Project Hail Mary: the best sci-fi in years

Three days before watching Project Hail Mary, I reread parts of the book. I wanted to know whether my affection for the text would ruin the experience or amplify it. The result was more than I expected: the film is at once faithful to what matters in the novel and different enough to be its own thing. For fans of Andy Weir's book it's a gift. For anyone who has never heard of it, it's a doorway into one of the best pieces of science fiction cinema has produced in many years.

Andy Weir and the trick he does better than anyone

If you've seen The Martian — Ridley Scott's 2015 film, with Matt Damon surviving on Mars on potatoes and rocket physics — you already know what Andy Weir is about. He has a particular gift: take a protagonist alone, in an absurd survival situation, and turn scientific problem-solving into something genuinely thrilling. The Martian was published in 2011. Project Hail Mary came out in 2021 and did the same thing, only with higher stakes: it isn't one man trying to get home — it's humanity trying not to go extinct.

The book spent years in the adaptation queue. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — the directors of The Lego Movie and producers of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — took the project on in 2020. The choice makes sense once you watch it: they know exactly where to place humour without breaking the tension, and they know when to let a moment of silence do the work on its own.

Waking up alone, in space, with no memory

Ryland Grace wakes up on an interstellar ship. He doesn't know who he is. He doesn't know where he is. He doesn't know why he's there. Two crew members beside him are dead. As his memory returns in pieces — in flashbacks the film uses intelligently, never as a lazy narrative crutch — the viewer discovers alongside him the scale of the problem: the Sun is losing energy because of Astrophage, an extraterrestrial microorganism that consumes solar radiation. Earth has a few years before it enters a permanent winter. Grace is the only one who can save the species. And he's light years away, alone.

Ryan Gosling carries that first act almost entirely in monologue. It's a contained, precise performance — he doesn't play a hero, he plays a secondary-school science teacher who, by accident of circumstance, has become the most important human being in the universe. The humour Gosling finds in the character is essential. Without it, the film would turn into an elegy far too heavy to bear.

Rocky — the best alien in cinema in years

Everything the film gets right converges in the moment Grace discovers he isn't alone. On a neighbouring ship is Rocky: a five-legged, eyeless being with a rocky exoskeleton, from a star system called 40 Eridani. Rocky is a scientist too. Rocky's sun is also being consumed by Astrophage. And Rocky was also alone.

Communication between the two starts from zero — they share no language, no biology and no way of perceiving the world. The sequence in which Grace and Rocky build a common language out of nothing is one of the most ingenious and moving I've seen in the genre in a long time. The film doesn't explain: it shows. And you follow the reasoning in real time, as though you were taking part in the experiment alongside them.

Rocky was built as a physical puppet, operated by a team of five puppeteers led by James Ortiz — the stated inspiration was Frank Oz and Yoda himself. There's no green screen in the scenes with him. The character is matter and mechanics, and Ortiz's performance is so expressive that you forget Rocky has no face. Ortiz named the group the Rockyteers. The design was developed by Neal Scanlan — the same craftsman behind the creatures in the recent Star Wars films — across more than three hundred iterations before they arrived at the final version.

About halfway through the film, when something happens between Grace and Rocky, I realised I was emotionally invested in a five-legged creature that communicates through percussive sounds. It's exactly what the book does with words — and what good science fiction ought to do with images.

What Lord and Miller got right

According to the directors themselves, the scenes with Rocky are roughly 50% puppetry and 50% VFX, and the seam is almost imperceptible. The choice to use practical effects wherever possible is a statement about the kind of cinema they wanted to make — and the result on screen confirms the decision was worth every extra penny in the budget.

The screenplay is by Drew Goddard — who also wrote The Martian and The Cabin in the Woods. Goddard kept the book's non-linear structure without ever leaving the viewer lost. It's an elegant script: you never feel you're being manipulated by the flashbacks, even when you clearly are. Sandra Hüller joins the supporting cast in the Earth-bound scenes and delivers the emotional counterweight the first act needs.

Numbers that say something about the genre

Project Hail Mary was released on 20 March 2026 by Amazon MGM Studios. It has taken more than $639 million worldwide — the third most-watched film of the year — with 94% approval on Rotten Tomatoes and a score of 77 on Metacritic. CinemaScore: A. Those are numbers that say something about a genre that spends its life asking permission to be taken seriously.

There are moments where the film stretches a little too far. Some flashbacks could be shorter. The Earth scenes, with all the political and human weight they carry in the book, come out slightly smaller on screen. But these are minor reservations against a film that decides, from beginning to end, to trust the viewer. It doesn't over-explain. It doesn't simplify the science to the point of emptying out the meaning. It lets you sit with the difficulty of the problem long enough to feel the weight of the solution.

If you like science fiction that treats science as an emotional engine — and not as background scenery — Project Hail Mary is compulsory. It's still in cinemas in some cities — and the Project Hail Mary page on our Rei dos Filmes has the rating, synopsis and trailer. Leave a comment below if you've seen it, and tell us what you made of Rocky. I really want to know whether you got there too.

If you want more sci-fi that takes its science seriously, there's the post on 36 years of Hubble and the sci-fi films science inspired — a direct parallel with what Weir does. And if you enjoy the story of how the genre was built brick by brick, the post on Metropolis of 1927 and the robots it invented is worth your time.