Lisa Johnson Mandell’s Project Hail Mary review says it’s its an immediate sci-fi classic that the whole family will find full of wonder, intrigue and soul.

Those of you who know me best understand my penchant for sci-fi, both films in films and literature. It’s right up there with historical fiction and period dramas in my, ahem, book. So when I tell you that Project Hail Mary is not only the best film I’ve seen so far this year, but possibly the best film I will see all year long, you should understand that this declaration comes from a woman who does not make such statements lightly.

It is, in essence, a masterpiece. There. I said it.

Based on the 2021 Hugo Award-winning novel by Andy Weir — the same delightfully science-obsessed genius who gave us The Martian and who is, without question, one of my all-time favorite working science fiction authors — Project Hail Mary arrives on screen as something so rare it almost defies categorization. It’s a big-budget blockbuster that is also intimate, warm, funny, and genuinely, tear-jerkingly moving. Weir has a gift for making hard science feel like the most thrilling adventure imaginable, and this film honors that gift completely.

Project Hail Mary review — the plot is not what you might imagine

Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) wakes up alone in a high tech space ship.  He doesn’t know who he is, where he is, or why two crew members lie dead in their pods.  Through a series of beautifully constructed flashbacks, we learn how Grace got there. The sun is dying in a measurable, catastrophic, civilization-ending way. A microorganism called Astrophage is feeding on our star, dimming it, and every star in the galaxy appears to be suffering the same fate.

Except for one: Tau Ceti, which is 12 light-years distant in a galaxy far, far away. Someone needs to find out why, and it turns out that Grace, a humble junior high science teacher with a massive, self deprecating brain, has been assigned to be the savior of all humanity.

The mission is called Project Hail Mary.  The odds are, to put it charitably, not great. But what happens when Grace meets the heretofore impossible is a story for the ages.

Ryan Gosling: the eyes have it

There couldn’t have been a better choice than Ryan Gosling for the lead. He brings to this role a quality that is deceptively difficult to pull off: he makes intelligence feel warm. He is funny without mugging, vulnerable without sentimentality, and heroic in the most ordinary, believable way. For much of the film, he is alone — or wearing a helmet that covers most of his face — and yet he somehow holds the entire screen with the expressiveness of his eyes and the precision of his physical performance. This is the work of an actor at the absolute peak of his powers, and if the awards conversation doesn’t begin immediately, I will start it myself. There—I just did.

He also produced this film, which tells you something important: Gosling didn’t just show up for the paycheck. He fell in love with Weir’s manuscript before the book was even published, and he helped assemble the creative team around him. That passion is visible throughout.

Rocky: the real star (forgive me, Ryan)

And then there is Rocky, an irresistibly charming life form unlike any other.

Rocky is the alien Grace encounters in the depths of space — a five-limbed, rock-like, spider-ish, faceless creature whose species communicates through musical tones rather than spoken language. In the wrong hands, Rocky could have been a CGI disaster. Instead, he is the most purely lovable character since ET, and the story of how he was brought to cinematic life is worth a paragraph or four.

In an era when CGI does everything, the filmmakers made a radical choice: Rocky is primarily a puppet. A magnificently engineered, painstakingly detailed, purely extraordinary puppet — designed by the legendary Neal Scanlan, a founding alumnus of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and the man responsible for some of the most beloved creature work in the modern Star Wars films (the beloved Porgs among them).

Scanlan’s team created Rocky from a sculpture that was digitally scanned, 3D-printed, and cast in layered fiberglass, then painted with such detail that Rocky’s skin seems organically realistic. His multiple arms were built with interchangeable attachments — a sculpted closed fist for walking, three animatronic fingers capable of actually gripping and moving objects on set. It is extraordinary craft.

Bringing Rocky to life required a team of five puppeteers — dubbed the “Rockyteers” — who operated the character on set in every scene alongside Gosling. The lead puppeteer, and the voice of Rocky, is theater artist James Ortiz, a man whose résumé includes a Drama Desk Award for his dinosaur puppetry at Lincoln Center, an OBIE Award for his off-Broadway work, and a Jim Henson Foundation Grant.

What makes Rocky transcendent, though, is not the mechanics but the soul. Ortiz has described the character as “a genius-level intellect… the genetic splice of a miserly old man, a peppy Labrador, and a deeply anxious 14-year-old boy.” Every one of those qualities comes through. Rocky communicates through a translator Grace builds with duct tape and ingenuity, and once that translation bridge is established, the friendship that develops between these two impossibly different beings — two lone survivors, each desperate to save their world — is genuinely, achingly real.

I found Rocky so adorably charming we’re actually thinking of naming our puppy after him. Frankie Feldman would approve.

The Directors, Who Woulda Thunk?

Project Hail Mary is the first completed feature film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller since 22 Jump Street and The Lego Movie, both in 2014. Their return to the director’s chairs — for a sprawling, $248 million, IMAX-shot science fiction epic — might have seemed like a gamble. One I predict will pay off in the hundreds of millions.

Lord and Miller built their reputation on a seemingly paradoxical skill: making things that should not work, work spectacularly. Animated Lego as philosophical comedy? Done. 21 Jump Street as genuine satire? Done. A two-and-a-half-hour hard science fiction story about loneliness, first contact, and the molecular biology of a sun-eating microorganism, somehow emerging as a crowd-pleasing, laugh-out-loud family film? Done, done, and done. Their sensibility — irreverent and warm, whip-smart and emotionally generous — is exactly what this material needed.

The screenplay is by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Ridley Scott’s 2015 adaptation of Weir’s The Martian (and received an Oscar nomination for it). He understands Weir’s particular alchemy — the way scientific problem-solving becomes narrative suspense, the way humor and wonder coexist without canceling each other out. The cinematography by Greig Fraser (Dune, The Batman) gives the film a visual grandeur that never overwhelms its intimacy.

Fellow sci-fi fans will note that this film nods generously to the great tradition of space cinema — the existential solitude of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the makeshift ingenuity of Apollo 13, the emotional enormity of Gravity, the warmth and wonder of Interstellar. But more than any of them, I noticed its kinship to E.T. — a story of an unexpected friendship between a human and a being from somewhere impossibly far away, built on communication, curiosity, and the particular loneliness of feeling like the only one of your kind.

In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if Spielberg himself might find himself wishing he had directed Project Hail Mary, but will most assuredly tip his hat to Lord and Miller.

Project Hail Mary review — The sublime music

Composer Daniel Pemberton, whose work on the Spider-Verse films is considered among the most inventive film music of the 21st century, has outdone himself here. The score accomplishes something genuinely difficult: it sounds like space — vast, cold, and infinite — while also sounding like friendship, warm and strange and full of feeling.

There are choral passages that will thrill you to the marrow. There are sequences built around Rocky’s echolocation-based communication that are unlike anything I’ve ever heard in a movie theater. And then there are quiet moments — just Grace and Rocky and the dark between the stars — where Pemberton’s music does the emotional work that no dialogue could.

And then there’s the use of the Harry Styles hit “Sign of the Times,” that is so moving and apropos you can’t believe it wasn’t written specifically for the film.

In essence, Project Hail Mary is about a willingness, or lack thereof, to pay the price to save the world, and the things that can be accomplished when one stops being afraid. It’s funny, it’s warm, it’s scientifically rigorous, and it will break your heart in the best possible way.

See it in IMAX if you can, and bring tissues only you’re a person who has feelings.

Rated PG-13

2 Hours 36 Minutes

If this Project Hail Mary review encourages you to fly over the the cineplex for a screening, get times and tickets at Fandango.com — go ahead, spring for IMAX.