Project Hail Mary
26 Mar 2026Score 8/10
Review
Project Hail Mary is as faithful to its source material as Andy Weir’s prior The Martian is faithful to its source material. The PHM novel is longer, slightly better, but doesn’t have as much spectacle. There is 0 woke in PHM. The Movie trailers spoil some things, and at times the movie itself “spoils” some things which were kept a little mysterious in the book until later reveals. I recommend the book over this movie, but if you’re not a reader and don’t plan to read Andy Weir’s original works, go ahead and watch PHM, its better than most of what they make nowadays.
Analysis
I think it would have been impossible to accurately portray the PHM MC on film. He’s supposed to be a smart, self-important, slightly narcissistic, but sweet former professional scientist turned high school teacher. His character is similar to your classic Heinlein protagonist, but with less self-sacrifice and no rakish charm. Picture the MC from Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters but completely asexual. Not necessarily a bad thing, but its a combination that feels kind of unrealistic.
So instead of trying to port this character over one-to-one they make Gosling’s character in Movie PHM more awkward, more socially unaware, and more Avengers hero-esque quirky. Movies are not built for a MC who spends paragraph upon paragraph of deep thought to figure out a complex engineering problem. Primer didn’t even really do that. The most engineering-focused movie of all time didn’t really try to portray the inner workings of a focused engineer’s mind.
Gosling’s character isn’t bad, his attractiveness is actually pretty central to how he is characterized. No matter how awkward he is, he still commands respect for being intelligent, because he is actually able to put his ideas into words. It would have been a total misstep if they made Dr. Grace into a nerd who can’t get no respect and fumbles all the time while trying to explain things. His quirkiness is that of being an over-qualified high school science teacher. Good teachers do not struggle with explaining complex concepts, that is their specialty. Gosling faithfully follows this in the movie.
One Major Movie Misstep
Book readers will remember that the introduction of the Blip A and Rocky are massive surprises that are not foreshadowed in the early half of the novel. Rocky doesn’t even join the cast until more than a third of the way through the book. The introduction of other sentient life is supposed to be a twist not the opening plot of the book. Yet most of the promotional PHM movie materials explicitly show off Rocky and don’t hide the fact that this movie will be not just about solving engineering problems, but about first contact with sentient life too.
Even in the movie itself, Rocky is introduced much earlier into Grace’s exploration of the alien star system. It takes away a lot of the story of isolation and self-reflection the novel has. Whereas novel PHM has a lot of failure and learning from mistakes, movie PHM is more of a straight shot from success to success leading up to a victory that felt inevitable.