Ryan Bautista | Head Editor & Layout Manager
March 20, 2026
A new science fiction movie is hitting theaters this week, and it is already receiving great reviews everywhere. With a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, Project Hail Mary is trying to join industry classics like Interstellar and The Martian in the epic tier of space movies.
Based on the book written by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian, Project Hail Mary forgoes the dusty wasteland of Mars for a different kind of plot: the world is ending!
The Sun is being eaten by microscopic aliens, and all life on Earth will end unless they are stopped. As a response to this, the governments of the world have united to send the man best-equipped to solve the problem to another star, who has the same alien issue but isn’t dying. The man, a high school science teacher Ryland Grace. One small problem: he’s lost his memory. It’s really a long shot, or a…oh, that’s why it’s called Project Hail Mary.
Yes, I paraphrased that joke from the movie.
Throughout the movie, Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, has to tackle advanced aerospace problems while also regaining all his lost memories of his time on Earth. What’s crazy about this movie is that it isn’t boring. Normally, it is easy for all the science talk in science fiction movies to go straight over people’s heads, as it can be simplified into this doohickey can not break or this thingamajig will blow up. With this movie, Gosling manages to make everything interesting and exciting, as his witty remarks simplify scientific terms into everyday language. Senior Caiya McAlister, who admitted that she “doesn’t normally like sci-fi movies,” loved how “relatable everything was” and “really enjoyed watching it.”
While Gosling is busy doing science stuff with the new star, he even comes into contact with another spaceship. Helming the spaceship is an alien who is affectionately named Rocky. He (it?) communicates through musical notes, so Gosling sets up a translating system that soon (after trial and error) finds the perfect voice for the creature. Rocky then sets out to help Gosling, as he (I’m gonna go with he) is also trying to save his planet from the Sun-eating aliens.
What is interesting about Rocky is how much practical puppetry went into his creation. There was always a physical puppet on set with Gosling, helping him in scenes, and it was then augmented with a little CGI in post-production. Senior Liem Sidhu was surprised at “how real he felt” and “had to stop himself from tearing up when Rocky [SPOILER ALERT].” The same thing goes for the set design. The practical spaceship sets are detailed down to the individual switches, and pairing that with awe-inspiring space visuals makes the entire movie feel like a blockbuster.
After seeing it myself, I can safely say that Project Hail Mary deserves to be placed in the upper echelons of space movies. The visuals, story, and characters were all thought out to perfection. It followed the book well, but also experimented with adding new things as it turns an internal dialogue into a movie. Some scenes had the graininess of old space-race newsreels, while others had high-definition visuals. The same thing goes with the score, as classical orchestral movements were interwoven with complete silence to mimic the emptiness of space. This melding of seemingly opposite things appears throughout the movie, and that is what makes it a great film. Fans of the book will enjoy its faithfulness, but people who have never heard of the book can still enjoy this blockbuster of a movie.
Leave a Reply