In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling returns to space for the first time in nearly a decade to play an appealingly disheveled astronaut tasked with saving the Earth. A mysterious microorganism is zapping the sun’s energy. Gosling’s character, a molecular biologist and middle-school teacher named Ryland Grace, years ago wrote a misunderstood-in-its-time dissertation that has unexpectedly turned him into an “our only hope”-style figure for an ice age-bound population. 

These grave stakes guide a movie that, as written by Drew Goddard and directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, ends up liking to keep things as light as possible — friendly to a pleasant dinner-and-a-movie evening out. (It’s an adaptation of a bestselling Andy Weir book published in 2021 that I haven’t read.) Most of Project Hail Mary is set aboard a ship Grace wakes up on after a years-long medically induced coma to make the unfathomably far-flung trip go by faster. He’s the sole survivor among his crewmates, whose deaths seem to be the fault of glitchy equipment. On the cavernous vessel he intensely researches when not tirelessly wisecracking and joking around with — spoiler alert — an alien he unexpectedly meets shortly after regaining consciousness. Nicknamed Rocky for its craggy shell, the crab-like creature is also trying to save its planet from the same parasites Grace is trying to thwart, becoming an unlikely friend and professional partner.

Read the full review at South Sound.

Image credit: Jonathan Olley © 2026 Amazon Content Services LLC.