'Project Hail Mary' Movie Review: Ryan Gosling Finds Hope at the End of the Universe

At some point in Project Hail Mary, Eva Stratt, played with immaculate steeliness by Sandra Hüller, finds herself at karaoke singing 'Sign of the Times' by Harry Styles.

It is, objectively, a strange choice for a woman coordinating the survival of the human race. But then again, the situation is strange. The sun is dying.

So yes, karaoke seems appropriate. “Just stop your crying, it’s a sign of the times,” sings Stratt. In a film otherwise packed with astrophysics, extinction-level stakes and interstellar travel, that moment tells you almost everything about what the movie is really doing. Beneath the surface, this is a story about people trying to be brave for one another.

Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and adapted by Drew Goddard from Andy Weir’s bestselling novel, the film begins with a premise that requires a leap of faith. Humanity discovers that its star is being drained by a mysterious microorganism called Astrophage, which feeds on stellar energy and propagates across space. If nothing is done, Earth faces catastrophic global cooling within roughly three decades.

Stratt is a German technocrat with moral flexibility. She has accepted that saving this civilisation requires a certain amount of bullying. So she launches a multinational programme to figure out what’s going on. And then she recruits Dr Ryland Grace.

Grace is played by Ryan Gosling, who by now has perfected the art of playing men who are very smart but also slightly confused about how they ended up in this situation. Grace used to be a molecular biologist with bold ideas the scientific establishment did not appreciate. Now he is a middle-school science teacher. Stratt recruits him into a top-secret interstellar mission called Project Hail Mary.

The mission’s central idea is essentially this: go to the one star that doesn’t seem to be infected by Astrophage and see what’s going on. Yes, that is the plan. Visit another star system and see what’s up. It should feel ridiculous. Instead, it feels weirdly convincing.

Part of the reason is Gosling, who has quietly become one of the funniest actors working today. His Grace wakes up on a spaceship with amnesia and gradually remembers both the mission and the alarming fact that he appears to be responsible for saving the world. Gosling plays the whole thing with irresistible charm and sincerity. The setup has echoes of The Martian — another Weir adaptation — but Lord and Miller push the tone somewhere more playful and sentimental.

And then comes Rocky.

Rocky is an alien engineer who looks like a spider made of stone and speaks in screeching sounds. He is also, as it turns out, on exactly the same mission as Grace. His civilisation is also facing extinction because of the Astrophage, and he too is the lone survivor of a desperate interstellar gamble.

What follows is one of the most charming friendships in recent science fiction. Grace and Rocky communicate through improvised translation software that reduces Rocky’s speech to sentences like, “Fist my bump”. The result sounds a bit like The Thing (from Fantastic Four) doing tech support.

The film becomes, delightfully, a buddy comedy in space. The jokes arrive quickly. Gosling has the instincts of a stand-up comic and the script lets him run with them. But the film also lands the emotional punches with surprising precision. There is something deeply moving about two creatures from different galaxies figuring out how to look after each other.

At one point Grace tells a fellow astronaut that people who volunteer for suicide missions must have some kind of “brave gene”. The reply is simple: there is no brave gene. You just need someone to be brave for. In this film, it lands like the truth.

The movie inevitably invites comparisons. There are shades of Interstellar in its cosmic stakes and Arrival in the slow decoding of alien communication. At one point you even worry it might drift toward the lonely-astronaut anxieties of Passengers. But it never feels derivative. If anything, Project Hail Mary plays like a cheerful remix of the genre’s greatest hits.

The spaceship is a glorious maze of corridors and machinery. The alien design is tactile and expressive. The science mostly holds up, but the film also understands something essential about science fiction: you don’t have to understand the equations to feel the stakes. You just need to care about the people.

And in a world that currently feels like a constant scroll of disasters, the film’s optimism feels oddly radical. There are wars happening. The planet is overheating. The news is an endless parade of things going wrong. Project Hail Mary looks at all that and says: maybe the answer is still kindness. Someone watching you sleep so you can rest. Someone cracking jokes while the universe collapses. Someone deciding that your survival matters more than their own mission.

The ending might strike some viewers as a little too hopeful — almost like a children’s film. But maybe that’s exactly why it works. Cynicism is easy. Hope requires imagination.

Which brings us back to the karaoke. When Eva Stratt sings Sign of the Times, the lyrics about escaping the end of the world stop sounding ironic. For a film about dying stars and microscopic space organisms, Project Hail Mary turns out to be about something much simpler: bravery isn’t chest-thumping heroism. Sometimes it’s just the courage to sit beside someone, watch them sleep, and hope they wake up.