Project Hail Mary 2026 Movie Review
It may have seemed like a risky move gifting Phil Lord and Christopher Miller – whose only live action movies were a pair of twentysomething Jump Streets over a decade ago – the keys to a $250 million budget sci-fi epic, which also has the damning label of ‘Amazon Studios Movie’ slapped on it, this was actually the left-field choice for our Top most anticipated movie of 2026 and, as it happens, it’s pulled off the impossible.
Dr. Ryland Grace, a slightly hapless school teacher with some controversial physics theories in his past, finds himself waking up on an interstellar ship with scattered memories of how he got there, slowly putting together the pieces of a puzzle involving the end of the world… if he doesn’t succeed in doing whatever he’s supposed to be doing out there but can’t quite remember…
Of course, under the hood, there’s a lot more going on that makes this work than just 21 Jump Street and Amazon, the latter taking an impressive monetary gamble, but one which was arguably justified – crafting this year’s Interstellar, Gravity, The Martian, plus going one better in terms of the original vibe for the piece, one which will certainly prove divisive but is absolutely down to how much you dig Ryan Gosling’s charmingly goofy schtick. Lord and Miller are far more than just their live action credentials, having also done the boundlessly innovative The Lego Movie, with Lord writing the insanely great Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and them both writing the sequels to both of those movies. And that’s just the directors.
The story is by Drew Goddard, who also adapted The Martian, which was also written by the same author as the book for Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir – a hard sci-fi epic which definitely has vibes of The Martian meets Interstellar but also very much goes and then some in its added and extremely audacious gambits, the likes of which Lord and Miller appear to be the only ones even vaguely equipped to rationalising in a film of this scope. It’s imaginative, intelligent, and frequently outright laugh-out-loud hilarious – a combination which is almost impossible to perfectly realise in a 2.5 hour Big Screen sci-fi epic, balancing the humour with tension and delivering a resoundingly heartfelt and extremely satisfying ride.
Almost entirely key to making it work is Ryan Gosling, who seems to have been born to play the lead role, absolutely on The Fall Guy form with his sarcastic, self-deprecating, reluctant hero vibe, an innately resourceful soul who – much like Damon in The Martian – finds himself having to pull out all the stops to survive alone a long, long way away from home. Gosling is just at the top of his game, which is great news because it’s an almost one-hander for the star, having to balance some pretty challenging scenarios – fluctuating between clumsily fending off automated medical bots on his ship in a thoroughly comedic fashion one second, and discovering dead bodies the next, and called upon to pull off a succession of improbably touching sequences later into the piece. He’s the heart and soul of the voyage, and utterly nails it, completely committed to the part, with countless moments that will leave you in stitches, even as he has the fate of the known universe and more in his hands.
Lord and Miller do the science justice too, cramming in all that juicy hard sci-fi from the novel but managing to make it work for a moviegoing audience (the classroom explanations and alternate approaches to exposition are appreciated and applauded), whilst the VFX perfectly render the visuals, which alternate between the tense docking and narrow escape sequences of the likes of Interstellar, Gravity and Ad Astra and combine those with the kind of innovative visual humour you’d expect more from a live action rendition of Pixar’s Wall-E. It’s genius and jaw-droopingly spectacular in equal measure, heartfelt and heartbreaking, tense and flat out hilarious. Everything you could want from a Big Screen spectacle, and everything you didn’t realise that you wanted too, and one of the most refreshingly enjoyable cinematic outings of recent times. It’s the 2026 epic to beat, for sure.
