Project Hail Mary (2026) Review

Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, but he's so completely Ryan Gosling in this that I'm just going to call him Ryan. Ryan is a charming scientist, fired for writing a paper saying the Goldilocks zone is wrong and calling a lead scientist a waste of carbon at a conference. He now teaches kids. Charmingly.

He gets drafted when it turns out the sun is dying, and investigates for the government. Charmingly. It's a bit like Breaking Bad, but with the sun dying. The sun is cooling by 10 degrees, they think, which would basically offset global warming and then some. Turns out he's one of 300-plus scientists on the case. He's weirdly upset by this.

He does science. He charms Carl, the government guy. He plays bowling charmingly with Carl in a DIY store. They buy duct tape and foil and make a fake Venus. Carl seems smarter than Ryan. There are two faceless government drones hanging around, but they're not Carl, so they don't matter.

They send him on a fighter jet to a carrier. He presents to a big room. They are rude to him.

The problem: astrophages are infecting every star in the neighbourhood except one, Tau Ceti. So they're sending a ship, and they decide to use the evil sun-killing space spores as fuel, which is about the most human plan in all of humanity. A near-light-speed ship goes eleven-and-a-bit light years out and fires probes back with the answer. Twenty-two-plus years before Earth learns anything. It's a long-burn plan.

Cut to: everyone but Ryan has died on the ship, and he's lost his memory.

"Engine cutoff" happens and the ship just stops. That's not how physics works, but sure. This is a film with water-based space bacteria that eat sunlight; it's not aiming for realism.

Aliens.

The aliens have built something at the Petrova line. Basically just a spaceship. (And they made the astrophages pay for it! Make Tau Ceti Great Again!)

Ryan tries to flee and it mirrors his every move. It throws things at him, so he has to spacewalk out and collect them. I think we're supposed to be charmed by Ryan here, but I was only exasperated by his squirrelly incompetence. Sure, he's never done first contact before, but he must have seen at least one movie in his life?

He takes almost no precautions opening the alien device. He should probably have stayed in the EVA suit, in case it was full of poisonous gas. He tries unscrewing it in one direction, then a dozen other things, then finally the other direction. It opens, and he leans in to give it a big old sniff. This man may be charming, but he is dumb as a bag of hammers. Dumber than the Prometheus scientists. Which is saying a lot.

After a bunch of back and forth he heads over to the other ship and meets the alien. A rock alien. Who tells Ryan to fuck off back to his own ship, apparently. But he does it cutely, with puppets, so it's nice.

They finally meet properly through some kind of glass. Ryan works out the readout is showing oxygen and decides it would be rude not to remove his helmet. Luckily this isn't the Mars Attacks type of alien. Or the Loki type.

Ryan eventually figures out Rocky doesn't have eyes. Despite there being no eyes.

They go through a whole maths-and-names routine and have a working universal translator within a few hours. I get the need from a storytelling perspective, but it's really dumb.

Also: how big an issue is global cooling and a dimming star for a rock monster with no eyes? Would they care? Would they even notice? Rocky's species doesn't know about radiation or relativity, which seems unlikely for people who built an interstellar ship.

The fix: there are microbial predators on the Tau Ceti breeding planet keeping the astrophages in check. The plan is to grab the predators and ship them off to Earth and Rocky's world. Seeding Venus with an alien ecosystem seems a bit of a terrible idea, but sure, better than extinction.

There's drama getting the samples, and Rocky breaks out of containment to save Ryan.

Flashback interlude: following zero redundancy protocols, both the science officer and the replacement science officer were in the same building working with the incredibly explosive space virus. They die due to a measuring mistake, and Ryan gets ordered aboard because he knows the procedures. He says no. Nobody cares. For a government planning to drug him onto the ship, they didn't even secure the doors to the room, so he just ran off.

Ryan holds off sending his probes back to Earth while waiting for Rocky to recover, potentially dooming billions, given we're told a quarter of the world's population will die in the next 30 years. He can't send Rocky's data because he doesn't know how, but he could have shipped his own off.

He also gives Rocky a laptop with all of Earth's knowledge on it. Nice as Rocky seems, that's a massive strategic mistake. But then Earth did fuck him over, so fair enough.

It's suspicious that Rocky's crew and Ryan's crew both entirely died, by the way.

The journey home will take four-plus years, and Tau Ceti is nearly twelve light years away. Either the ship has broken the light barrier or the film is quietly relying on time dilation it never bothers to explain. Given this is a film where "engine cutoff" stops a ship, I know where my money is.

Due to reasons, the amoebas can escape containment. Ryan fixes his, but knows Rocky won't be able to fix theirs, so he sacrifices his ride home to save his friend. It's like that bit at the start of Potter: you need someone to be brave for. Now the coward has a friend to be brave for. Ryan ends up in a biodome with a beach and a house, teaching Eridian kids, not sure he even wants to go home.

I imagine it was beautiful in IMAX. The back of a plane seat is not great.

Broadly, the entire plot is a framing device for a buddy movie about being better than you think you are through others. There are a dozen things that do this better; exploring humanity from the outside is most of Star Trek, and of course Babylon 5. It's not terrible, but the science is awful for a science fiction film. Rocky is great, and Ryan is, as always, charming.