Project Hail Mary Review: Ryan Gosling Just Saved Science Fiction

There is a moment about forty minutes into Project Hail Mary where the film reveals the identity of Ryland Grace’s companion aboard the spaceship Hail Mary, and the audience I watched it with — a regular Thursday evening screening, not a premiere or opening night — collectively gasped and then immediately started laughing with delight. That reaction tells you almost everything you need to know about this film. It is a movie that earns genuine wonder. In 2026, that is rarer and more valuable than almost anything else a blockbuster can offer.

Project Hail Mary — directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) and based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel — opened in theaters on March 20, 2026. It has since earned $511 million worldwide, a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and what may be the most enthusiastic word-of-mouth of any film released this year. Having seen it twice, I can report that the hype is entirely justified.

The Story

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is or how he got there. Two of his crewmates are dead. The ship’s AI is keeping him alive and slowly drip-feeding him information, but Grace has to piece together his situation from the ground up — including a mission so critical that humanity sent a single man across light-years to attempt it alone.

The mission: investigate Astrophage, a microorganism that is slowly consuming the Sun’s energy output, threatening to plunge Earth into a global ice age within decades. Grace is a middle-school science teacher who, through a chain of events he only recovers in fragments, ended up being humanity’s best and last hope. The film unfolds across two timelines — Grace’s growing memory of how he got to the ship, and his present-day attempts to survive and solve the problem — and the interweaving of both is handled with extraordinary skill.

Ryan Gosling Is Extraordinary

This is not Gosling’s quiet, stoic performance mode. This is charming, funny, emotionally open Gosling — the version of him that made Barbie so unexpectedly joyful — channeled into a role that asks him to carry nearly every scene of a 156-minute film largely solo, and then asks him to do something even more demanding when he is no longer alone.

Gosling plays Grace as a genuinely curious, delighted scientist who finds wonder in everything — even in circumstances that would break a less resilient person. His physical comedy is exceptional. His ability to communicate complex scientific concepts to an audience while making them feel exciting rather than didactic is a genuine achievement. The performance is one of the best of his career, and that is not a claim made lightly given his track record.

The Friendship at the Heart of the Film

To say more than this would spoil one of the film’s great joys, but the relationship that develops between Grace and another character he encounters in deep space is the emotional engine of Project Hail Mary. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — who built their careers on finding the humanity inside absurd premises — do the best work of their careers establishing this bond. By the final act, the film has made you care so deeply about this relationship that the ending lands with the kind of emotional weight that makes people sit in the theater through the credits unable to move.

Sandra Hüller (Anatomy of a Fall) appears in the Earth-based timeline as Eva Stratt, the ruthless mission coordinator who made the choices that put Grace on the ship. She is excellent in a role that could easily have become a villain but instead becomes one of the film’s moral anchors. James Ortiz provides the voice and motion capture performance for Rocky, Grace’s companion — a performance that is unlike anything else in recent cinema.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller Are At Their Peak

Lord and Miller have always been directors who smuggle genuine emotional depth into seemingly commercial premises — animated toy movies, LEGO films, animated Spider-Man origin stories. Project Hail Mary gives them the biggest canvas of their careers and they fill it with exactly the qualities that have made their best work endure: warmth, wit, visual inventiveness, and an absolute refusal to be cynical about the capacity of human beings (and others) to connect across any distance.

The science in the film is handled with real care. Andy Weir’s novel — like The Martian before it — roots its drama in actual physics, biology, and chemistry, and the film does not shy away from letting Grace do real science on screen. The sequence in which he first figures out what Astrophage actually is, using tools available on the ship, is the most exciting science has looked on film since The Martian.

The Verdict

Rating: 9.5 / 10. Project Hail Mary is the best science fiction film in years and one of the finest films of 2026. It is optimistic, thrilling, genuinely funny, and more emotionally devastating than any space adventure has a right to be. Ryan Gosling gives the performance of his career. The friendship at the center of the story is one of the most affecting in recent cinema. And the ending — which stays closer to Weir’s novel than most adaptations dare — is exactly right.

See it in the largest format available. Bring someone you care about. Project Hail Mary is in theaters now and will be streaming on Prime Video later this year. The novel by Andy Weir is available wherever books are sold — and if the film moves you, the book will too.