Ryan Gosling Returns to Space in Andy Weir’s Science Fiction Adventure
DIRECTORS: PHIL LORD & CHRISTOPHER MILLER/2026
An opening that always grabs its audience’s attention: Someone waking up with no memory of how they got there.
Dr. Ryland Grace’s (Ryan Gosling) amnesia is just the start of his problems. He’s the only surviving astronaut on a voyage to an unknown destination for an unknown length of time. Bits and pieces flash back to him: a dying sun, his worried students, experiments in a lab. He begins piecing together his mission to save Earth, but even the name of his ship, the Hail Mary, doesn’t inspire much confidence. (So yes, we are watching a “Hail Mary, full of Grace…at the hour of our death.”) When the Hail Mary slows to a halt, he’s as confused as ever—that is, until he realizes he may not have to answer all of his questions alone. (If you haven’t watched a trailer for Project Hail Mary yet, stay the course—the advertising gives away more of his journey than needed.)
If there’s anything we know about directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, it’s they love movies. Arrival, E.T., Gravity, and Interstellar are all woven into Project Hail Mary’s DNA, and the script overtly references Alien and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If you worry the guys who took a stab at a Star Wars prequel only take inspiration for their live action projects from space, you’ll be pleased to know they’ve seen Rocky and are big fans of Meryl Streep, too.
Of course, the other movie hanging over Hail Mary is the other Andy Weir adaptation, 2015’s The Martian. That 2015 hit earned 7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and finished the year in the box office top 10. Like Matt Damon’s stranded astronaut, Grace is fighting to survive alone in space, and we’re watching his process of scientific problem-solving, often through video diaries. Because this script is adapted again by Drew Goddard, these films feel simpatico though they come from different directors. A decade removed, Ridley Scott’s The Martian is still a crowd-pleasing banger, and its tighter script still gives it the edge over Hail Mary. Even with a few yada-yadas through the details of Grace’s science, a shaggy second half slows the momentum with a few oops-that’s-not-really-the-end fake outs. (To its credit, it doesn’t trick us as many times as the finale of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.) Hail Mary only runs a dozen minutes longer than The Martian, but it feels it.
Aside from inconsistent pacing, there’s only a lot to love. This is the kind of movie star part Hollywood has thrived on since the beginning, and Gosling reminds us here why the camera has loved him for the more than two decades. Like The Martian and Gravity, he carries this film alone for most of its runtime, and instead of playing this role stoic like in First Man or Blade Runner 2049, he’s continuing his funny streak from Barbie and The Fall Guy. Despite the end-of-the-world stakes, Hail Mary is a comedy as much as it’s an adventure. Grace may be carrying Earth’s future like Atlas, and Gosling finds that pathos, but Grace’s juvenile t-shirts and Gosling’s one-of-a-kind shrieks are here to release the tension.
Also keeping this anxiety-fueled voyage from getting sucked into a black hole of misery: It looks darn lovely, which isn’t a given for outer space onscreen. Lord and Miller, et al. have stressed the importance of practical filmmaking, even choosing puppets and animatronics over computer-generated creations. At one point I found myself wondering, “How did they do that?” and then realized how rarely that comes to mind at the movies anymore. With just one viewing, this already feels like a part of the 21st century sci-fi canon.