YNOT at the Movies

You wake up alone on a spaceship. You don't remember your name and how you got there, or why. And somehow, saving all of humanity is your problem to solve. What would you do? That existential gut-drop is the engine of "Project Hail Mary" (USA 2026 | 156 min.), and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller make the most of it, for a while. The trouble is that this is two films in one, and the seams show.

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher, wakes up on a spacecraft light years from Earth, his memories returning in slow, disorienting fragments. As he pieces together the truth, one thing becomes clear: he is humanity's last, best hope of stopping the sun from going dark. It's a fascinating setup, intimate and eerie, and for its first act the film makes superb use of that solitude. Grace alone in the void, rationing his wits alongside his oxygen, conjures the same stripped-back tension that made "Gravity" (2013) so viscerally effective.

Then Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz) arrives, and the film becomes something else entirely.

Rocky is a spider-like, rock-armored alien who has traveled from his own star system chasing the same solar mystery. The craft involved in bringing him to life is genuinely remarkable, puppetry work that reportedly pushed the limits of what has ever been built for cinema. If you have a soft spot for multi-limbed, faceless creatures, Rocky will win you over. If not, no amount of personality will overcome the instinct to recoil.

The friendship that develops between Grace and Rocky is earnest, and the filmmakers clearly love it, treating it as the beating heart of the film. The intention is sweet. The execution, though, never quite achieves the emotional altitude it reaches for. The bond is charming rather than moving, and it never delivers the gut-punch the third act demands. Instead of drawing its power from something raw and primal, as "Gravity" did by stripping its story down to one person's pure will to survive, "Project Hail Mary" places all its emotional weight on a friendship that, despite everyone's best efforts, remains at a certain remove.

Part of the problem is that Grace himself is difficult to feel the full weight of. Ryan Gosling is excellent, funny and physically committed, doing precisely what the role asks. But the film struggles to make us feel the crushing burden of his mission, or what truly drives this unlikely hero to keep going when every rational option has run out. Without that core conviction, the stakes, however planetary in scale, drift.

Greig Fraser's cinematography is stunning in its warmth and intimacy, and the production design, a ship assembled by multiple nations with each capsule built by different hands, is one of the film's genuine triumphs, visually inventive and thematically coherent. However, at 2 hours and 36 minutes, the film also outstays its welcome. There is a tighter, more piercing version of the movie inside this one, a film that earns its emotional ending rather than simply arriving at it.

What remains is a movie with a genuinely big heart, impressive spectacle, and a belief in human connection that feels both sincere and, in the current moment, necessary. It just doesn't quite stick the landing it's been running toward for nearly three hours.

"Project Hail Mary" opens in theaters on Friday, March 20, 2026.