All Hail
the first feel-good adventure of 2026 arrives.
Project Hail Mary
Directors: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller • Writer: Drew Goddard, based on the book by Andy Weir
Starring: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, James Ortiz, Ken Leung
USA • 2hrs 36mins
Opens Hong Kong March 19 • IIA
Grade: B+
I’m going to start with two teeny tiny details about Project Hail Mary that stuck in my craw, both from the same scene. Halfway through the critical mission to stave off an existential threat to all life on Earth, the handful of scientists, astronauts and good ol’ fashioned grease monkeys doing this try to relax and put the literal weight of the world on their shoulders out of their minds for a hot minute. Even the boss, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, The Zone of Interest) takes a break with some karaoke. But, really? She sang Harry Styles’s most boring song (“Sign of the Times”)? And given the stakes, the best beer the powers that be could get for these braves souls was fucking Budweiser?
Not that those entirely subjective missteps do much to mess with Project Hail Mary in the grand scheme of things. If you saw – and liked – Ridley Scott’s The Martian, this is probably going to go down smoothe (smoother than a bloody Budweiser, that’s for sure). Based on a book by Andy Weir, upon whose book Scott’s film was also based, PHM is an almost identical pro-science, pro-curiosity, humanist slab of spacefaring competency porn, about a guy who literally saves the world because he knows mathematics and doesn’t immeditately shoot another living being because he doesn’t look like him and speaks another language. I know. Revolutionary and subversive! Spider-Man: Into/Across the Spider-Verse writer/producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller return to the directors chairs to bring the same kind of snappy banter lined with just a dab of emotion they did to 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie. The whole thing works more often than not because Drew Goddard, who adapted The Martian and Max Brooks’ World War Z, wrote this screenplay, and he clearly “gets” Weir, because The Superior Canadian Ryan, Gosling again proves his value as a comic straight man, and because of a stellar voice performance and puppeteering by puppet master James Ortiz and his seven-member crew.
PHM starts on the ship in deep space, coming up on the orbit of Tau Ceti (a star in Cetus and a relatively close 12-odd light years away – but not as close as Proxima Centauri), where he’s been sent to learn more about the mysterious substance? Bacteria? Parasite? That lives (!) on the surface of our sun (!!) and is consuming enough of it that in a generation Earth’s temperature will drop as much as 15 degrees (!!!). That will kill most life and doom us to the dustbin of history (not a bad idea). The same phenomenon is happening on Tau Ceti, so Dr Ryland Grace (Gosling), a high school science teacher whose anti-establishment theories of life make him an academic pariah, catches the attention of the mysterious but powerful head of the Hail Mary project, Stratt. Grace winds up the Hail Mary’s in-house expert on the so-called Astrophage, and also winds up making friends with the secuity guard who actually understands carbon emissions, Steve Hatch (Lionel Boyce, The Bear), and the mission’s key crew, captain Yao Li-jie (Ken Leung) and Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub). As only things can unfold in sci-fi, Grace ends up alone on the actual mission, at least until he gets to Tau Ceti and discovers another ship orbiting the star, a ship piloted by an alien species in the form of Rocky (Ortiz). Cue the buddy comedy that somehow rolls in orbital mechanics, xenon in solid form and space fishing.
ProjectHail Mary is exactly what you think it’s going to be. It’s incredibly faithful to the book, despite jettisoning large swaths of the nerdy details that gave the book texture (the scientific method and empirical, control group-based experimentation get short shrift) and made Grace’s choices entirely logical. There’s much less from the supporting players and Grace’s time before Hail Mary as a popular but lonely high school teacher, and even with all those bits missing it’s still a bit long (this doesn’t need to be over two hours), drags in the middle and then unnecessarily sprints to the finish.
But there’s so much basic joy and respect for science and not being a dick in between that when the film clangs it barely registers. Lord, Miller and Godard know where their strengths are, and that’s most definitely in the combination of Gosling and Ortiz learning to communicate and their resulting friendship. They get an assist from practical effects pro Neal Scanlan (whose credits include Andor and Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice) on the Rocky puppet, which is a flawless mix of practical and CGI; this is the way, people. Gosling and Ortiz make the connection palpable, and make it feel as if they’re both floating out in deep space for long enough to really have a chance to know each other. Ortiz’s voice turn gets the lion’s share of chuckles (he raises “Dirty, dirty, dirty” and “What is happening?” to glorious heights), and Gosling is typically nimble at toggling between comedy and drama, making the film’s tonal shifts less jarring than they could be. Take all that and wrap it up in soft, filmy visuals and immersive IMAX images and you get the year’s first feel-good adventure with a string of stand-out moments that’s a nearly pefect tonic to our collective, ongoing shitshow.