No, Project Hail Mary is not THAT good

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]That Project Hail Mary has been a box office hit isn't much of a surprise.

[00:00:04]Many of the marketable box office hit ticks successfully promoted during a campaign that still feels like it's ongoing with the degree to which the movie is being overpraised. Though it might be a likable representation of why we go to the movies and is technically an original property rather than another entry in a big franchise, which makes it easier to root for, it is not one of the best sci-fi movies of all time. Nor is it the next Interstellar. And I'm saying that as someone who thinks Interstellar is itself overrated. This video isn't about Nolan's proficiency at appealing to people who just discovered what good filmmaking looks like, but Project Hail Mary does neatly fit into that category.

[00:00:43][music] Ryan Gosling is like a cross between Keanu Reeves and Tom Hanks in both public reputation, acting ability, and genre range. And he's the leading man in this movie about a science teacher mysteriously stranded alone in space with nothing but a mission to save Earth. Though the mystery of why he's there and his loneliness from being there don't stick around for long, and you likely needn't have seen the trailers or read any [music] reviews to imagine why. Gosling's character is called Grace because he's humanity's saving grace and other grace-related metaphors. [music] And they've tried to make him look a bit nerdy and scruffy with glasses, cardigans, t-shirts, and a boy band haircut perfect for this pop sci-fi movie. But he's a hot, smart nerd who's good with kids is already a giant bold tick in a box aimed at a particular broad demographic, and casting Ryan Gosling already got halfway there anyway. But on top of that, he's also funny. Like constantly quipping in every scene, including in serious or dramatic situations, funny. And that is what will make or break the movie for you.

[00:01:50]No.

[00:01:51]Gosling has proven himself a good actor, especially from his serious period somewhere between the notebook [music] and Blade Runner. But, here he's defaulting to the humorous Gosling persona [music] that is recently to be expected of him. Not the peculiar loner from Lars and the Real Girl, not the attractive bachelor from Crazy, Stupid, Love, but somewhere in between as this vaguely relatable, self-aware goofball whose awkward charm is recognizable in Gosling himself from any real-life promotional material he appears in. An exaggerated version of his public celebrity persona, you could say. Uh our consensus here is that it would be preferable if you did not die.

[00:02:30]Thanks, guys.

[00:02:32]You are now orbiting Tau Ceti.

[00:02:37]He has some brief moments of more emotional substance when Project Hail Mary demands it, but for the most part, he plays Grace as though Ryan Gosling, the actor, was pretending to be an astronaut on a Saturday Night Live sketch.

[00:02:49]>> gas? I think this thing's broken.

[00:02:53]It's a style of character that, in such high doses as this, feels ill-suited to the fundamentally existential [music] premise of humanity facing extinction and relying on this one underdog scientist to pull through to avoid the apocalypse of the sun dying due to some convenient fictional substance floating across the solar system. [music] Whether he is or isn't immersed in scientific experimentation, Grace comes across less like a human confronting the end of the world [music] and more like a cartoon character who, for all the flashback scenes taking place on Earth, never has somebody equally quirky to bounce off of. Woman, there it is.

[00:03:30]Once he joins the project, some of the other scientists and agents have their thinly characterizing moments.

[00:03:36]>> We don't need a coupon. We're the government. Which government? All of them.

[00:03:42]But, in comparison to Grace, everyone else seems obligated to play the straight man to this jokester that wandered into the wrong story. His humor that comes across as trying too hard to entertain one of his classrooms, eternally [music] disconnected from the high-stakes plot, and constantly interrupting the potential emotional and philosophical potency. None of that is helped by the Earth scenes looking noticeably weaker visually once stripped [music] of the spectacle of zero gravity and space, which is then compounded by the movie's choppy, hyperactive editing, often making scenes feel more like a YouTube vlog or music video than a cinematic drama. Despite the lengthy run time, the film rarely slows down long enough to let atmosphere settle or cinematography breathe.

[00:04:28]Hi, Grace. From the rough beginning, the movie is saved by the arrival of Rocky.

[00:04:33]The absurdity of what transforms into an interspecies buddy comedy with a rock alien finally aligning with Grace's goofball energy. The emotionally intimate purpose of the story becoming clearer as their chemistry [music] shows genuine warmth and their interactions feature earned comedy that isn't just Gosling failing to find anything to bounce off of. Grace look disgusted when eat. How do you look when you eat? It look beautiful.

[00:04:58]Oh my god.

[00:04:59]Their relationship undeniably carries the movie, and Ryan Gosling doing science with an alien was always going to be the biggest selling point regardless, which is why they couldn't possibly keep the reveal away from the marketing. The upbeat science problem-solving audiences were already familiar with from Andy Weir's previously adapted novel The Martian would have been serviceable on its own, but this dynamic between two isolated astronauts fulfilling a mutual objective of saving their respective home planets is what gives the movie its much-needed personality. The feel-good wholesomeness of their companionship and the novelty of learning to communicate and live with an alien filling in for the lack of ambient loneliness or survivalist tension that made Matt Damon being alone for the entirety of The Martian work.

[00:05:45]Then Grace go on hall to reel it in. If ship not at precise angle and speed, we die. Example.

[00:05:52]Their approach to this twist on the formula is effective, making Rocky a cute alien companion has the same kind of cinematic cheat code as giving the main character a cute dog.

[00:06:06]The practical puppeteering giving his expressive movement believable physicality in the absence of a face, Rocky is so efficiently engineered to be adorable and affectionate that often he feels less like a truly alien intelligent species and more like an endearing AI sidekick or pet. Not even their language barrier makes for much of a hurdle and Rocky's translation program keeps our vague semblance of his intelligence and knowledge at a long enough distance for us to mistake his limited vocabulary for awestruck naivety.

[00:06:43]Or maybe all rock people are just like that, even expert scientists sent on space missions to save their planet. It sure is lucky that Grace would not only encounter an alien species in the exact same isolated situation as him, both of their crews having died in their sleep during the voyages, but that they would share a personality and get along so well. Even still, all scenes of them together make the occasional flashbacks to the Earth parts of the dual timeline structure a bit of a chore to sit through. Their narrative contributions, in the form of selective amnesia, gradually recontextualizing the mission through Grace's memories, never really compelling as a drip feed of thematic exposition that disrupts the momentum of said mission more than it enriches Grace's character.

[00:07:29]What is Grace doing? Question. I'm having a moment.

[00:07:34]Project Hail Mary so consistently swerves from real tension or dread that space is never frightening or particularly awe-inspiring, even when it's most blatantly trying to be.

[00:07:45]Whether Grace is discovering the dead crew, [music] stumbling upon and getting chased by an aesthetically peculiar alien ship, meeting Rocky for the first time through a small window, or going through the action climax of dangerously fishing samples from the nearby planet, which concludes in both of them narrowly avoiding death, the narrative stakes and environmental trepidation are just never there as much as the movie would benefit from, which it could achieved whilst keeping large amounts of its humor intact. And I know that for certain because it's what The Martian managed to do. I don't want to compare them in detail because they are allowed to be different [music] films, but they invite some level of comparison by coming from the same author, and I'm allowed to have my sci-fi preferences. I will say the biggest difference in the stakes is that in The Martian, it's one guy's mission to survive on Mars long enough to get [music] rescued, and Project Hail Mary is two guys trying to save two solar systems from mass extinction. Hence, it's odd that the latter would feature vastly more levity than the former. And that's with the former being considered enough of a comedy in 2015 to controversially earn the Golden Globe Award for Best Musical or Comedy. Sounds really dire, isn't it?

[00:08:55]Yeah.

[00:08:57]Earth's incoming apocalypse is strangely weightless because we never see public or geopolitical consequences besides everything looking a bit cold after a while. There's no sense of societal desperation or collapse, and there's no real menace from anyone on Earth or elsewhere. At one point, an accidental explosion wipes out some of the crew intended to go on this suicidal mission, and the commander, played by Sandra Hüller, forces Grace to take one of their places, but she isn't remotely villainous, and the explosion wasn't caused [music] by anyone villainous. The commander is just more serious than Grace about the whole thing, but then everyone is more serious than Grace [music] about everything, and she's still more soft and approachable than how you'd expect a character leading a world-spanning project would be like or even how that person in real life would be like. Remember everything will be all right.

[00:09:50]Grace making first contact with extraterrestrial life isn't terrifying and the continued collaboration isn't philosophically transformative because Rocky is just one alien-colored half of the buddy comedy dynamic we already know. That interspecies cultural differences only mechanisms by which their friendship can provide light entertainment or give them different tasks to fulfill during the barely comprehensible and forgettably interchangeable procedural problem-solving propelling the plot forward in its inevitable direction.

[00:10:21]It could work.

[00:10:22]Thumbs up, baby.

[00:10:24]The occasionally hyperactive editing and generally fast pacing that doesn't linger for very long underpinning everything, the feel-good optimism and the mashup of various other sci-fi movie concepts means it's definitely a film that whilst an original IP didn't lack the familiarity and mass appeal to find a large audience. The whole mission to save the dying sun is just a giant McGuffin and Project Hail Mary is content for its central message to involve Grace meeting someone to be brave for, to find a reason to fulfill this mission he was forced on when he didn't believe in himself [music] and to portray that message with much less discomfort than a $250 million blockbuster is already limited to, thereby diluting the poignancy of its own emotional highs and lows. How do you know when the hug is done? You just feel it. Oh. I could have and usually expect much less from such high-budget movies, but I still don't think it makes full use of gradually reframing the mission from one of intelligence to a test of Grace's endlessly quipping, difficult to take seriously character. It's over use of comedy notwithstanding, the setups and payoffs are quite predictably Hollywood coded once you catch on to what the film is going for, and this will no doubt be the obligatory blockbuster entry in this year's best picture nominations, despite the pacing of its emotional resolutions faltering in the final act.

[00:11:50]Even through its Earth segments, the film had maintained an engaging momentum up to this point. The mission and emotional journey feel like they've been resolved. The mission goes a bit wrong, Rocky saves Grace, Rocky doesn't die, and they share a heartfelt goodbye for a bittersweet ending where they depart, never communicate again, and aren't confident in each other's fates. But Grace hadn't made a sacrifice that would fully fulfill the themes, so the film invents another obstacle in which he turns his ship around to save Rocky from a death he wouldn't have been able to figure out or prevent, [music] sacrificing his ticket home to Earth, repeating a lot of the emotions of the self-sacrifice stuff we'd already gotten between them, and ultimately concluding on an even happier saccharine ending that I don't think you can consider bittersweet at all because Grace seems perfectly happy in his little dome on the rock people planet teaching a class of rock children with the option that the rock scientists will build him a new rocket home to Earth if and when he wants it. It feels repetitive, even if necessary, to conclude the themes because the film has been full of Grace proving his bravery and continuing to sacrifice his own life and safety, [music] whether for the mission or for Rocky. One more final decision where he abandons his self-doubt and cowardice for the sake of his friend doesn't substantially change [music] his character in my eyes. It's just more proof that he is as heroic as the film's plot has always demanded him to [music] be. Then again, this unwavering feel-good optimism of Grace and Rocky [music] representing the best of humanity, rock alien as the latter may be, seems to be the whole point.

[00:13:22]>> I'm Grace.

[00:13:25]>> [music] >> I'm going to call you Rocky.

[00:13:30]>> [music] [music]