Project Hail Mary Is the Best Sci-Fi Movie Since Arrival, and It's Not Close

I have a rule about movies I claim to love: if I only loved it once, in a perfect cinema, on a perfect night, I do not trust it yet. Project Hail Mary passed the harder test. I saw it three times, in three different rooms, with three different kinds of audience energy, and the ending got me every single time. That is not a small thing for a film built around a man alone on a spaceship, a dying sun, and a scientific problem that could easily have felt like homework. The film earns its emotion the old-fashioned way, by making you care about two beings — one person and one gloriously strange alien — before it asks you to care about the fate of a planet.

The comparison to Arrival is doing real work here, and it is not just hype. Arrival gave mainstream audiences a first-contact story that was about language, grief, and choice rather than laser battles, and it trusted viewers to sit with an idea. Project Hail Mary does something just as brave in a different register: it trusts viewers to laugh. It is warm where Arrival is solemn, chatty where Arrival is hushed, and that warmth is not a compromise. It is the point. A story about loneliness only lands if you can feel what connection would actually be like, and this film makes connection look funny, awkward, stubborn, and deeply human.

Rocky is the whole movie, in the best way

Let us be blunt: a first-contact movie lives or dies on the alien, and Rocky is a triumph. He is not a cute sidekick and he is not a riddle to be solved. He reads, instantly, as a person with his own worries, his own pride, and his own reasons for being out there in the dark. The animation and voice work matter, but what matters more is the writing around him. He and Grace do not simply exchange information; they misunderstand each other, they annoy each other, they learn each other's limits, and then they build something together that neither could build alone.

That middle stretch, where the two of them are simply working a problem side by side, is my favourite kind of blockbuster filmmaking because it is so unfashionable. There is no villain monologuing, no ticking clock artificially cranked up every five minutes, no betrayal twist to keep the audience awake. There is just curiosity. Grace talks to himself, names his equipment, gets overexcited about chemistry, and slowly stops being alone. Rocky, in turn, stops being a mystery and starts being a friend. If you have ever had a friendship form around a shared project — a lab bench, a rehearsal room, a long drive with a broken map — you will recognise the rhythm immediately. It is not sentimental in the cheap sense. It is sentimental in the true sense: it believes that working together is a form of love.

That is also why the adaptation choices work so well. Adapting Andy Weir is hard because so much of his pleasure on the page comes from watching a smart person show his work. On screen, pages of calculation would be death. Lord and Miller, with Drew Goddard's script, understand that the science should be texture, not lecture. The film keeps enough of the problem-solving to make the stakes feel real and the solutions feel earned, but it cuts ruthlessly toward the emotional architecture underneath: what Grace remembers, what he agreed to, what was done to him, and what he is willing to give up now that he understands the full picture. The flashbacks are doing moral work, not just exposition work, even when their pacing stumbles.

Gosling, finally allowed to be the whole performance

Gosling is the other reason this film holds together, and I want to be specific about why. For years he has been cast as the quiet man, the stoic dreamboat, the guy who says very little and lets the camera do the talking. He is excellent at that, but it has hidden his funniest and most vulnerable gear. Here he gets to be goofy without being a joke, earnest without being naive, and scared without losing his sense of humour. Grace is a middle school teacher, not a square-jawed action hero, and Gosling plays that ordinariness as a strength. He is the kind of person who would try to explain something clearly, fail, try again, and then laugh at himself for failing. In a story about the end of the world, that small human comedy is what keeps the film from collapsing into bleakness.

That does not mean the film is flawless, and I am glad to name its flaws plainly instead of waving them away for a 9.0. The Earth flashbacks do bunch up early and thin out late, and a few of them repeat information the space story has already made clear. A tighter edit could have trimmed the film without losing anything essential. The score, too, occasionally tells you how to feel a beat before you have had a chance to feel it yourself, especially in the scenes with Rocky that would land harder in silence. These are real criticisms, but they are also the criticisms you make about a film you admire. They are about calibration, not conception. The conception is sound.

What the film means for science fiction more broadly is the part I keep returning to. For years the genre at blockbuster scale has split into two camps: superhero stories wearing science-fiction clothes, and grim dystopias wearing science-fiction clothes. Both can be good, but neither leaves much room for the middle ground that gave us films about ideas, scale, and human smallness in a vast universe. Project Hail Mary plants itself firmly in that middle ground and then, crucially, refuses to be homework. It moves, it jokes, it runs a tight two hours and ten minutes that feels much shorter, and it walks out of the cinema with you. You do not just admire it afterwards. You feel oddly hopeful, oddly tender toward strangers, oddly ready to believe that curiosity might be a survival skill rather than a luxury.

So yes: see it in a theatre, on the biggest screen you can find, with someone who will not judge you for tearing up. That is not just a viewing tip. It is part of the argument the film is making. Some stories need a room full of people breathing together to work properly, and a first-contact story about loneliness is surely one of them. Project Hail Mary is funny, warm, and emotionally complete in a way mainstream science fiction has rarely managed in the last decade. It deserves its score, and it deserves an audience willing to meet it halfway.

Verdict: 9.0/10. The best mainstream sci-fi movie in a decade. Please go.