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'Project Hail Mary': Lost in Space Revisited.

Ryland Grace is having a very bad day. Ryland is a middle school science teacher and he just woke up in outer space. Way-outer space, on a rocket ship floating silently through vast star fields. He's not alone, exactly -- he has two crewmates, but they're both dead in their cryo-pods. What the hell?

"Project Hail Mary," a movie directed by animation vets Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (the "Spider-Verse" films) and written by Drew Goddard, who also scripted "The Martian" (a similar picture likewise based on a novel by Andy Weir), manages the considerable feat of reinvigorating the lost-in-space movie. It's a work of impressive cinematic invention, with more heart than is normally found in a sci-fi film. The picture also features -- and is largely powered by -- a quietly virtuosic performance by Ryan Gosling, who plays Ryland, the accidental astronaut whose academic background has prepared him not at all for an interstellar adventure. ("I can't even moonwalk," he says, deploying one of the movie's likeably corny laugh lines.)

Gosling is alone on screen for much of the picture's two and a half hours and his creative concentration never flags. As he floats and bumps and twists and turns through the zero-G interior of his ship, relaying his thoughts to a recording computer, or sometimes just talking to himself, we slowly get a flashback account of how he wound up in his current plight.

It turns out that before he was a middle school teacher, Ryland was a noted microbiologist, one of whose brainiac papers brought him to the attention of Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), an international science bureaucrat in desperate need of help with her latest project -- basically, saving the world. The sun is being dimmed by an onslaught of Astrophage -- energy-gobbling molecules whose solar depredations could wipe out a quarter of the Earth's population in less than 30 years and set the survivors to slaughtering each other in global food wars.

Ryland is enlisted in the fight against the Astrophage very much against his will. Soon, however, he gets some help of his own in the form of a spider-legged, rock-shaped alien who is clearly a visitor from the same cuteness galaxy that previously gave us R2-D2, E.T., and WALL-E. Ryland calls this little guy Rocky (simple, but says it), and the rest of the movie follows these two as they bond and banter. Like Ryland, Rocky has been left alone by the loss of his rocket crew, which once numbered 23 creatures. "Now only one," he tells Ryland with an eye-moistening alien sigh.

The movie's design largely avoids the Bakelite gleam of standard space tech pioneered by "2001: A Space Odyssey" nearly 60 years ago. (At least one of the space ships on display has a really alien look -- it suggests an enormous hovering antenna.) Given the challenges of making a sci-fi movie with no space monster (and no space romance, either), it's remarkable how successful the directors are in sustaining emotional propulsion with the back-and-forth between the two lead characters. But the film's major asset may be puppet-master James Ortiz, who brings Rocky to near-life and brilliantly voices his English-as-a-second-language lines, too. Heaps of praise are also due to film editor Joel Negron for pulling off such complexly structured scenes as the one in which Rocky gets hopelessly entangled in a reel of metal measuring tape.

It's hard to imagine a lot of naysaying being aimed at this smartly made and -- let's just put it out there -- fundamentally lovable movie. Is it too long? Maybe a little. Too sweet? Too gritless? Really? As Rocky would say, "Fist my bump!"

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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate, Inc.