Project Hail Mary Review: When Science Fiction Forgets the Story
By Arameh Etemadi: This Project Hail Mary review comes with a caveat: I loved the book. The film is a different matter entirely, 156 minutes, one spacecraft, and a few flashbacks that don’t do much; that’s the whole thing.
The Setup
Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up on a ship, alone, with no memory, no context. The flashbacks trickle in, turns out he’s a molecular biology genius who got ignored long enough to end up teaching middle schoolers. Now he’s apparently the only person who can save Earth. Sure. The flashbacks don’t move the story forward; they exist mainly to give the audience a breath of air outside the ship’s walls. Grace must rely entirely on his own knowledge to uncover why he was sent into deep space in the first place.
The Tone Problem
The film presents a premise that deserves to be taken seriously, and scientifically, it could be. But the direction, the editing, and the fantasy elements layered over everything make it hard to stay in that headspace. There’s no real dread here—no weight to the isolation.
Part of that is Rocky, a sentient, invented, moving rock who becomes Grace’s unlikely companion. Rocky is genuinely fun. Once Rocky shows up, the film basically becomes a buddy comedy, and honestly, it’s charming. But you can’t play it that way and still ask the audience to feel the weight of deep space loneliness. The film picks warmth over dread and sticks with it. That’s a choice. Not always the right one.
The Visuals, and Their Limits
The film looks extraordinary. And yet even an IMAX screen can’t save it from itself. When a movie is this long and this visually repetitive, spectacle stops being a reward and starts being wallpaper. The scale is there. The wonder isn’t.
Ryan Gosling
To his credit, Gosling holds the whole thing together. For a film that functions essentially as a one-man show, that’s no small thing, and he’s genuinely good in it. But good acting, beautiful cinematography, and a charming alien aren’t enough to carry 156 minutes of thin storytelling.
What Project Hail Mary needed most, what science fiction needs most right now, is a real story. Everything else was already there.