- Project Hail Mary ditches space opera gravity for warm, hilarious interspecies friendship.
- Ryan Gosling’s everyman charm carries a story bigger than any galaxy could contain.
- Rocky the alien is already the most lovable screen creature in years, maybe decades.
- Phil Lord and Christopher Miller remind us that blockbusters can still feel genuinely human.
There’s a moment in nearly every great buddy film where two wildly mismatched people realize they need each other more than they’d ever admit. Project Hail Mary, releasing March 20, earns that moment at light speed, except one half of this duo happens to be a craggy, multi-legged rock spider who communicates through musical tones and makes the whole thing work with astonishing warmth.
Ryan Gosling plays Dr. Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship several light years from home, with two dead crewmates and absolutely no memory of why he’s there. It’s a classic setup for existential dread. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, returning to the director’s chair for the first time since being famously ousted from Solo, choose laughs over dread. Smart move. The duo crafted a thrilling, attractive outer space adventure-comedy with drama that genuinely moves you, taking a complex production riddled with tricky story elements and making it look easy.
What sets Project Hail Mary apart from your standard stranded-astronaut survival story is the relationship at its center. Grace eventually crosses paths with Rocky, an alien engineer sent from his own planet on a nearly identical mission to investigate why their shared star isn’t dying the way ours is. Rocky can’t breathe Grace’s atmosphere. Grace can’t survive Rocky’s. And yet somehow, they build a friendship that’s part parenting, part workplace comedy, and part something cinema rarely attempts with a straight face: genuine alien kinship.
James Ortiz, who puppets Rocky and eventually voices him, delivers a performance capable of nearly outshining Gosling himself, and that’s saying something. Rocky’s clicking, scampering expressiveness is the kind of creature work that makes you forget about CGI entirely.
The film doesn’t hide what it’s really about. Grace’s arc is the classic stunted-man story: brilliant, avoidant, and quietly terrified of mattering to anyone. It’s dressed in hard sci-fi clothes, complete with real orbital mechanics, astrophysics problem-solving, and the kind of classroom-experiment energy Andy Weir perfected in The Martian. But the science is a backdrop here. Lord, Miller, and Gosling help animate the idea that it’s still possible to pull off a Spielbergian romp that doesn’t sacrifice smarts or empathy.
The two-and-a-half hour runtime includes some uneven flashback sequences back on Earth, involving Sandra Hüller’s steely mission director, that occasionally slow the momentum. But every time the film returns to Grace and Rocky’s evolving relationship, aboard their respective ships, communicating through improvised science and sheer stubbornness, it becomes something genuinely special.
This isn’t nostalgia dressed up as innovation. It’s a film that understands connection is the point, and spectacle is just the vehicle. Lord and Miller find their most personal gear here, slipping humor and heart into a story about humanity’s survival without once making it feel like a lecture or a burden.
Project Hail Mary opens in UAE cinemas on March 20. Book your IMAX tickets early. Rocky is worth every dirham!
