Project Hail Mary: Mark Kermode’s scifi film review.
Our man of many movies, Mark Kermode, sits down to watch Project Hail Mary – you can watch his review above.
There’s a particular flavour of science fiction that smells faintly of whiteboards, panic, and someone frantically Googling orbital mechanics while the universe catches fire outside the window. Project Hail Mary is that flavour, bottled, shaken, and hurled into IMAX.
Based on Andy Weir’s novel, this is essentially The Martian’s spiritual cousin, only instead of one man stranded on Mars, we get one man stranded somewhere so far away that even Google Maps throws up its hands and suggests “good luck, mate.” Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a reluctant hero who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with amnesia and a rapidly dawning sense that things have gone spectacularly wrong for everyone back home. The Sun is dimming, Earth is on a countdown to deep freeze, and humanity’s last hope is… a slightly bewildered science teacher.
What follows is a clever structural dance between present-day space survival and flashbacks on Earth, where we learn that Grace didn’t exactly volunteer for this mission so much as get voluntold by Sandra Hüller’s gloriously icy Eva Stratt, a woman who treats ethics like optional DLC. The film leans into this moral ambiguity with a raised eyebrow rather than a lecture, which is refreshing in an age where Hollywood often feels the need to underline its themes with a fluorescent marker.
But let’s address the five-legged elephant in the room. Rocky.
Rocky is the film’s masterstroke. A genuinely alien alien, not just a human in a rubber forehead, brought to life through a mix of puppetry and digital wizardry that feels tactile in a way most CGI creatures have long forgotten. His relationship with Grace becomes the emotional core of the film, a buddy comedy played across the vacuum of space with translation software held together by hope and a bit of musical guesswork. It’s absurd, charming, and occasionally surprisingly moving. There’s a scene involving sacrifice that lands like a small emotional meteorite.
Visually, the film is a bit of a show-off, but in a good way. Lord and Miller juggle aspect ratios like circus performers, switching between widescreen flashbacks and towering IMAX sequences for the present-day mission. The practical sets give the Hail Mary a lived-in, slightly grubby authenticity, as if someone’s been eating crisps in the cockpit for the last few light-years. It’s all very tactile, very real, and just stylised enough to remind you that you’re watching something a bit special.
If there’s a weakness, it’s one inherited from the book. The plot occasionally feels like a greatest hits album of hard sci-fi tropes. Problem appears. Science happens. Problem solved. Repeat. It’s engaging, but you can sometimes see the narrative gears turning like a well-oiled exam question. Even so, the film’s enthusiasm for science is infectious. It makes you want to dig out your old school textbooks and shout “I knew this would be useful one day!” at nobody in particular.
Gosling, meanwhile, leans into the everyman panic with a nice mix of dry humour and existential dread. He’s less quippy than Matt Damon in The Martian, more quietly baffled, like a man who’s just realised he’s left the oven on but the oven is the Sun and he’s several light-years away.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have a soft spot for science fiction that remembers the “science” part isn’t just window dressing. Project Hail Mary may not reinvent the genre, but it understands exactly why it works in the first place. It’s about curiosity, ingenuity, and the strange, fragile connections that can form even between species separated by the vast indifference of space.
In short, it’s a crowd-pleaser with a brain, a heart, and just enough nerdy swagger to get away with both. If nothing else, it will leave you with a renewed respect for middle school science teachers. And possibly a lingering suspicion that if the end of the world does come, it’ll be solved by someone with a whiteboard and a very strong cup of tea.
