Project Hail Mary

The most consequential decision here is a material one. There is no green screen. The sets are built, the spacecraft interiors are physical, and the 2,018 visual-effects shots function as a finishing coat rather than the substance of the image. You can feel the difference in how the actors hold their eyelines and in how light behaves against real surfaces. The alien, Rocky, is a puppet with a voice by James Ortiz, which means Ryan Gosling is reacting to a thing that exists in the room with him. The lineage the film is reaching for is the practical creature work of an earlier era, and it earns the comparison more often than not.

The cinematography splits the world in two by splitting the film stock. Earth-bound flashbacks carry a grainy, nostalgic texture; the deep-space passages move to a cleaner large-format 70mm with photochemical warmth. It is an orientation trick that works below the level of conscious notice, which is the best kind. Daniel Pemberton's score is the other great asset, built on a four-note theme and instruments you rarely hear carrying a blockbuster, the ondes martenot and the cristal baschet among them. The seven-minute cue attached to the film's largest set piece opens on thudding percussion and climbs from there.

Gosling's Ryland Grace is a physical-comedy performance first, a wit second, and the film knows it. He is at his sharpest in the flashback sequences, where he has other actors to bounce against. The film is less sure of him when it leaves him entirely alone in the vacuum, which happens more than a little. Sandra Hüller works in the opposite register. Her deliveries are coy and deadpan, and she withholds enough that the emotion, when it lands, arrives with more force than the surrounding material has prepared you for. There is a karaoke sequence built around her that stands as the film's most surprising few minutes, her voice doing something her face refuses to confirm.

Where the picture wobbles is at the seam between comedy and stakes. The gag reflex that made Lord and Miller famous does not always defer to the gravity the premise is claiming, and the flashback architecture leans on aspect-ratio shifts that some viewers will find clarifying and others distracting. The film is genuinely funny and genuinely moving, sometimes within the same scene. It is less reliably both at once. If you came to The Martian for the pleasure of watching a competent person improvise their way out of death, this is playing the same instrument, tuned warmer and a half-step sillier.

Judged by what it sets out to do, which is deliver a high-concept crowd-pleaser without hiding behind a render farm, it succeeds with room to spare. The reservations are real, but they are the reservations you have about a confident film, not a broken one.

Everything past here is open. If you haven't seen it, come back after.

The fight I find most interesting is the one over Gosling. The majority read is that his Ryland Grace is a real, lived-in creation, and one argument goes further, calling it superior to the character on the page and crediting him with solving a thinness the novel never did. Michael Fairbanks takes the minority position with actual specificity: that Gosling is coasting on his default movie-star setting, and that the performance is never as dynamic as Matt Damon's in The Martian. I land closer to the majority, but Fairbanks has identified something true about the shape of the film. Gosling is best in company and thinnest in solitude, and Robert Daniels flags the same split from the other direction. A space picture that strands its lead alone for long stretches is exposing exactly the mode where its star is least electric. Both things can be true. He's very good with people to play off, and the film asks him to be alone more than serves him.

Then there's the Hüller karaoke scene, which apparently wasn't scripted at all. Gosling heard her singing on set, and it got written in. That's the kind of accident that only happens when you've built a real space for actors to occupy, and it's the strongest argument I can make for the whole no-green-screen philosophy. Guillermo del Toro's public praise for the practical commitment reads less like a courtesy and more like a manifesto, and the framing of the film as a stand against CGI-saturated, AI-adjacent blockbuster production is doing real cultural work in 2026, whatever you make of the movie underneath it.

The adaptation dispute is the one I can't settle, and I won't pretend to. Brandon Sanderson, who read the novel in advance years ago, gives it a 10 and calls the pivot from science to relationship the correct call. Serena Seghedoni argues the opposite: that the departures from the book are precisely where it fails, that the existential edges got sanded into a saccharine buddy comedy. These aren't taste positions dressed as arguments. Both writers know the source, and they're disagreeing about what the source was for. My instinct is that Sanderson is right about what the film is trying to be and Seghedoni is right about what it costs. The relationship focus is what makes the thing move; it's also what dulls the harder philosophical points the premise could have pressed.

River Phan's objection is the sharpest political read on offer, and it deserves airing even if I don't fully sign it. The argument is that dimming the sun with a blameless alien microorganism instead of human action turns a climate-catastrophe premise into an apolitical wash, one that quietly acquits the real-world culprits. I think that overstates the film's obligation to be an allegory it never claimed to be. But Phan is correct that the frictionlessness is a choice, and that a movie about a dying planet which locates the cause entirely off-world has decided, deliberately, not to look in a particular direction.

The Rocky problem is smaller but worth naming. Brandon Sanderson singles out the hamster-ball entrance as the moment the character becomes lovable, goofier than the book's version. Others found the voice a touch too sitcom-coded. I think the puppet is the film's best formal idea and the writing around it is its most uneven, and those two facts live in the same character.

Where I come down: this is Lord and Miller's most ambitious directorial swing, and the ambition is legible in the craft even when the tone slips. Peter Bradshaw notes the moments of dullness and the puppyish silliness while granting that Gosling keeps it watchable, and observes that it deliberately refuses the stunned awe of Interstellar. That refusal is the whole design. It wants to be warm rather than overwhelming, funny rather than sublime. On its own terms, it mostly gets there.