Is PROJECT HAIL MARY's Rocky the Greatest Movie Alien Ever? | Lord and Miller | Ryan Gosling

Ajouté : 2026-05-27

[00:00:04]Dr. Grace, the world is counting on you.

[00:00:12]No, no, no, NO. I'M SORRY. I'M SORRY.

[00:00:26]Somewhere in this movie, you cried over a rock. Don't lie. You did, and I did, and everybody in my theater did. I could hear it. This weird clicking spider crab thing that looks like it was made out of something from a geology exhibit made us cry. At some point, it became one of the most emotionally devastating characters I've seen in years. So, what happened?

[00:00:44]How did that work? Well, that's what I'm digging into in this video, inspired by the film Project Hail Mary, that's now available in home video, because I think that Rocky isn't just a great movie alien. Rocky might be the greatest alien character ever put on screen. And I'm gonna explain to you exactly why I believe that.

[00:01:16]Here's the thing about aliens in movies.

[00:01:18]They almost always cheat. And they cheat in one of two ways. Either the alien is basically a human. They speak English within 5 minutes. They understand love and humor, sacrifice, family. They have faces we can read. I mean, look no further than ET or the Na'vi from Avatar or almost every alien species in Star Trek. These aliens are emotionally accessible because they're just us with a costume on or some makeup on or even some CGI on. Or the other option, the alien is completely incomprehensible, a monster, a force of nature, something we're supposed to fear rather than understand. like the aliens from Arrival before Amy Adams figured out how to communicate with them or the terrifying creatures from A Quiet Place or the Xenomorphs in the Alien movies. These aliens are philosophically interesting, but you don't feel for them. Rocky doesn't fit either category, and that's the first thing that makes him extraordinary. The film refuses to use both shortcuts. Rocky is genuinely and profoundly an alien. Different biology, different senses, different relationship to time and language and music. And yet by the end of this movie, like Ryan Gosling's Ryland character, you do anything for him. The film earns that without cheating. So how? Well, the first thing Lord and Miller get exactly right is making communication hard. Like genuinely, frustratingly hard. There's a long stretch of this movie where Ryland and Rocky cannot talk to each other.

[00:02:35]There are two scientists who both desperately want to communicate and just can't. The film doesn't skip over that either. Instead, it sits in it and gives us an extended and humorous string of scenes showcasing them figuring out how to communicate with each other. The musical tones, the mathematical concepts, the way they piece together a shared language step by step. It's truly one of the standout sequences of the movie. Showing this is important because of what it does to the audience. Every tiny breakthrough, every moment where one of them figures out something new about the other lands as a genuine victory. You feel that effort. So, when they're finally able to have a real conversation, it doesn't feel like a given. It feels earned. And anything earned in a movie hits 10 times harder than anything handed to you. Compare this to the Aliens in the Avatar series, where the language barrier just kind of dissolves. You never feel the gap close because you never felt the gap. Well, Rocky makes you feel that gap, every inch of it. And here's the technical miracle at the center of this movie.

[00:03:31]Rocky has no face, no eyes we can read, no mouth that moves the way ours do, no body language that maps onto anything human. The tools that filmmakers normally use to make you feel for a character, a trembling lip, tears, a look of fear, are completely off the table. And yet, Rocky is one of the most expressive characters in the film. How sound, behavior, curiosity, his excitement when solving a problem, his moments of grief or fear, his attempts to joke with Ryland, his playful actions mirroring Ryland's thumbs up. Those are those moments that get us to care about Rocky because he's expressing himself emotionally in a way that we can understand. What the filmmakers understood is that we don't actually need a face to feel empathy. We need intention. We need to be able to read what a character wants. And Rocky always has clear, legible wants. He wants to solve the problem. He wants to go home.

[00:04:18]He wants to understand Ryland. And eventually, in a way neither of them can fully articulate, he wants to protect him. Once you can feel those wants, the face becomes irrelevant. Rocky proves that. And so much of that comes down to James Ortiz, the performer inside that suit. This is a fullbody, voice modulated, motion captured performance with no face to hide behind and no conventional acting tools to lean on.

[00:04:40]And Ortiz makes Rocky feel completely alive. Every scuttle, every hesitation, every moment of excitement or grief reads as genuine because Ortiz commits to it completely. It's the kind of performance that doesn't get talked about enough because the technology is in the way. But take the suit off in your mind and what you're watching is an actor doing something genuinely extraordinary. Rocky works because James Ortiz makes him work. But here's what I think is the deepest thing that this movie gets right about Rocky and why this relationship hits so hard. Ryland and Rocky are not drawn together by destiny or by some cosmic significance.

[00:05:13]They find each other by accident in the most isolated possible situation. Two beings from entirely different star systems with nothing culturally in common who probably would have never met under any other circumstances. and they become friends anyway because they're both scientists, because they're both curious, because curiosity apparently is a universal language even when every other language fails. There's something genuinely radical about that. Most first contact stories are about conflict or awe or fear. This one is about, and I know this sounds small, but I mean it as a compliment, just two people figuring out how to be around each other, which leads to some pretty touching moments in the movie, like when Ryland is showing Earth to Rocky in that projection room.

[00:05:53]That's why the ending works the way it does. Ryland's choice, what it costs him, and why Rocky is worth it. You believe it completely. Because the movie spent two and a half hours making you believe in this friendship as something real, something that transcends every possible difference between two beings.

[00:06:08]When that moment comes, it earns every single tear. I want to zoom out for a second because I don't think the Rocky question is a question about one character in one movie. I think it's a question about what science fiction is for. The genre has spent decades fixating on what aliens would want from us to invade us, to enlighten us, to judge us. Rocky asks a different question. What would it actually be like to just meet one? To sit with the stranges of another kind of mind and try patiently to understand it, to discover that understanding is possible even when everything else is different. At a moment when a lot of big budget sci-fi leans into nihilism and spectacle, project Mary makes the radical argument that cooperation is more interesting than conflict. that curiosity is more powerful than fear. Rocky is the physical embodiment of that argument.

[00:06:53]Proof that you can have a character who is truly completely alien and still make an audience love them, maybe more than any human character in the film. Rocky made us cry over a rock. And the fact that he did. The fact that we were willing to says something kind of beautiful about us as well. Well, if you haven't seen Project Hail Mary yet, I genuinely envy you and I appreciate you watching this video and possibly getting spoiled. But see it now. is out on home video and probably still showing in some of your theaters. And I want to hear what you think. What do you think about my analysis of Rocky? Do you agree? Do you think these were the reasons it worked? Or are there new reasons you think why Rocky affected all of us so emotionally in the theater and made this movie one of the standout movies of 2026 already? Let me know what you thought about all of it down in the comments section below. Thank you so much for watching this video. Appreciate it madly. Please remember to subscribe down below and hit that bell button so you see where we're dropping all the content we do here on the channel, especially these new video essays that I'm very focused on doing so much more of here in 2026. I want to hear from you. Let me know what you think about it and what subjects would you want to see me tackle on a video essay just like this in the future. All right, take care of yourselves. Be well, and I'll talk to you next time with another brand new video just like this here on the John Roa channel.

[00:08:13]Heat. Heat.