Project Hail Mary is about an educator and a molecular biologist named Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling). He’s just your typical school teacher. He’s good with kids, he wears quirky science-related shirts, and he rides a bike to school. But the first time we meet him is not in a classroom. It’s aboard an interstellar spacecraft heading toward a star.
Grace can barely remember why he’s in space. He’s no pilot. He’s no astronaut. But he remembers a woman named Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) who asked him to look into something they harvested near Venus. That was around the same time news about the Sun slowly dying started spreading, even his young students knew about it. As it turns out, it’s because of a single-celled organism they began calling Astrophage. Latin for “star eater.”
Stratt is pooling all the world’s resources toward this research, which means it is of utmost importance that they understand everything about Astrophage fast. If Grace can determine its composition, characteristics, and nature, they can save humanity from total extinction. There is no room for mistakes.
But that is all Grace can remember at the start. He’ll piece together more along the way. His immediate concern is navigating the ship. And, by the way, he isn’t heading toward Earth’s Sun, but toward something similar: Tau Ceti, a star in an entirely different solar system. Why is he going to Tau Ceti?
As if that isn’t perplexing and agonizing enough, he soon encounters a giant alien ship. Inside it is a lone, rock-like creature Grace named Rocky (James Ortiz). Rocky isn’t hostile and seems smart enough to understand human language. Grace doesn’t fully know why Rocky intercepted his ship, but he has a good feeling they are on the same page…
They both want to save their planet.
At this point, everyone who has watched or plans to watch Project Hail Mary knows it’s based on a book by Andy Weir, the guy behind The Martian. And if you’ve read the novel and finished the film, you’d know this adaptation does a really good job abridging everything into a tight 156 minutes.
If you haven’t read Weir’s bestselling space odyssey, going in blind is perfectly fine. In my opinion, it’s actually better to watch the film first before picking up the book. Not knowing why Ryland Grace is in space or what he needs to do makes every decision he and Rocky make feel heavier. Their fate, and the fate of the world they live in, feels a lot more dire that way.
Watching the film first also helps you visualize a lot of the scientific stuff described in the novel. On top of that, it gives you the image of Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace. A story about a dying sun needs a charismatic leading man to hold it all together, and that’s exactly what Gosling brings: charm. He can do the most ridiculous things, like dancing with a mop or getting drunk, and we’ll still adore and root for him every step of the way.
But his casting goes well beyond his power to attract, delight, and fascinate us. Gosling is a genuinely underrated good actor. And there are plenty of scenes here that ask him to carry real grief and pain, and he pulls it off almost effortlessly.
You start to appreciate him even more when you realize how little screen time he gets with another human being. But when he does, it’s with Sandra Hüller’s stoic Eva Stratt. So imagine a charismatic science professor and someone who essentially runs the world, working together to save the world. It’s an unlikely duo that delivers a lot of funny moments, but also some surprisingly heartwarming ones too. Their partnership and dynamic epitomizes a very human kind of love in the film. No, not the romantic kind. But the kind that pushes you toward your best self.
As compelling as that sounds, the film’s most iconic pairing is still Grace and Rocky.
James Ortiz’s Rocky is a genuine scene-stealer, out-charming Gosling in more than a few moments. It is worth noting that Rocky is a puppet. In an age dominated by CGI, it speaks volumes when filmmakers put their full trust in a physical creation to carry both action-packed and deeply emotional scenes. Rocky is so well-designed that it emotes without a face, which is no small feat.
Let me just insert here my praise of the production design, which is outstanding and deserves far more recognition than it gets.
The movie’s main weakness for me is that it can feel disorienting. The back-and-forth between past and present is hard to follow and understand without prior knowledge of the book. I think the film could do a better job showing Grace’s struggle to piece his memory together. It also leans more feel-good compared to the novel’s grimmer, life-or-death tension.
But honestly, these are small complaints, about as small as an astrophage. Compared to what Phil Lord and Christopher Miller pulled off here, this adaptation is about as good as it gets. It captures the essence and the heart of the story: the joy of science and discovery, and the quiet power of believing in yourself.
4.5/5