Project Hail Mary (2026) [Movie review]

He wakes up in a bag of fluid, disoriented and unkempt, with no idea who he is or how he got there. The spaceship around him hums with quiet purpose. The other two crew members are dead in their comas. He is alone, light-years from Earth, and the only thing in the universe that stands between his planet and extinction. Slowly, in pieces, the memory returns. His name is Ryland Grace. He is a middle school science teacher. And the world ended somewhere behind him while he slept.

That is the opening of Project Hail Mary, and it is one of the best opening sequences in recent science fiction cinema. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, whose previous films together include The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, have spent their career making films that are formally smarter than they look while they are happening. Project Hail Mary is their most ambitious film and their most emotionally sustained one. It is also, by a considerable margin, the best science fiction film of 2026, and among the best of the decade.

The Part Where Ryan Gosling Has to Carry Two Hours by Himself

For the first third of Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling is alone on screen. Not mostly alone. Completely alone. The film operates in this stretch as a one-man show in space, cutting between Grace’s disoriented present and the flashback sequences on Earth that reassemble his memory and, with it, the audience’s understanding of how he got where he is. This is a structural gamble that Drew Goddard’s screenplay makes with confidence, and it pays off because Gosling is exactly the right actor for Lord and Miller’s improvisational, character-first approach.

Gosling’s performance is truly fantastic. There are large swaths of the film where he’s the only person on screen, so a lot rests on him, and he will rightfully get a lot of praise for his work. The specific quality he brings to Grace is not the brooding intensity that most science fiction films reach for when they strand a character alone in space. Gosling plays Grace as a fundamentally funny person who is also, underneath the jokes and the improvised solutions and the enthusiastic scientific problem-solving, genuinely terrified. The fear is always there. The humor is how he manages it. This is a more sophisticated performance than it looks while it is happening, and it is the foundation on which everything else in the film is built.

Greig Fraser’s cinematography gives the Hail Mary spacecraft a lived-in practicality that grounds Grace’s isolation in something tangible. Nearly two hours of Project Hail Mary was shot for the IMAX 1.43:1 aspect ratio, and the sequences that open up to the full IMAX frame have an expansiveness that the more intimate interior scenes deliberately withhold. Lord and Miller use the format ratio as an emotional instrument, expanding the frame when the universe gets larger and contracting it when Grace is at his most confined. This is not a default choice for a film shot in IMAX. It is a specific, considered use of the format’s potential.

Rocky and the Decision That Changed Everything

When a naïve scene in Project Hail Mary called for a sci-fi screen project looking for a puppeteer for an alien character, James Ortiz was initially skeptical, since most aliens onscreen these days are rendered using VFX: “I read the script, and I did go, ‘This reads like a CGI alien.’ I can’t wait to be a tennis ball.” That skepticism turned out to be the most useful thing Ortiz brought to the production.

Rocky, the spider-like alien from the Eridani star system who Grace encounters in the film’s second act, is a puppet. Not a CGI character with a puppet stand-in for eyeline. Not a motion-capture performance translated into digital imagery. A physical, practical, bunraku rod puppet built by designer Neal Scanlan, operated on set by Ortiz and a team of three to five puppeteers called the Rocketeers, present in the frame for every scene alongside Ryan Gosling. When Grace reaches out and touches Rocky, Gosling is touching an actual object. When Rocky responds to something Grace says, Ortiz is in that moment, reading and reacting in real time.

Lord and Miller wanted to use practical, instead of digital, effects as much as possible. “Actor to actor, I didn’t want Ryan to ever feel like he was alone in this,” Ortiz says. The production built every set four to five feet off the soundstage floor so that Ortiz and his team could operate from below, and designed the shooting schedule around the puppeteers’ physical requirements. For particularly complicated shots, VFX firm Framestore provided CGI support. But the principle, that Rocky should be real, present, and responsive in every scene, held throughout.

Sometimes, it was 45-minute takes of just us playing stuff, Ortiz has said about working with Gosling. Lord and Miller’s improvisational approach to filmmaking, which has been a consistent creative signature across their work, found in this pairing something it had never quite had before: a leading man and a puppet designer who could genuinely riff off each other as performers, accumulating a shared history across six months of production that the film’s emotional payoffs are built on. Ortiz thought that Lord and Miller would choose a higher profile actor to re-record the dialogue in post-production. But as the directors screened the film, they used Ortiz’s tracks and felt it couldn’t be improved upon.

Rocky communicates in musical tones that Grace has to learn to decode, which gives their early scenes together a specific comedic texture. They are two scientists from incompatible biologies and incompatible home worlds trying to figure out how to talk to each other, and the film plays this as both genuinely funny and genuinely moving. The moment when Grace first understands something Rocky says is one of the best single scenes in the film. The moment when Rocky first understands something Grace says is better.

Sandra Hüller and the Earth Sequences

The Earth flashbacks that assemble Grace’s memory are structured around his relationship with Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), the cold, efficient project director who recruited Grace for the Hail Mary mission against his explicit wishes and overruled every objection he raised. Hüller has been one of the most impressive performers in world cinema since Toni Erdmann (2016) and her Oscar-nominated work in Anatomy of a Fall (2023), and she is doing something specific and fine here.

Eva Stratt is not a villain. She is a person who has been given the authority to save the human race and has decided, rationally, that the price of saving it is doing things that cannot be justified to the people they are being done to. Hüller shows once again why she is one of the most impressive working actors right now, taking a character who can seem cold and heartless and imbuing her with the exact right amount of warmth. The warmth is always earned rather than given, visible only in the moments when Stratt allows herself a response she has not strategically pre-calculated, and Hüller finds those moments with the precision of a performer who understands exactly how much the character can afford to reveal.

The Earth sequences carry a different tonal register from the space sequences, more procedural, more geopolitically scaled, less intimate, and Goddard’s screenplay manages the transition between them with a structural confidence that the novel’s readers will recognize and appreciate. The film does not explain everything about how the Hail Mary mission was assembled. It trusts the audience to fill the gaps.

Drew Goddard, Andy Weir, and the Adaptation Question

Drew Goddard previously adapted Andy Weir’s The Martian for Ridley Scott in 2015, and the specific challenge he faces with Project Hail Mary is considerably harder than the one he solved with that film. The Martian is fundamentally a survival story with a single, continuous dramatic question: will Mark Watney get home? Project Hail Mary has a survival story nested inside a first contact story nested inside a mystery about the nature of Astrophage, the microbe consuming stars, nested inside a friendship between two beings from incompatible biologies. Translating that structure from a novel that can use internal monologue and gradual scientific revelation to a film that needs visual and dramatic momentum at every moment required real craft.

Goddard’s solution is primarily structural: he uses Grace’s amnesia as a narrative engine, rationing the flashback revelations to provide dramatic information at exactly the moments when the present-day story needs them. This is not a subtle technique, but it is an effective one, and the screenplay applies it with enough precision that the reveals land consistently rather than feeling mechanically produced. The scientific problem-solving, which occupies a significant portion of Andy Weir’s novel and is part of what made the book popular with readers who do not normally reach for science fiction, is translated into visual sequences that Lord and Miller find ways to make cinematic without dumbing them down. The Astrophage problem is a real problem, explained in real terms, and the film’s solutions to it require the audience to follow actual logic. This is rarer in studio science fiction than it should be.

The runtime of two hours and thirty-six minutes is the film’s only sustained vulnerability. There are sequences in the middle section where Project Hail Mary allows its problem-solving to expand beyond the emotional pacing the friendship story requires, and the film sags slightly in these passages in ways that a tighter cut might have avoided. This is a minor complaint about an exceptional film, but it is the honest one.

The E.T. Comparison and What It Actually Means

Project Hail Mary feels kind of like seeing E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time. Yes, partly because it’s a boy and an alien, but more because of the sense of friendship that you see develop between these characters. Two people from completely different worlds, and yet they are able to move beyond their many differences to not only try to solve a major ecological crisis, but to try to save one another from the crisis of loneliness.

The comparison is apt and worth developing. What Spielberg achieved with E.T. was the sensation that a friendship between a child and an alien could carry the full emotional weight of a major studio film, that the relationship itself was sufficient dramatic architecture. Most science fiction films from that era and this one reach for external stakes to justify their scale. E.T. let the friendship be the stakes. Project Hail Mary does the same thing, and it works for the same reason: because Lord, Miller, Gosling, and Ortiz committed to making the Grace-Rocky relationship feel genuinely, specifically earned rather than symbolically representative of a theme.

The Interstellar comparison circulating in critical discussion is less precise. Christopher Nolan’s film is formally ambitious and emotionally restrained, using spectacle to approach feelings that it keeps at a deliberate distance. Project Hail Mary uses spectacle to get closer to its feelings, not to manage the distance from them. The visual scale and the emotional register are aligned rather than in productive tension. This is not a criticism of either film. They are doing different things with similar materials.

The Oscar Conversation Around James Ortiz

Ortiz will be submitted for Supporting Actor. Awards enthusiasts should expect the film to compete across major categories, including best picture and directing for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, alongside a robust artisans campaign. But Ortiz’s performance raises a more complicated question: Can a nontraditional acting role compete with human performances?

The question is genuinely interesting and deserves a genuine answer. Rocky is not a visual effect. The character’s physicality, precision and comedic timing are rooted in Ortiz’s performance, mediated through puppetry and design in the same way a motion-capture performance is mediated through technology. The Andy Serkis conversation about Gollum and Caesar was never fully resolved by the Academy, and the path it opened is the one Ortiz is walking. The difference is that Rocky is not a motion-capture performance translated into digital imagery. Rocky is physically present in the frame. What Ortiz did is closer to what Frank Oz did with Yoda than to what Serkis did with Gollum, and the Academy gave Oz a Special Achievement Award conversation that never quite materialized into the recognition the work deserved.

The overwhelmingly positive reaction to Rocky has launched Ortiz into a new stratosphere of fame, with film buffs predicting he may even get an Oscar for his work. Whether the Academy finds a category that fits the achievement, or revives the Special Achievement Award it has largely stepped away from in recent years, is a question 2027 will answer. What can be said now is that Rocky is one of the most fully realized screen characters of 2026, and the human being responsible for that realization deserves whatever formal recognition the industry can devise.

Who Should See Project Hail Mary

Everyone who can get to a theater while it is still playing. The IMAX format is not a premium upgrade for this film. It is a genuinely different experience, and several sequences in Project Hail Mary were composed specifically for the 1.43:1 ratio in ways that a standard screen cannot fully deliver. Seeing it on streaming when the theatrical run ends will be seeing a version of the film, but not the version Lord and Miller made. Seeing it in theaters does have a major impact on its presentation. Watching for the first time on streaming will not be nearly as life-changing as seeing it at a movie theater is.

If you have read Andy Weir’s novel: the adaptation is faithful where it matters and smart about what it changes. The structural shift from first-person internal monologue to cinematic imagery is handled with more ingenuity than most Weir adaptations have managed. Rocky in the film is Rocky from the book, and the decision to make him a puppet rather than a CGI construct is the single best production choice the film makes.

If you have not read the novel and are deciding whether to read it before seeing the film: see the film first. The pleasures of the novel are partly the pleasures of gradual scientific revelation, and experiencing those revelations through Lord and Miller’s visual language, with Gosling and Ortiz as your guides, is the more immediate and the more emotionally compelling entry point. The novel will still be there afterward, and reading it after the film is its own worthwhile experience.

Project Hail Mary is in theaters now via Amazon MGM Studios. It remains in IMAX engagements through May.