My cousin Phil Lord’s new movie appears to have had a very successful launch indeed: It has landed in a rarefied zone where mass audiences, genre fans, and a good chunk of the critical establishment all come away grinning, sniffling, and telling their friends: “No, really, you have to see this one”. I think this is because they manage to fuse:
a genuinely hard-science premise,
a disarmingly silly sense of humor, and
a core emotional throughline built around loyalty and friendship rather than angst and grit
The entrails are truly favorable:
<https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/2026W12/>
Not in the Marvel/Barbenheimer/Mario tier, but damned good. We will see how many legs it turns out to have both at the box office, on streaming, and in the artistic noösphere. So far both audiences and critics think that it is doing a very good job:
Typical of what I am seeing: This:
M.G. Siegler: Hail Hail <https://thoughts.spyglass.org/p/hail-hail>; ‘I saw Project Hail Mary last night. It was great. Yes, a lot of parallels with The Martian, with some Interstellar sprinkled in. But it was just nice to see a mostly optimistic movie about technology and the future. Perhaps more thoughts after I see it again as the lord intended: on an IMAX screen…
And this:
Leah Schnelbach: Project Hail Mary Is a Delightful, Optimistic Sci-Fi Adventure <https://reactormag.com/movie-review-nonspoiler-project-hail-mary/>: ‘This is a stellar adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel…. I’m not a person who cries. Not during turbulent life events, not when I’m scared, not during weddings, not on election nights, not during religious ceremonies, not during movies…. While I didn’t exactly cry during Project Hail Mary, I did tear up…. It caught me off guard. I read and enjoyed the book—it’s an involving and often very funny book…. However, the movie adaptation takes the heart of the book, the core story about friendship and the nature of bravery, opens it up, and reaches out into the audience to invite us all in. My guess is that different people will find that invitation in different moments, but when it really got to me, I found it extremely moving….
What’s good about the movie is what was good about the book: the question at its center. When exactly did we all decide there’s no future? When did we give in to the inevitability of our collapse? Why are we ceding our human creativity to AI, our hard-won scientific breakthroughs to under-educated magical thinkers? Shouldn’t we try to fight for our home’s survival and health, as long as even one of us is still breathing? How dare we give up? Maybe this sounds a little aggro—but that question is the base note thumping along under what is very much an exhilarating, heartwarming space adventure….
Ryan Gosling is fantastic…. The whole movie rises and falls on his ability to make you care about him while he’s alone in a ship, yes, but more than that he has to veer between being a scientist who gets to see space up close, and make discoveries no one’s ever made before, while also being terrified and alone all the time. I don’t think there was a single moment that felt false to me. Sandra Hüller… gives mission leader Eva Stratt a wry, fatalistic humor that makes her a real person rather than a plot device. Lionel Boyce is hilarious as Carl… a character that could have just been “stoic straight man comic relief” becomes a real person…. James Ortiz… is fantastic, and absolutely integral to this film’s success….
The special effects are largely practical. Grace’s ship is a set, and any time he does anything difficult in zero-g that means Gosling actually did those things, on wires. There’s also some amazing puppetry work. In addition to everything else it does well, Project Hail Mary is a reminder of how much better a movie looks and feels when it’s made on a real set, with props that have real heft, instead of in front of a green screen…
I have noted this before:
In my reading what the audiences seem to be positively reacting to most is the inter-species buddy story. Andy Weir’s sense of humor from the book—energetically preserved in the adaptation—does a lot of work. By the time we get to the climactic rescue, the emotional stakes are obvious. A separate strand of praise focuses on craft: how convincingly first the book and then the movie renders the engineering, the problem‑solving, and the constraints of a desperate mission. Film write‑ups have latched onto the choice to rely heavily on practical effects, and thus on props have heft.
In a media ecosystem saturated with dystopia, that may be the most striking thing about Project Hail Mary is a story about an extinction‑level threat that leaves its viewers, not complacent, but energized—reminded that ingenuity, solidarity, and a stubborn refusal to give up are still options on the table. And the story wraps this message in jokes. What’s not to like?
Well, so far two people have come across my screen who do not like it.
First, that wrapping the message in jokes is something some people do not like. For example, it really seems to have gotten the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis’s back up.
She seems to have been started from having been offended by—to be carrying a chip on her shoulder from—the fact that “The LEGO Movie” was actually good (in addition to containing the only Aristophanes shout-out I have seen on the big screen this millennium). She does not quite dare trash Project Hail Mary—she knows that would make her look really stupid—but:
Manohla Dargis: ‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling Is Lost & Found in Space <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/movies/project-hail-mary-gosling-review.html>: ‘“Project Hail Mary,” a feather-light science-fiction movie about a heavyweight subject—the end of the world…. Countries… have joined forces… telegraphs the movie’s optimism… comes off as quaintly old-fashioned….. Multilateralism… is tough to buy…. Lord and Miller are best known for “The Lego Movie”… amusing enough to make you feel almost OK about watching a feature-length commercial. The filmmakers have an advanced degree in pop culture…. The filmmakers and the actor lean into the comedy of the character’s plight, yet… that… blunts the existential terror…. Ryland [and] Rocky… [are] a little too cute, a little too programmatically Spielbergian, and… upend… the movie’s initial serio-comic balance…. [The] movie… becomes increasingly, almost willfully more insubstantial…. Lord and Miller… accentuate the positive to the detriment of the… movie…. This particular message of hope ends up being a bummer.
Second, the New Yorker’s Justin Chang brings forth what I can only characterize as a s***post.
Look: It’s fine for Justin Chang to not like the movie.
You don’t have to like movies.
It’s fine for Chang to not like Ryan Gosling’s performance.
Performances don’t have to land with you.
(It is a little rich, however, to place responsibility for what he and he alone—others see it as Oscar Best Actor-worthy—sees as Gosling’s failure (“I don’t think he’s at his best”) not on Gosling’s missing the mark but on “(mis)direction”—as if Ryan Gosling is not a professional adult.)
But it is not fine for Justin Chang to make false claims about audience reaction—to assert “the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of ‘Project Hail Mary’ expends it recklessly”.
That is just plain weird.
New Yorker Daily: Ryan Gosling’s Space Movie Doesn’t Land <https://public.hey.com/p/2vYFzWQNGUvZ41V7SLQppbPm>:‘Ryan Gosling plays a molecular biologist turned middle-school teacher turned astronaut in Project Hail Mary. He also plays to the crowd—much to our critic’s exasperation…. “It’s the most smoothly engineered crowd-pleaser I’ve seen… and I don’t mean that entirely as a compliment. All I could see, in the end, was that engineering. It’s a science-fiction comedy in which the science and the comedy—which is to say, the stakes and the humor—don’t feed each other so much as cancel each other out…. Gosling is a superb actor…. I don’t think he’s at his best in “Project Hail Mary,” and he appears to have been (mis)directed to lay it on a bit thick. At times, he seems to be playing for obvious laughs…
And:
Justin Chang: “Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/23/project-hail-mary-movie-review>: ‘Not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view… an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles…. Lord and Miller… aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur… dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible…. And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.”… The audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky…
What to say about this?
First:
Stratt’s dealings with Grace are ultimately not “brusque but not unkind”.
She drugs him—the source of his temporary amnesia—while he is continuously refusing to go on the mission, kidnaps him, and loads unwillingly onto the spaceship.
That is the very definition of “unkind”.
Chang’s assertion that Stratt is “not unkind” is a did Chang really watch the movie?!?! question-raising moment.
Second:
Please, gentle readers, to note that at the moment Project Hail Mary has a 96% rating at “Rotten Tomatoes” <https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_hail_mary> on the audience-response Popcornmeter,
Please, gentle readers, to note that at the moment Project Hail Mary has a 95% rating on the critic-judgment Tomatometer.
Please, gentle readers, compare that audience (and critic) response to Chang’s claim that the movie team’s “flippancy” “expends… recklessly” the “precious, unstable resource” that is “the audience’s goodwill”.
The audience (and the critics) appear to have finished the movie with absolutely enormous reserves of goodwill.
This is a second did Chang really…?!?! question-raising moment.
In this case, did Chang really talk to anyone else in the audience?!?!
Or does he think he is a know-it-all who knows everything about how the audience feels simply by sitting in his basement and typing into the screen as he engages in Visualizing the Cosmic All with his Gigantic Krell-Like Brain?
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