Project Hail Mary (Amazon MGM Studios, General Admission, Lord Miller, MGM, Open Invite Entertainment, Pascal Pictures, Waypoint Entertainment, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, April 1) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC 18 movie theatres in Fashion Valley to see Project Hail Mary, which turned out to be a quite compelling if sometimes flawed movie. It was also an ironic reflection of the current Zeitgeist because, in an age when the U.S. population is being conditioned by our government to hate and fear undocumented immigrants as so-called “illegal aliens,” it’s basically a friendship story between a human, molecular biologist turned middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and a literal alien, Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz). The science-fictional premise is that a microorganism from space called an “astrophage” is menacing life on a large number of solar systems, including ours and that of Rocky’s home planet, Erid. The way it does that is it sets up a line, called a “Petrova line” after the person who discovered it, between the star it’s targeting and a nearby planet with an atmosphere mostly of carbon dioxide, where it can breed and ultimately eat up the star. An international scientific team led by a German woman, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller, who looks like she’s from the previous generation to Grace but is actually just two years older than Ryan Gosling), recruits Grace to their research division because he’s an expert microbiologist, even though his one big theory aroused a lot of opposition and he turned out to be wrong. Grace figures out that the astrophage is a single-celled organism that literally lives off light, and as it consumes light and destroys the star source it’s feeding off of, it also releases a burst of energy that represents its, shall we say, “excreta.” The team has discovered that one star in the known universe, Tau Ceti, is immune from consumption by astrophages, though they don’t know how or why. To find out, they recruit a team consisting of a commander, engineer, and scientist to travel to Tau Ceti on a spaceship literally powered by astrophage shit, that precisely because the astrophages store so much energy will be able to travel at near-light speeds.

Only just before the ship is supposed to depart, some of the astrophages being studied at the base camp cause an explosion that kills the scientist on the crew, and after asking for permission and not getting it, Stratt and her crew decide that Grace will replace the scientist on the ship. They give Grace an injection that puts him into a medically induced coma, and when he comes to he’s already on board the ship on a one-way mission to Tau Ceti since the ship is large enough to carry enough astrophage fuel to get there but not to return. When the ship arrives at Tau Ceti Grace sees a giant spacecraft already in orbit around it. It turns out the spaceship is from Erid and, like Grace’s own craft, is inhabited by just one living crew member; the other 20 who left with it all died under mysterious circumstances, as did the other two crew members of Grace’s Earth ship, pilot Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and engineer Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub). From that point the film becomes a quite moving tale owing a lot to Robinson Crusoe (indeed, it’s a considerably better movie than the actual 1964 film Robinson Crusoe on Mars, with which it shares some of the same tropes; I wrote about that one at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/12/robinson-crusoe-on-mars-aubrey-schenck.html), as Grace and Rocky (the latter a name Grace gives the Eridian because he resembles a pile of animate rocks, sort of like The Thing in the Fantastic Four comics only considerably smaller) form an uncertain bond, overcome their problems – including that each breathes an atmosphere totally toxic to the other, as well as how to communicate with each other (to human ears, Rocky’s native language sounds like wind noises) – and finally realize they have to make common cause to save both their planets. The friendship between Grace and Rocky (all the more moving because of the sheer weight of the barriers between them) and the extent to which Grace has to learn navigating skills and the ability to do space walks to obtain the all-important samples of the bacteria, native to Tau Ceti’s fifth planet, which neutralize and kill the astrophages is the core of this movie and more than makes up for its problems.

For one thing, the movie is too damned loud; instead of the long stretches of silence that punctuated Stanley Kubrick’s and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (still the best science-fiction film ever made, and arguably the best film ever made, period), we get a continual din from Daniel Pemberton’s music score and Erik Aadahl’s oppressive sound design. The one time directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (who previously have been known only for animated comedies and camp-fests like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) and screenwriter Drew Goddard (who wrote the script for The Martian, the last major movie based on a novel by Andy Weir) let us have a moment of silence to symbolize the vastness of space, it got ruined by a sonic bleed-through from a movie being shown in the adjoining theatre. (That’s one of the eternal down sides of watching films in multiplex theatres.) There’s also the unlikelihood of representatives from the world’s nations coming together to deal with the astrophage threat; Justin Chang’s review of Project Hail Mary in The New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review) lampooned this. “One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international cooperation and competent leadership,” Chang wrote. “Talk about science fiction.” If an astrophage invasion actually happened and caused the sun to cool down to an extent that would threaten to annihilate all life on earth within 30 years, Donald Trump would probably say, “Great! Now all those environmentalist wackos will stop bothering me about global warming!” (With his total self-absorption, he’d probably also figure that at age 79 he’d be dead before it actually became a problem.) I also had a problem with the film’s sheer length, 156 minutes, though some of the younger members of our audience actually were sorry that the film wasn’t even longer. (This is the generation that binge-watches a 10-hour TV miniseries in a single “streaming” sitting, which has led me to joke that 1920’s director Erich von Stroheim, who got ridiculed for wanting an audience to sit through a 10-hour movie, is in heaven thinking, “Now is when I should be alive! Technology has finally caught up with me!”)

There are also those jarring flashbacks to Grace’s life pre-launch; the film actually opens with scenes of Grace coming to inside the spacecraft with a full growth of beard that makes him look like the Unabomber, and the idea, at least according to Chang, is that his memory of past events is coming back to him in dribs and drabs that just happen to flash back to him in chronological sequence. (I’d have liked it better if he’d had one long flashback giving us the full exposition in one go.) Rocky and Grace name the planet from which they harvested the astrophage-killing bacteria “Adrian,” after Rocky’s partner back home on Erid – which made me wonder briefly whether Eridians have a gender binary at all, and if so is Rocky female or are Rocky and Adrian a same-sex couple. Ultimately Rocky is able to restock Grace’s ship with enough astrophage to get him back to Earth – the scenes in which Rocky talks Grace out of meekly accepting his death en route are among the most poignant and moving of the film – only there’s another wrinkle in the plot. Grace realizes that xenonite, the mineral out of which Rocky’s ship is made (on Earth xenon is a gas, but apparently on Erid it’s a solid), is vulnerable to the astrophage-eating bacteria which Rocky and Grace have loaded onto the spacecraft. So Grace has to detour back from his route back to Earth to save Rocky’s spacecraft and enable Rocky to save Erid. Before he turns back and heads for Erid he sends the bacteria that will save Earth in four pods labeled “Ringo,” “George,” “John,” and “Paul” (and in case we didn’t get the point, the soundtrack blasts us with The Beatles’ song “Two of Us”). Ultimately Grace ends up stranded on Erid, teaching science to a bunch of young Eridians, while Eva Stratt (ya remember Eva Stratt?) celebrates Earth’s redemption by leading her crew in a karaoke performance of Harry Styles’s song “Sign of the Times.” (It’s not her fault that Harry Styles has to compete with The Beatles – even a lesser song from their catalog – and inevitably loses.) But the elements I found oppressive about Project Hail Mary pale beside the ones I liked about it, particularly the friendship between Grace and Rocky. It’s particularly ironic given that Project Hail Mary was produced by Amazon MGM Studios, the same enterprise that gave us Melania, the $75 million ($40 million in production costs, including $18 million in rights payment to Melania Trump herself) ego-suck to Donald and Melania Trump. Now it looks like Jeff Bezos is going to make back all the money he sunk into Melania with a bona fide commercial hit that runs against everything the Trumps stand for: love between species, self-sacrifice, international cooperation, and an overall breakdown of the barriers between people and, in this case, other sentient life forms as well.