Science teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction... but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.
I popped along to the cinema to check it out...
Gosling has spent the last ten years nailing a very specific brand of soulful emptiness. With the exception of Ken from Barbie,think about the neon-soaked quiet of Drive or that aching, hollowed-out look in Blade Runner 2049. He’s the undisputed king of the blank slate—the kind of actor who lets us project whatever angst or stoicism we happen to be feeling onto him. Project Hail Mary asks him for something entirely different, yet it fits his weird, magnetic vibe perfectly. He wakes up completely amnesiac on a spaceship, flanked by two dead bodies. His only way out? Solving a string of science puzzles.
Andy Weir’s original book is a relentless love letter to the human brain as a Swiss Army knife. He brought us the "science-the-shit-out-of-this" vibe in The Martian, and he’s doubling down here. But where Ridley Scott gave The Martian a dusty, macho grit, handing Project Hail Mary to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller is a wild pivot toward something way more kinetic and cheeky.
The first thing that really hits you about Project Hail Mary isn't the massive scale of it all—it’s the sheer, tactile weight of the thing. Lord and Miller completely ditched that sterile, green-screen look that makes so much modern sci-fi feel like you're just watching someone else play a video game. They actually built a ship. They built the consoles. When Gosling jabs a button, you can feel the click through the screen. When he smacks into a bulkhead, the metal rings out with a thud.
About halfway through the movie, there's a sequence involving a cloud of pink particles scooped from the atmosphere of a planet called Adrian. It's easily one of the most drop-dead gorgeous things put on screen all decade. It’s an absolute riot of neon-pink popping against the pitch-black void of space, looking completely alien and impossibly beautiful all at once.
But all the visual effects in the world wouldn’t matter if we didn't buy the man at the center of it. Ryan Gosling has always had a touch of the silent film star about him (especially in the brilliant Nice Guys) the way he lets a pause stretch out until it becomes a punchline. Here, he leans into a kind of Chaplin-esque physical comedy that is a revelation. He isn’t a sleek, professional astronaut; he’s a guy who’s just realized he’s "put the not in astronaut.”
There is a grace to his lack of grace, a musical and comedic groove to what Ryan Gosling does. He stumbles, he fumbles with his tools, and he reacts to the cosmic horrors surrounding him with a dry, self-deprecating wit that keeps the movie from ever becoming too self-important.
When he finally encounters "Rocky"—the spider-like alien who becomes his only companion—Gosling’s performance shifts into a masterclass of comedic timing. Acting opposite a practical puppet (and what a puppet it is—a five-legged, rock-textured marvel of engineering), Gosling manages to create a chemistry that is more convincing than most romantic leads manage in a lifetime of rom-coms.
They also get that if you want an audience to sit through two hours of a guy talking to himself and eventually to a giant, super-hot stone spider, you’ve got to make it fun. The movie feels like it’s buzzing with this improvisational franticness and using Gosling's comedy chops that keeps the heavy-duty orbital mechanics from feeling too dry.
Here’s the real gamble, and exactly why the movie works so well: Gosling’s dynamic with "Rocky," the alien engineer. In lesser hands, this would've devolved into a mushy, CGI nightmare. It’s genuinely moving to watch these two lonely castaways find their groove. One's a middle-school science teacher who never asked for this; the other is a weary alien who watched his entire crew die. It turns into the ultimate workplace comedy, just set in a tin can orbiting a dying star.
Maybe because the real world feels like a runaway train right now, and the idea of someone who can actually step up and fix the problem is the ultimate escapist fantasy. It ditches the preachy social consciousness for the romance of the garage tinkerer and the lab rat. It takes that old-school, frontier duct-tape ingenuity and rockets it into deep space.
When Gosling finally makes a massive choice driven by friendship, the movie achieves a kind of emotional contact that modern sci-fi rarely touches. It’s not trying to be high art; it’s a genuine bet on our capacity for wonder and is a hell of a lot more fun than watching another superhero knock down a skyscraper.