Project Hail Mary (2026) – The Chiswick Cinema film reviews

Project Hail Mary is now is showing at The Chiswick Cinema, book tickets here: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2

In their first live action feature in over a decade, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller deliver a warm and occasionally beautiful space epic that, if you can forgive its excesses, is well worth seeing on the big screen

It takes a little while to adjust to the tone of Project Hail Mary. Ryan Gosling wakes up alone on a spaceship and immediately starts quipping his way through it, all self deprecating one liners and nervous energy, in a tone that near two decades of Marvel films has made feel like the default setting for modern blockbusters.

Not inherantly bad, but if that tone has become a little jarring to some, as it has me, the opening stretch requires some patience.

It’s probably unfair to tarnish directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller with the Marvel brush, this has long been their style. Their previous work, from 21 Jump Street through to 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, all follow this joke a minute structure, and they’ve earned the right to it.

Ryan Gosling, to his credit, is one of the very few actors who can sustain that comic energy without it becoming exhausting. He has the charisma and the timing to ensure it never feels entirely hollow, and he is fast becoming something of a signature sci-fi presence.

Blade Runner 2049, First Man (not strictly sci-fi, but still, space, rockets, existential dread etc) and now this: three completely different corners of the genre, each demanding something distinct.

Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, Image credit: IMDB

In Blade Runner he was all stillness and melancholy, in First Man, coiled grief, here he’s loose, insecure and charming.

Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher and former molecular biologist who gets recruited, against his will, as the last hope for a mission to save the Earth from an organism that is slowly killing the sun.

He wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, and has to piece together both who he is and what he’s supposed to be doing.

Drew Goddard’s screenplay, his second adaptation of Andy Weir’s work after The Martian, borrows from a lot of places. Interstellar, Ad Astra, The Martian obviously: the lone guy in space is well trodden ground. There’s the civilians out of their depth energy of Armageddon, E.T. and Arrival for the business of learning to communicate with something previously unknown.

There’s a direct Close Encounters musical reference, a knowing Alien nod, and a self aware streak running through the whole thing that feels very much of a piece with Lord and Miller’s previous work. Much like 21 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, it wears its influences openly, and sees its similarities to genre predecessors as a feature, rather than a bug. Mostly, it works.

The practical effects are essential to that. The entire Hail Mary spacecraft was built as a physical set, and Lord and Miller shot the whole film, reportedly costing around $248 million, with minimal digital effects, favouring physical builds over greenscreens. The ship feels like a real place, with weight and texture.

Impactful sci-fi needs to feel grounded, and the commitment to practical filmmaking gives the film a tangibility that so much modern blockbuster filmmaking lacks. Greig Fraser, who won an Oscar for his cinematography on Dune, shoots the space sequences in full IMAX and the Earth flashbacks in widescreen, and it all looks great.

Rocky, the alien, is a puppet. This is maybe the single most important creative choice the film makes. In my review of Wasteman earlier this year, a film that lived or died on the chemistry between its two leads, I wrote that its success relied almost entirely on the friction between them.

READ ALSO: Wasteman (2026) – The Chiswick Cinema film reviews

Project Hail Mary is the same kind of film in that respect, a two-hander that needs its central relationship to work, or nothing else matters.

Where Wasteman ran on malice and tension, this one runs on warmth and playfulness. Rocky is performed and voiced on set by James Ortiz, an award-winning New York theatre puppeteer, in his film debut.

Gosling is acting with something that was actually in the room with him, and you can see that in every interaction. Rocky is expressive without having a face, funny without ever feeling like a sidekick, and immediately easy to care for.

The Chiswick Cinema

When Grace builds a translation system from scratch, stumbling through misunderstandings and slowly arriving at mutual understanding, the film reaches its highest point.

Watching someone learn to communicate with a fun little space guy is just inherently good, and it taps into something fundamental about why sci-fi works as a genre: the sense of wonderment, the idea that the universe might contain something extraordinary just beyond what we currently know.

This middle stretch, where Grace is alone on the ship figuring things out and then bonding with Rocky, is meditative and frequently wonderful.

The film is happy not to get too caught up in the science, and it’s better for it. How does ageing work across interstellar travel? Don’t worry about it. Space is silent when the mood requires it, and noisy when it doesn’t. The screenplay trusts you to go along with the broad strokes.

An interesting choice is the near total absence of an antagonist. Not just no villain, there is nobody in this film who is arrogant, or scheming, or even particularly unlikeable. Sandra Hüller’s Eva Stratt, who in another film might have been a cold-blooded authority figure, is played instead with warmth and competence.

It gives the film a gentleness that feels unusual for a blockbuster at this scale.

While the highs are very high, it doesn’t quite manage to always sustain its peaks. There are a baffling number of endings, and at two hours and thirty-six minutes the final act could really do with a firmer edit.

But I was charmed by the conclusion they eventually settled on, and I suspect most audiences will be too.

Project Hail Mary is derivative, overlong, and occasionally tonally jarring. It is also warm, beautiful, and genuinely moving. Go and see it at the cinema.

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