Project Hail Mary ** (2026, Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller) – Classic Movie Review 13,897

The 2026 American sci-fi film Project Hail Mary is written by Drew Goddard, based on the 2021 bestselling novel by Andy Weir. The $200 million film stars Ryan Gosling, with Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz and Lionel Boyce.

The 2026 American science fiction film Project Hail Mary is produced and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and written by Drew Goddard, based on Andy Weir’s 2021 bestselling novel. The film stars Ryan Gosling (who also produced the film with Weir, Lord and Miller), Sandra Hüller, James Ortiz and Lionel Boyce.

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a school teacher and former biologist who awakens on an interstellar spacecraft, and has a close encounter with another lone survivor, a rock-like alien, who conveniently learns to starts speaking English, with multiple flashbacks as to how Grace got there as his lost memory returns.

That’s it really. I don’t want to be a Blue Meanie (oh, yes I do), but this artless, naive film is not for grown-up grown-ups.

Project Hail Mary starts refreshingly and promisingly well, looking like a serious science fiction film, with some serious science too (the Sun’s dimming will result in a catastrophic cooling of the Earth in 30 years), all going well for three quarters of an hour or so, then starts getting soppy, sentimental, sickly and finally sickening.

The film coasts merrily along on Ryan Gosling’s undeniable, infectious charm and cheeky sense of humour. Gosling’s tour-de-force performance is sustained and unflagging throughout. They have the right star, the right bright star. We all like Ryan Gosling. What’s not to like? (He’s Canadian.) The other huge success is the visual effects work, absolutely thrilling, quite amazing, successfully creating another world. Most of us thrill to spectacular visual effects (maybe less so now they have become so ubiquitous and apparently easy to achieve). What’s not to like?

But that is not enough.

The problem is the oh-so-cheesy script written by Drew Goddard, based on Andy Weir’s 2021 novel. This is the kind of script no old-time studio would have backed, let alone spent a ludicrous $200 million on. Admittedly, film studios have always been attracted by success in other media, so maybe they would have green-lit Project Hail Mary, but not gambled $200 million on.

Somehow we are in the hippy-dippy Tom Hanks land of Forrest Gump, Apollo 13 and Cast Away (and The Wizard of Oz) rather than the more cerebral and challenging (and adult) 2001: A Space Odyssey. We are in Disneyland and ET Spielbergland. It even references Close Encounters (musically, but also as inspiration no doubt) so we know it isn’t borrowing ideas from it or ET.

The flashbacks come from novel but they are very weak and boring in the film, with Sandra Hüller at a loss in a one note, no-charm performance as Eva Stratt, the head of the international task force behind the planet-saving Project Hail Mary. Talking boring, Ryland Grace encounters an irritating puppet alien he calls Rocky (voiced and operated by James Ortiz) on his journey. This is when the film starts to fall apart and crashes and burns.

The story itself is rather thin, quite a simple and unsophisticated thing wrapped up in some complex scientific mumbo jumbo (the sun’s dimming is caused by a microorganism known as an astrophage, exponentially increasing its population on the Sun’s surface) so it seems clever. This leads the runtime to over-run to 156 minutes when a compact 115 would do much better.

However, the $200 million gamble paid off magnificently. Premiered on March 9, 2026 (at London’s Empire Leicester Square) and released in the US on March 20, 2026, it had already grossed $317 million by 31 March 2026.

The Rocky character was made through a puppet controlled by a team of five puppeteers dubbed The Rockyteer.

Andy Weir’s debut novel is the 2011 science fiction story The Martian, filmed by Ridley Scott as The Martian, starring Matt Damon, and released in October 2015.

© Derek Winnert 2026 – Classic Movie Review 13,897

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