PROJECT HAIL MARY Review

There is a certain kind of studio sci-fi film that feels increasingly endangered. The kind built on scale, curiosity, star power, and emotional payoff. The kind that trusts audiences to engage with ideas while still delivering momentum and spectacle. Project Hail Mary belongs to that tradition, and it does so with confidence.

It is, at least for me, the strongest film I’ve seen so far this year.

That may sound like the usual post-screening high talking, the sort of reaction that can fade once the adrenaline wears off and the parking lot glow disappears. But the more I’ve sat with this one, the more convinced I am that it genuinely earns that level of praise. This is an exciting, funny, visually striking, and unexpectedly moving sci-fi adventure that knows exactly how to package a big concept inside something human.

The premise drops us into familiar but effective territory. Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling) wakes up alone aboard a spacecraft with no real memory of who he is, how he got there, or what he is meant to do. As his recollection gradually returns, the film reveals the scope of the crisis: Earth is facing catastrophe, and Grace has been sent on a desperate mission to solve it. It is an inherently gripping setup, one that turns memory loss, isolation, and scientific problem-solving into a narrative engine.

Yes, there are clear traces of other space films in its DNA. You can feel echoes of Interstellar, The Martian, Ad Astra, and even a little Alien in some of the visual and tonal choices. There are also moments of levity and crowd-pleasing energy that give it a broader commercial pulse. But Project Hail Mary is not merely patchwork. What helps it stand on its own is how well it fuses those influences into something that feels lively rather than derivative. It understands the pleasures of this sub-genre and delivers them with enough personality to avoid feeling secondhand.

A large part of that comes down to Ryan Gosling, who anchors the entire film with a performance that is both technically demanding and deceptively relaxed.

This is the kind of role that could have easily collapsed into a string of tics or a generic “smart guy in crisis” routine. Gosling avoids that trap. He makes Grace feel intellectually gifted without ever turning him into an unbearable know-it-all, and he gives the character a jittery, off-center humor that becomes essential to the movie’s tone. That humor matters in a story dealing with loneliness, extinction, and enormous cosmic stakes. Gosling keeps the material buoyant without draining it of tension.

There is also something very believable in the way he uses wit as a shield. Grace often meets fear with deflection, absurdity, or nervous banter, and the performance understands that instinctively. It never feels like the film is winking at itself. It feels like a man trying to keep himself from falling apart. That distinction makes all the difference. Gosling has always been more versatile than some give him credit for, and this performance is another reminder of that range. He carries a film that asks him to be funny, frantic, vulnerable, lonely, and awestruck, often in quick succession. The balancing act is impressive. He gives the movie a center of gravity that allows the spectacle to hit harder because there is a real person at the center of it.

As strong as Gosling is, though, Sandra Hüller leaves a major impression.

She brings an entirely different texture to the film. Where Gosling’s energy is anxious and loosely calibrated, Hüller’s is rigid, disciplined, and almost forbidding. She has a severity that cuts through the film in a fascinating way. There is very little softness in how she carries herself, which makes the moments where that exterior cracks all the more affecting. That is especially true of the now unforgettable 'Harry Styles karaoke scene,' which for me remains one of the best individual scenes I’ve seen in any film this year. It is a superbly judged moment because it lands on several frequencies at once. It is uncomfortable, funny, sad, and deeply revealing. More than anything, it exposes a kind of loneliness that words have failed to express. The scene could have been played too broadly or too sentimentally, but the film threads the needle. It becomes a moment of raw release from someone who seems to have forgotten how to ask for connection in a normal way. That emotional undercurrent is a major reason the movie lingers.

Technically, the film is exceptional. The craftsmanship is apparent across the board, but the standout categories for me were sound, production design, and especially cinematography. The visual presentation is one of the film’s greatest strengths. So many space-set movies default to a palette of gloom, gray, and low-light austerity. Project Hail Mary goes another way. It embraces color, brightness, and a more vivid visual language, which gives the movie a sense of vitality that feels entirely appropriate for a story centered on survival. There is an elegance to the lighting as well. The use of flares, reflective surfaces, and mirrored imagery gives many sequences an almost prismatic quality. It is beautiful on a purely aesthetic level, but it also complements the story’s fractured memory structure and themes of self-reckoning. The film is often visually expressive in ways that do more than simply show off production value.

From an awards perspective, it is easy to imagine this being a serious player in multiple below-the-line races. The craft is too strong to ignore, particularly in branches that respond to a marriage of technical scale and strong visual identity. This does not look like assembly-line blockbuster filmmaking. It looks shaped.

That said, the film is not without issues. The clearest one is length -- At 2 hours and 36 minutes, Project Hail Mary stretches itself more than it needs to. The last half hour, in particular, begins to feel overextended. There is a point where the movie appears to have reached its natural endpoint, emotionally and narratively, and then it continues on with additional material that mostly reiterates ideas the audience has already absorbed. Some of those later beats are not bad in isolation, but they do not all feel necessary. The ending becomes too eager to keep explaining itself and too committed to giving every last emotional beat a final underline. It is the sort of problem audiences will forgive more easily when the film surrounding it is this engaging, and I did. Still, the bloat is real. A leaner final stretch would have made the whole experience hit even harder.

My other reservation is that I wanted more backstory for Grace’s life before the mission. The film gives us enough to understand his general emotional condition. We know he is isolated. We know he is carrying disappointment and regret. We understand that he is not exactly a man stepping into this mission from a full and satisfying life. But the movie leaves much of that personal terrain underexplored. There is not much sense of family, close relationships, romantic history, or a fuller world waiting behind the plot mechanics. That absence stood out to me because the film already spends a fair amount of time working through flashbacks. If it was going to devote that much space to the past, I would have liked some of that time to deepen Grace as a person rather than mainly servicing the mission structure. More insight into what his life looked like on Earth would have made the emotional stakes even richer.

Even with those criticisms, though, the film is a major success. It is exactly the sort of big-budget original science fiction movie that studios should still be making: smart without feeling homework-heavy, emotional without becoming syrupy, and technically ambitious without losing its personality. It delivers the pleasures of a crowd-pleasing blockbuster while still carrying enough thought and feeling to stick with you afterward.

Ryan Gosling does terrific work here. Sandra Hüller is excellent. The visuals are often stunning. The soundscape and set design work are first-rate. And while the movie borrows from a recognizable lineage of modern sci-fi, it packages those influences with enough freshness, charm, and conviction to feel worth celebrating on its own terms.

I expect Project Hail Mary will draw comparisons to films like The Martian and Interstellar, and I think it deserves to be in that conversation. Whether it ultimately reaches that level for everyone will come down to taste. But for me, this one absolutely connected.

It is thrilling, funny, sincere, and crafted with real care. And at least right now, it stands as my favorite film of the year so far.

🍿 SCORE = 88 / 100