‘Project Hail Mary’ Film Review - Brad’s Version
by Brad Harris
There's a moment early in Project Hail Mary where Ryan Gosling's Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of who he is, where he's going, or why. The film could have spent its first forty-five minutes on Earth explaining all of that to us. It doesn't. Instead, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller drop us straight into the disorientation alongside Grace, doling out context in brief, earned flashes as his memory slowly returns. The result is a film that trusts you to grab on and keep up, rather than make you sit through an hour of handholding exposition first. Anyone who sat through Armageddon knows exactly what that feels like.
A lot of people I know are skeptical of Gosling going in. “Ken-in-Spaaaaaace,” they’ve joked. Fair enough concern. But not once during this film did I catch a glimpse of Ken. As Dr. Ryland Grace, Gosling plays anxious, resourceful, occasionally terrified, and deeply human in a way that never evokes the Malibu Dream House. Gosling earns it at every turn and is doing something genuinely tricky here. Grace is a man carrying the weight of humanity's survival, and Gosling plays him with a dry, playful sarcasm that never trivializes the stakes. The wit feels like a survival mechanism, something Grace reaches for when the gravity of the situation becomes too much to hold directly. It works because Gosling never winks at the audience. He's not performing the humor. He's proving it can be the fuel that gets you through calamity.
The friendship between Grace and Rocky, the alien he encounters in deep space, is where Project Hail Mary really earns its place, though. Rocky is brought to life through the puppeteering work of James Ortiz, and the creature is so physically convincing, so present in scenes alongside Gosling, that the question of how they pulled it off followed me out of the theater and wouldn’t let me fall asleep. It’s that convincing. But what ultimately makes the relationship land isn’t believable puppeteering and stellar voice work: it’s the writing. Grace and Rocky cannot speak each other's language, so they build a new one together, iterating and communicating their way to understanding. The film understands that real collaboration isn't about finding an overlap of commonality. It’s two people creating something neither could have made alone because of their differences.
And that idea runs through the whole movie, giving the story genuine emotional architecture rather than just spectacle.
Project Hail Mary is interested in what a single person can accomplish when stripped of everything, and equally interested in what becomes possible when that person finds an unlikely partner. Individual resilience matters, sure, but co-resilience is where the magic comes from. The film also has something hopeful to say about being forced into situations you’d never choose for yourself but finding out you’re capable only because you did the thing, Zhu Li. And that message lands without being preachy about it, which is harder than it looks.
Lord and Miller pace the whole thing with real care. There are slower sequences, but every one of them does the work essential to paying everything off by the conclusion. I appreciated that the film never fired everything at once: it knows how to wait and breathe to find just the right moment to lob for the end zone.
(Hail Mary, football…is this thing on? *tap tap*)
Bear Bits and Bobs:
• The production design draws a clear visual distinction between the Hail Mary's Earth-built materials and Rocky's xenon-based Eridian technology. That contrast mirrors the relationship between the two characters, different in every way, but somehow learning to mesh in ways that achieve more than is possible alone.
• There is a certain score-fueled spacewalk scene that needs to be seen on the biggest screen available. And on the subject of the score, it earns special mention for what it chooses not to do. The music accompanies without manipulating, setting atmosphere rather than mandating emotion. That restraint is increasingly rare and worth noticing.
• Sandra Hüller plays Eva Stratt, the formidable architect of the whole mission, and brings the same coiled precision to the role that made her impossible to look away from in Anatomy of a Fall. And Lionel Boyce as Officer Carl is warm and grounding in exactly the right measure. I’ll never shop at Home Depot the same way again.
• Rocky's vocal range contains at least one rather fashion-forward cameo I did not expect and can now never un-hear. Biggest laugh of the whole movie.
Project Hail Mary is the rare science fiction film that trusts its audience, respects its source material, and finds genuine feeling in the space between two very different creatures trying to save their planets and each other. Amaze, amaze, amaze.
5 out of 5 Bear Paws (with a butt wiggle for good measure)