Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | Film | March 20, 2026
I don’t know what else one can ask for from a big-budget movie than what Christopher Miller and Phil Lord deliver in Project Hail Mary, working from a terrific script from Drew Goddard based on Andy Weir’s novel. It may not be perfect, and it may be 20 minutes too long (although I easily could’ve watched another hour), but it does what the best space exploration movies do: make you feel small in the scheme of the universe while somehow embigening our sense of what we might contribute to it. It is life-affirming. It is funny. It is emotional. It is thrilling and intense and, above all, genuinely entertaining. It may be the best sci-fi film since Arrival, and easily one of the strongest arguments in recent memory that not every movie need be a sequel, reboot, or spin-off.
Ryan Gosling puts those Half Nelson talents to use as Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher and former molecular biologist who was bounced out of the scientific community after writing — and publicly defending — a paper that has caught the attention of government agent Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) because of what’s happening to the solar system. The sun is dimming, thanks to a microorganism known as Astrophage traveling along an infrared band from the Sun to Venus called the Petrova line. Earth is expected to cool by 10 to 15 degrees within the next 20 to 30 years — which would wipe out, conservatively speaking, a quarter or more of the global population.
The same Petrova line and Astrophage problem is afflicting every star in the universe except one: Tau Ceti. Ryland Grace is asked to undertake a one-way suicide mission aboard the Project Hail Mary to find out why Tau Ceti is the exception and transmit his findings back before Earth succumbs to catastrophic climate collapse.
I should also mention that the backstory is relayed through flashback, because the film actually opens with Grace awakening from a coma — the sole survivor aboard Project Hail Mary — already in the vicinity of Tau Ceti. When he arrives, he discovers another life form: an endearing rock-like creature he names Rocky, who is also trying to solve the same problem for his own planet, Eridani.
Rocky and Grace, each having spent years in isolation, find a way to communicate, and ultimately befriend each other and work together to solve the problem before their respective planets perish.
That’s the gist, but the humanity, the humor, and the emotional beats live in the details. This is decidedly not Gosling’s “sad astronaut” movie — that was First Man. This is charming, quick-witted Gosling, perfectly calibrated to Miller and Lord’s sensibilities. Occasionally, their humor cuts against the intensity the story earns, but it’s hard to begrudge them for leaning into levity when the alternative is two hours of existential dread — and, frankly, I’d still love to see their version of Solo. They have a brand. They’re very good at what they do.
My only quibble — and it’s just that, a quibble — is that Rocky feels a little like something out of Fraggle Rock rather than a serious science fiction film. But it’s difficult to complain too loudly about a rock-like alien creature that manages to conjure full-on Groot-level feelings. It’s fitting, in the end, because Project Hail Mary is a popcorn movie — unabashedly, joyfully so — and it’s one of the best we’ve gotten in years. In a summer movie landscape increasingly defined by franchise obligation and diminishing returns, it’s a genuine original, and it deserves every seat it fills.
