Drew Goddard) turns the film’s middle-section into The Odd Couple in Space, with Gosling as the fussy Felix and a craggy space crab playing the role of Walter Matthau.

Figuring out how to talk to one another turns out to be relatively easy — the film mostly glosses over what had to be a months-long process of deciphering and translating each other’s languages. Learning how to share sleeping and lab spaces on Grace’s cramped ship prompts a whole series of brief comedy sketches about their incompatible lifestyles. (And I mean literally incompatible; if Rocky is exposed to Earth’s atmosphere, it could kill him.)

It’s a lovely sentiment that these two disparate beings might find common ground in the vastness of space, and it’s an essential part of Project Hail Mary’s overall message about how cooperation and fellowship are the most powerful forces in the universe. But at times, the non-stop gags distract from the overall story, and the frequent flashbacks to Grace’s past slow down the story even further. For long stretches, Project Hail Mary seems, like its namesake spacecraft, to be adrift in space, going nowhere, waiting for the end to arrive. When it finally does, it comes, like, four different times; this movie might have more conclusions than The Return of the King.

The fate of the world, and Project Mary as a whole, ultimately rests on Ryan Gosling’s hunky shoulders. The movie might eventually evolve into a two-hander about a pair of mismatched scientists, but one of the buddies here doesn’t even have hands, and Gosling is the only human face on screen for half the runtime. That he manages to hold the audience’s attention, and occasionally makes them laugh and even cry when he has nothing and no one to play off of is a testament to his enormous star power and charisma.

He’s guided through his journey by directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, utilizing a similar tone from their Spider-Verse movies, one that frequently undercuts moments of sincere emotion with jolts of winking humor. That balance is sharper in something like Into the Spider-Verse, though. Here, both the sweet and the sarcastic moments feel a little more forced, with Gosling rushing to fill almost any onscreen silence with some kind of quip.

He’s trying really hard. But I guess a guy 11 lightyears from Earth with no one to help him but a sentient pile of boulders would be trying pretty hard. And maybe caring about something — anything! — these days is such a bold and desperate act in and of itself that you have to admire the effort, even if you don’t completely love the outcome.

Additional Thoughts:

-I’ve already seen several people compare this film to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar filtered through the more sentimental lens of someone like Steven Spielberg. Project Hail Mary openly references Close Encounters of the Third Kind, so the comparisons are certainly valid. But let’s not forget that Spielberg has his own alien encounter coming to theaters this year, and based on the trailers, it seems to be a lot less optimistic about global cooperation and alien encounters. This and Disclosure Day should make an interesting double feature when all is said and done.

-It occurs to me that seven years after they walked away from their big Lucasfilm project, Lord and Miller finally got to make their solo star war story.

RATING: 7/10