By Owen Gleiberman, Mar 10, 2026, 6:00am PT
‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling in a Lavish but Derivative Outer-Space Adventure
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s lone-astronaut saga wants to be “Interstellar” meets “E.T.,” but it’s too long and too cutely formulaic.
Editor’s Note: An audio recording from the article is in the online version. –DrWeb
There are clichés that critics go back to, and when I realize I’m guilty of overusing one (sometimes once can be too often), I’ll vow never to use it again. Here’s one I did that with: lauding something as “the movie we need right now.” That’s a phrase so cringe I’m ashamed I ever used it. The reason I bring this up is that “Project Hail Mary” is a cosmic adventure that feels diagrammed, if not programmed, to be The Movie We Need Right Now.
It’s a lavishly scaled feel-good environmental outer-space thriller, starring Ryan Gosling as a science geek who is sent many lightyears away to save Earth. So it’s a movie that recalls such lone-astronaut-in-the-void hits as “Gravity” and “The Martian.” (It’s adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, who wrote the book “The Martian” is based on.) The film was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who started off as animators (“The Lego Movie”) and have the skills to turn the mysteries of space into a catchy techno fantasy. Gosling, who has already anchored one space-travel movie (Damien Chazelle’s unfairly maligned 2018 Neil Armstrong drama “First Man”), makes the hero, Ryland Grace, a charismatic space bro, sheepish and funny and relatable. And the movie, which turns on Ryland’s relationship with an alien who joins him onboard, is like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” remade as an intergalactic buddy movie. “Project Hail Mary” wants to be the kind of great escape we need right now, and I have no doubt that many will hail it as one.
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So forgive me if I say that it’s not a very good movie. There’s certainly an abstract commercial grandeur to it. I saw it on an IMAX screen (it will open on many of those), where it becomes the kind of bedazzling warm bath your eyeballs can sink right into. But here’s the rub. “Project Hail Mary” is way too long (two hours and 36 minutes), because there’s not much variation to it. It’s baggy and incredibly derivative of movies you’ve seen before — like “Interstellar,” from which it lifts the premise of a space voyage as the last chance for human survival (in this case, the sun and other stars are dying, which means that we’ve got to travel to the lone star that isn’t in order to figure out why).
More crucially, everything to do with the onboard alien is far too cute and formulaic. We don’t think so at first, because his spacecraft is a daunting dazzler (it looks like a giant oil rig made of pick-up sticks), and the creature doesn’t have one of those beguiling faces. In fact, it has no face at all. It’s made of rock (it looks like the Thing recast as a five-legged spider), with a flat slate where its features should be. How will Ryland and the alien, who he nicknames Rocky, communicate? By mimicking each other’s body poses. Then by hooking the alien up to a computer, which translates his thoughts into one-liners that, within half an hour, are adorable enough to be sitcom-worthy. I should add that there are hugs. Too many of them. “Project Hail Mary” never stops figuring out ways to make you fall in love with it.
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