Project Hail Mary: The Friendship That Saved Two Worlds
- Ben Sorensen
- 2 minutes ago
- 5 min read
There are films that ask big questions about the universe. And then there's Project Hail Mary, which asks the biggest question a story can possibly ask; what does it mean to find a friend? All while set in the middle of deep space, answering it with a puppet, and somehow making you cry in public about it all.
Let's start with what the marketing won't fully prepare you for. This is not primarily a film about saving the world. The world-saving is homework that’s giving side quest energy. The friendship is the film.
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with initially no memory of who he is, where he's going, or why the two crew members beside him are no longer in a position to answer those questions. What follows is a slow, funny, surprisingly joyful reconstruction of a man piecing himself together. Then, just when you've settled into that story, the film opens a door and changes everything.
Through that door walks Rocky.
Here is where Project Hail Mary earns every comparison you're about to hear. Rocky, a physical puppet, built and breathed into life by legendary creature designer Neal Scanlan's shop and performed on set in every single scene by theater artist James Ortiz, is as fully realised a character as anything put on screen in recent memory. Rocky is not "impressive for a puppet." Not "surprisingly convincing." Rocky is a character. A person. Someone you'd want to have a conversation with, if the language barrier weren't quite so astronomically literal.
The decision to make Rocky practical, present, and physical on set with Gosling was not just a technical choice. It was a storytelling choice, arguably one of the most important the filmmakers made. There is not a single green screen in this entire film. Not one. The spaceship is a real set you can touch. The darkness of space was lit and photographed rather than painted in post. And Rocky was actually there, actually doing things, in front of an actor who could actually react.
You can feel it. The chemistry between Grace and Rocky is earned the way real chemistry always is; slowly, imperfectly, through the accumulated small moments of two beings from completely different worlds trying to understand each other.
What the film gets profoundly right, and what sets it apart from almost every other science fiction film about alien contact, is its refusal to reach for fear. There are no weapons drawn. No misunderstandings that escalate into violence. No instinct to dominate or destroy the unknown. Just two travellers, impossibly alone, each carrying the weight of their dying worlds, meeting each other with curiosity instead of dread.
Project Hail Mary is, in the quietest possible way, a radical film.
It dares to imagine that the first genuine contact between two intelligent species might go well. Not easily, nothing about their communication is easy. but well. It treats problem-solving as a kind of love language.
Both Grace and Rocky are scientists. Both are adaptive thinkers who reassess their understanding the moment new information arrives, without ego and without sentimentality. The film presents that quality, the willingness to be wrong, to adjust, to evolve your thinking in real time as one of the finest things a being can do. For better, and occasionally for worse. It's quietly radical, in the way the best science fiction always is.
Two beings, impossibly alone, each carrying a dying world — and what they find in each other is not rescue. It's connection.
Gosling is doing career-best work, and the specific reason is that he spends half the film in conversation with someone who communicates in a completely different way, and he has to make you believe both sides of that exchange. He does. He's funny, properly funny, not charming-movie-star funny and he’s quietly devastating in equal measure and all with an underlying genuine warmth. He carries the film's science with a light hand and its emotion with a heavy one, which is exactly the right way around. Gosling is also a producer on this film, and you sense his investment in it not just in the performance but in the texture of every scene.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the duo behind The Lego Movie, 21 Jump Street, and the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse) haven't directed a live-action film since 2014. That's twelve years. It turns out they were saving themselves for this. Their signature quality has always been finding the emotional core buried inside a genre premise that seems like it shouldn't work, and here they've done it on the grandest possible scale. Screenwriter Drew Goddard, who was nominated for an Oscar for adapting Weir's previous novel The Martian, brings the same gift for making hard science feel like pure pleasure.
Behind the camera, Melbourne-born cinematographer Greig Fraser (the Oscar winner behind both Dune films and The Batman) shot the film using two different film stocks, one for space and one for Earth, via a process of transferring digital footage onto celluloid before scanning it back. The result is a film that feels textured, physical, and real in a way that most space epics don't. It makes the void feel like somewhere you could actually be.
Andy Weir's source novel was already one of the most beloved science fiction reads in years. A New-York Times number-one bestseller that made the personal recommendation lists of both Bill Gates and Barack Obama, and accumulated over 170,000 reviews on Goodreads. Weir was a producer on the film, present on set for the entire shoot, and has been openly joyful about what Lord and Miller have done with it. Readers of the book will recognise every beat. Everyone else will simply feel every beat. Both outcomes are correct.
The film has debuted to a 96% score on Rotten Tomatoes from over 100 critics. The minority view, fairly put, is that it runs long and that Grace's character could use more grounding in the real world he's left behind. These are not wrong observations. They're just answering a different question from the one the film is asking.
See this on the biggest screen you can find.
That is not a polite suggestion. The film was shot for IMAX and it knows it. There are moments where the scale is designed to operate on you physically, to make you feel, in your chest and not just your head, how enormous the universe is, and how remarkable it is that any two beings within it ever manage to truly reach each other at all.
This generation has its E.T. And it arrived, appropriately enough, from very far away.
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