Project Hail Mary Review: Ryan Gosling's Best Performance in a Near-Perfect Film
Project Hail Mary made $334 million at the global box office and scored 95% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is the best science fiction film in years — and it earns that title through genuine scientific rigour, not spectacle.
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What is Project Hail Mary about?
Project Hail Mary is the best science fiction film since Arrival (2016), and it achieves that distinction the same way: by treating its audience as intelligent adults.
The film stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship millions of miles from Earth with no memory of how he got there. As his memory returns in fragments, he pieces together the situation: the sun is dying, a mysterious substance called Astrophage is consuming its energy, and he has been sent on a one-way mission to a neighbouring star system where Astrophage appears to be absent. He is supposed to figure out why — and bring the answer back to save humanity.
He cannot, as it turns out, do it alone.
Why Project Hail Mary works when most sci-fi doesn't
The fundamental problem with most science fiction films is that they use scientific concepts decoratively. Terminology gets deployed to establish atmosphere, not to drive plot. The science in Project Hail Mary is the plot.
Director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) made a choice that many studios would have refused: keep the science intact. The physics of how Astrophage behaves, the biology of its life cycle, the mathematics of fuel consumption and orbital mechanics — all of it is present in the film, explained clearly through Gosling's performance, and all of it matters to how the story resolves.
This is not a film that gestures toward science. It is a film that thinks scientifically.
Ryan Gosling's performance
This is the best work Gosling has done. That is a statement that needs context: he has been in Drive, La La Land, Blade Runner 2049, and Barbie. The statement still stands.
What Gosling does in Project Hail Mary is technically demanding in ways that most film performances are not. He is alone on screen for the majority of the runtime. He must convey the re-emergence of memory — not as a dramatic device but as a genuine neurological process — while simultaneously making the scientific problem-solving feel like natural thought rather than expository dialogue.
There is a scene approximately 40 minutes in, when Grace is working through the Astrophage biology, where Gosling makes a character think in real time. It is an extraordinary thing to watch.
Rocky — and why the friendship at the film's centre works
The trailers have shown that Grace is not entirely alone. He encounters Rocky, an alien scientist on an equivalent mission from a different civilisation, and the relationship between them is the emotional engine of the film.
Rocky is played through voice performance and animation, not a physical presence, and the decision to make their communication a genuine problem to be solved — rather than relying on convenient universal translation — is one of the film's boldest choices. The friendship that develops is earned through the same scientific rigour that governs the rest of the film.
It is also genuinely funny. This is a film about the end of two worlds and it is frequently, effortlessly funny.
How does it compare to The Martian?
The comparison is inevitable — both are Andy Weir adaptations about a lone scientist surviving through intelligence. Project Hail Mary is the better film.
The Martian (2015, directed by Ridley Scott) is an excellent film. Its Mark Watney is charismatic and problem-solving is its central pleasure. But The Martian is ultimately an optimistic survival story with a rescue as its terminus.
Project Hail Mary is about something larger: what do you do when survival is not an option but the mission still matters? It has a philosophical weight that The Martian never reaches for.
What is Astrophage, and is it scientifically plausible?
Astrophage is Andy Weir's fictional organism — a form of life that metabolises solar energy and breeds in the atmosphere of stars. The biology Weir invented for it is grounded in real constraints (thermodynamics, energy density, reproduction rates) even though the organism itself does not exist.
What the film conveys well: the genuine excitement of scientific discovery. When Grace figures out a new property of Astrophage, the film makes you feel the significance of the discovery before explaining what it means. This is pedagogically sophisticated — it generates emotional investment in understanding, rather than simply delivering information.
Verdict
Project Hail Mary is a near-miracle of studio science fiction: a $334 million-grossing, mass-audience film that does not condescend to its audience at any moment, makes genuine scientific thinking feel thrilling, and contains one of the best performances of the decade.
See it on the largest screen available to you.
Rating: 10/10