Project Hail Mary: A Fun Ride That Doesn't Quite Reach the Stars

Rating: 4.5 / 5

If you’ve read Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, you already know the magic of this story lives in the dialogue — the humor, the problem-solving, the unlikely friendship between a middle school science teacher and an alien that communicates through musical chords. The good news is that the film adaptation captures that magic. The less good news is that it doesn’t always trust itself to do more with it.

The Heart of the Story Translates Well

Ryan Gosling steps into the role of Ryland Grace, and he’s… fine. Solid. He carries the film competently, though the camera seems a bit too enamored with tight close-ups of his face behind a space helmet visor — a choice that starts to wear thin when there’s an entire alien spaceship to look at. Where things really click is the chemistry between Gosling and Rocky. The animated Eridian is genuinely delightful on screen, and their back-and-forth banter is one of the film’s greatest strengths. Credit where it’s due, though: a lot of that heavy lifting comes straight from Weir’s source material. The screenplay does a commendable job of distilling the book’s lengthy scientific dialogues into something that works within the time constraints of a feature film, preserving the wit and warmth that made the novel so beloved.

Cinematography: The Missed Opportunity

This is where I have to dock points. For a movie set against the backdrop of interstellar space — alien star systems, bioluminescent astrophage, two wildly different spacecraft docked together in orbit around a dying star — the cinematography feels surprisingly restrained. The editing leans toward short, frenetic cuts when it should be lingering. Let the shots breathe. Let the audience sit in the vastness of Tau Ceti and feel the isolation. Show, don’t tell.

The set design itself is excellent. The Hail Mary’s interior feels lived-in and believable, and Rocky’s ship — the Blip-A — is a wonderful piece of production design that translates the book’s descriptions into something visually distinct and alien in all the right ways. Rocky’s visual design is charming without being cartoonish, striking a balance that easily could have gone wrong. The raw materials are all there for something visually stunning. The camera just doesn’t always take advantage of them.

The Younger Audience Question

Word is that the original cut ran significantly longer, and what we got in theaters was trimmed to be more digestible for a broader, younger audience — the spring break release window is a tell. I understand the logic from a studio perspective, but I think the film suffers for it. A longer cut that let the cinematography breathe, that leaned harder into visual storytelling over exposition, would have elevated the whole experience. The best science fiction films trust their audience to sit with silence and scale. This one occasionally rushes past moments that deserved more room.

Sound Design and Score

The sound design is solid — space has the right weight to it, the mechanical hums and pressurizations of the ships feel tactile, and Rocky’s chord-based communication translates well to audio. The score, however, is largely forgettable. In a genre where music can be transcendent — Hans Zimmer’s organ in Interstellar, the Ligeti pieces in 2001 — a lackluster score is a real missed opportunity.

The Adaptation Verdict

Project Hail Mary is a very funny, very entertaining blockbuster. It’s well-made, well-cast in the ways that matter most (Rocky steals the show, as expected), and it captures the spirit of Weir’s novel about as well as a two-and-change-hour movie reasonably can.

But it doesn’t quite join my short list of screen adaptations that meet or surpass their source material. For a film to cross that threshold, the visual storytelling has to converge with score, performance, and pacing into something that transcends entertainment and becomes art. Interstellar does that. 2001: A Space Odyssey does that. It’s a high bar — competing with Nolan and Kubrick on pure visual beauty and emotional depth isn’t really fair when the budgets and directorial ambitions are in different weight classes.

Still: 4.5 out of 5. Go see it. Read the book first if you haven’t. And somebody release the longer cut.