Project Hail Mary Review: I Came for the Science, I Stayed for the Rock

I went into Project Hail Mary expecting a smart space movie. I came out having complicated feelings about a rock with five legs.

Let me say the conclusion first so nobody wastes their time: this is an 11/10 for me. Not because it's flawless — because it came out of nowhere and hit a nerve I didn't know was exposed. This one is staying in my head forever.

Spoilers from here. Everything. Turn back if you haven't watched it.

The setup, if you somehow missed it

Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) — a middle school science teacher with a molecular biology PhD — wakes up on a spaceship, light-years from home, with no memory of who he is or why he's there. Something called Astrophage is eating the Sun. Earth has one shot. He is it.

The first twenty minutes are a comedy and nobody warned me

Grace waking up and stumbling around the ship in that hibernation getup is legitimately hilarious. He moves like a man who was born forty seconds ago and is already late for something. Then he starts naming equipment he doesn't remember learning — am I a genius? why do I know that? — and you realize the movie has quietly taught you the entire ship's layout while you were laughing.

That's the Lord and Miller trick. They make you learn things while you're distracted by the joke.

Carl is the funniest man alive and he isn't even in the book

Officer Carl (Lionel Boyce, from The Bear) is Stratt's security guy — basically assigned to babysit Grace and instead gets pulled into his gravity. Their astrophage lab scenes are the best comedy in the film. Three astrophage on the slide, they run the test, suddenly there are four, and Grace goes we're fathers now.

Here's the fun part: Carl isn't really a character from the novel. Boyce has said the role was originally about a day of work, and Lord and Miller kept writing him more scenes because the chemistry with Gosling was working. A lot of what's on screen is improvised. So the funniest man in the movie is essentially an accident that everyone decided to keep.

He also matters thematically, which snuck up on me. Carl has zero scientific training, and when Grace is stuck on how to replicate the crisis conditions in the lab, it's Carl who suggests the fix. Grace doesn't get defensive about it. He just says thanks and uses it. That's the whole movie's thesis in one small scene.

Then Grace gets escorted onto a jet, dropped into a massive international briefing with no idea what's happening, and you can watch a man realize his life is over in real time.

Rocky. Okay. Rocky.

Their first contact is perfect and I refuse to hear otherwise.

Grace fleeing while the alien ship just... follows him. The sphere Rocky sends over that Grace fumbles, so Rocky sends the next one slower, and Grace's wounded little "they think we're idiots." Then the actual meeting — both of them screaming, both of them ready to fight, both of them realizing simultaneously that this is a misunderstanding. Then the dancing. The mimicking. The moment Rocky laughs for the first time.

Here's the thing that makes it work, and I didn't know this until after: Rocky is a real puppet. Built by Neal Scanlan's creature shop, performed on set by James Ortiz leading a team of puppeteers they nicknamed the Rockyteers. Ortiz was only supposed to operate the puppet and speak the lines temporarily — the plan was to dub a famous actor over him later. Lord and Miller watched the footage and decided they couldn't improve on it, so the puppeteer's performance is what's in the movie. Miller has said the final shots are roughly half puppetry, half VFX. Variety reports Ortiz is being submitted for Best Supporting Actor.

An eyeless rock. For Best Supporting Actor. And honestly? Deserved.

And "Rocky hate Mark" — the line everyone quotes — was improvised too. Gosling was riffing about an ex, named the other guy "Mark" after a real friend of his standing behind the camera, and Ortiz fired back in character to make the guy feel seen. That's the most beautiful piece of trivia I've learned all year.

The loneliness is the real antagonist

There's no villain here. Astrophage isn't evil, it's just hungry. The enemy is being alone.

The pre-launch party scene wrecked me. Everyone's celebrating, and Grace is standing off to the side with a drink, watching people have a life. Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) told him earlier that he has no pets, no emergency contact, nobody. And it lands like an accusation, because part of me thought: is that why they picked him? They didn't, technically — the actual science officers died in a training explosion and there was no time to train a replacement. But the movie lets that ugly little suspicion sit there anyway, because Grace himself is clearly wondering it.

Then Stratt sings.

You were not the only one who felt that scene, and here's the wild part: it wasn't in the script. Gosling overheard Hüller singing to herself while they were filming on an aircraft carrier, got obsessed with the idea, and begged her to do it. She agreed on one condition — she picked the song. She chose Harry Styles' "Sign of the Times." The production had about 36 hours to clear the rights, from a small English town, calling Los Angeles and waiting for people to wake up. Test audiences named it their favorite scene every single time. It ended up in the trailers and became the movie's whole emotional signature.

It's the only moment the most controlled person in the film lets herself be a person.

The romance thing — you're not imagining it

You asked if you were the only one who felt something between Grace and Stratt. You're not, and it's not a misread.

In the novel they're strictly co-workers. Stratt is colder and the book never softens her. The film adds it on purpose — a handful of lingering looks, a few conversations carrying more weight than they need to. It's deliberately small enough to miss. And yes, when she drugs him and puts him on that ship against his will, she is visibly close to tears, quietly begging him not to fight her. She's crying while destroying his life, because the alternative is everyone dying anyway.

Gut-wrenching, and — sorry — also very funny, because Gosling is sprinting.

Two loners in an empty universe

The thing that makes Grace and Rocky work is that Rocky is a loner too. Both of them lost their crews. Both of them were sent out to die quietly for people who'll never know their names. They find each other in the middle of absolute nothing, and it's pure chance.

The rescue after the ship's spin accident is the most bro moment in any movie this year. Rocky leaves his own environment — an environment Grace's body would kill him in, and vice versa — to go get him. No hesitation. Their eventual separation is a knife between the ribs.

Grace chose Rocky, and I need to correct one thing about that

This is the part everyone gets slightly wrong, including me at first, and the correction actually makes it better.

When Grace realizes Taumoeba can eat through xenonite — and Rocky's entire ship is xenonite, meaning his fuel gets devoured and he dies slowly and alone in the dark — Grace turns the ship around.

But he does not sacrifice Earth. He'd already sent the probes with the Taumoeba samples and all his research. Earth is saved either way. What he's giving up is his own way home. The man who was so desperate not to be a hero that he tried to run from the launch pad, who had to be drugged and carried onto the ship — that man voluntarily burns his only ticket back to Earth for a friend.

That's the reversal the whole film is built on. Not "he picked the alien over humanity." He picked someone else over himself, which is exactly the thing he was incapable of at the start.

The ending, and the Stratt detail you definitely missed

Grace lives on Erid in a purpose-built dome, and it's not sentimental to point out that this is a biological necessity, not a courtesy. Eridians breathe ammonia at crushing pressure and lethal heat. No human could ever set foot on that planet unprotected. His species and theirs are physically incompatible in every direction.

Which is why the point stands: they built him a world. Not because humans are welcome on Erid — they aren't, they can't be — but because he's Rocky's. That bond is the entire visa.

And then he teaches. A class of young Eridians, hanging on every word about a star they'll never see. The same job he had on Earth, where he was a nobody. Here, he's the cool alien uncle who saved the sky. Rocky tells him the Hail Mary is repaired and ready to take him home whenever he wants. Grace says he'll think about it.

He never says yes. That's the ending.

I saw a post saying Earth would never accept Grace the way Erid did, and I think that's right. On Earth he was a footnote with no emergency contact. On Erid he's a hero and a neighbor.

Now the detail I completely missed on my first watch, and it changes the last scene:

Stratt watching Grace's transmissions on a boat is not in the novel — the book never shows us Earth afterward. The film adds it, and if you look closely she has a small tattoo: a V with a line through it. Lord and Miller confirmed it means a life sentence without parole. The idea came from Andy Weir himself, who was on set during the adaptation.

The implied off-screen story: once the Hail Mary launched, Stratt's authority ended, governments turned on her, she was tried for abuse of power and imprisoned in France for life — and then she used her connections to break out, and spent the rest of it on the run, still trying to save the world. In the novel she offhandedly predicts exactly this fate and Weir never resolves it. The film quietly resolves it in a tattoo most people will never notice.

And the ice she's sailing through is shattered, in a world that's supposed to be freezing over. The book has her nuking Antarctica to force a greenhouse effect and buy Earth time. The movie cuts that entirely — but leaves the broken ice on screen for anyone who wants to do the math.

That's the level this thing is operating at.

Verdict: 11/10

Project Hail Mary is legendary to me because it arrived out of nowhere and refused to be cynical. In a genre that keeps insisting the universe is cold, this one says: yeah, it is — and two idiots found each other in it anyway.

What it left me with: let go of the past you keep re-reading. Spend the time you actually have on what you actually like. Cherish it while it's still happening.

Watch it. Then message me about the rock.