Hollywood's Last Shot: Project: Hail Mary
That’s exactly what was running through my head the second the credits rolled on my first watch of Project: Hail Mary, the balls-to-the-wall Sci-Fi Action adventure flick based on Andy Weir’s novel.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you already know the deal: I fucking love movies. But I also fucking hate movies now… specifically the soulless, assembly-line garbage Hollywood’s been shitting out for the last decade-plus.
They’re preachy, hateful, hopeless drivel cranked out by activists who despise storytelling, audiences, and fun itself. Massive budgets, zero passion, and political agendas so bloated they choke whatever story might’ve been there.
As a comic book guy, I’ve been burned so many times—getting hyped for a project only to sit there while it calls me (in not-so-subtle terms) a racist, misogynist, colonizer (literally in the case of Black Panther), or whatever the slur of the week is… just for existing as a straight white dude who wants cool stuff to happen on screen instead of a two-hour lecture.
So yeah… I fired up Project: Hail Mary completely on a whim. Zero hype. Zero expectations. Just something to kill a couple hours.
And it somehow became my favorite movie of all time.
A 2026 Hollywood movie.
It's Actually GOOD!
I don’t mean the acting (though it’s fucking excellent). I’m not talking about the cinematography, the rock-solid science, the story, the puppetry, the visuals, the sets, the writing, the score, or how loyal it is to the book. All of that is true. Project: Hail Mary is objectively GOOD.
But it’s also “GOOD.”
You picking up what I’m throwing down? Probably not, so let me break it down.
As a kid, every theatrical movie I saw rewired my whole entire personality. Walked out of Ninja Turtles wanting to be a ninja turtle. Came out of Jurassic Park as the world’s youngest paleontologist. Left Batman fully convinced I was Batman. Same thing happened with KPop Demon Hunters—I fell so hard for the characters and the world I just wanted to live in it forever.
Project: Hail Mary hit me different.
I walked out of the theater with my stupid helmet popcorn bucket in one hand and my wife’s hand in the other, and I was wrecked—in the best way. I’d laughed my ass off, I’d cried like an idiot, I’d related to Ryland Grace on every level except those abs.
I was blown away by everything.
But the thing that actually grabbed me by the soul wasn’t any of that technical brilliance.
It was this weird, warm punch right in the solar plexus—between my gut and my heart. A feeling that felt nostalgic as hell even though it shouldn’t. Something that should be normal… but modern entertainment has basically eradicated it.
Actual, real, pure, long-forgotten Hope.
Simple. Wholesome. Precious. Fun. Happy. Hope.
What the fuck is this alien feeling? Beep boop beep.
How often does modern Hollywood even let you feel genuine hope anymore?
I don’t mean cheap hope that gets ripped away for sequel bait. I don’t mean hope that gets crushed right before the third-act action beat so they can manufacture drama. I mean a movie that actually ends on hope. That sends you out into the world carrying it with you for the rest of the day, the week… maybe your whole damn life.
These days every movie wants to be Empire Strikes Back. They all end on some dark, ominous note that screams “see you in the next one, sucker.” Very few have the balls to end like Return of the Jedi—where the evil is defeated, the heroes win, and good actually triumphs.
Project: Hail Mary does that.
And it doesn’t just do it. It does it after two hours of brutal struggle. After loneliness. After betrayal. After loss. After insane conflict and action. After an apocalyptic threat that could’ve wiped out two entire sentient civilizations.
All that pain happened. All that loss happened.
And none of it won.
What wins in the end is wholesome, almost forgotten, hope. Two whole worlds soaked in it, spread across lightyears of space. Long-forgotten hope… finally remembered.
Friendship is the Focus
Hollywood does not understand interpersonal relationships.
They don’t get the laws of attraction. They don’t get beauty. They don’t get romance. They damn sure don’t get platonic friendships between people of the same sex. They have zero fucking clue how humans actually work.
That’s why real human stories are so rare these days.
Ahem… anyway.
These films actually understand the personal relationships between characters.
And Project: Hail Mary? It understands that sometimes a friendship is powerful enough to save the world — or two.
The relationship between Ryland Grace and Rocky is the greatest platonic friendship put on film in the last twenty fucking years. Hell, it might crack the top 5-10 in the entire history of cinema.
The weight of it. The way they interact. The writing. The pacing. Their growth from total strangers to literal family. Everything about their bond is unguarded, vulnerable, compassionate, loving, understanding, combative when it needs to be… and most importantly — human.
Yes, the friendship between an introverted, aloof human scientist lost in space and a five-legged, faceless rock alien is the most human relationship Hollywood has put on screen in two decades.
Grace and Rocky get thrown together across lightyears with a common goal. They don’t speak the same language. They’re not even the same species. But they fill gaps in each other that Grace couldn’t find on an entire planet full of his own kind.
Rocky (and yes, the puppetry is fucking phenomenal — he’s a real physical creation, not CGI) is compassionate, brilliant, silly, ADHD as hell, and the perfect chaotic counterpart to Grace’s more reserved, independent nature.
The Soundtrack and Puppetry
You may be wondering why I'm putting these two things together, so let me explain...
"A movie feels more real and more immersive when it establishes a more direct connection to the senses of the spectator."
And holy SHIT does Project: Hail Mary deliver on that.
How? How does it pull it off?
Plenty of movies have great soundtracks you blast in the car. Plenty have killer special effects and solid acting to sell them. That’s not new, right?
Project: Hail Mary didn’t.
Rocky is a puppet — a real, physical combination of puppetry and animatronics. As far as I know, zero CGI was used on him, and when you watch the movie… you can tell. There’s weight to him. There’s presence. There’s actual gravitas when Gosling is acting with him.
It’s emotion and interaction — not just acting and reaction to a tennis ball.
Gosling is phenomenal in this movie because he’s not pretending to talk to a green screen with ping-pong balls taped all over it. He’s not forced to imagine Rocky in his head. He’s not being told “okay, pretend he’s raising his arms now.” He’s acting in real time with a physical creature on set. That difference is profound. It’s night and day compared to the soulless CGI slop we get in Marvel movies and every other big-budget “just add more pixels” fest.
This movie could’ve easily turned into absolute garbo if Gosling’s interactions with Rocky didn’t feel that intimate and real. How many “guy with CGI sidekick” movies have completely failed or felt ridiculous? You already know the ones I’m talking about. But this perfect puppetry + a real actor with a physical partner on screen? It transforms what could’ve been a purely Optic film into something deeply Haptic.
And I love this even more because in the story itself, they literally use sound waves and frequencies to communicate. Sound and music are how the Eridians pilot their ships and talk. They use advanced echolocation to “see.” Music and sound in this movie aren’t just auditory — they’re practically visual, practically tactile. They’re haptic as hell. That’s fucking cool.
And yeah, it lets me sound smart when I say:
THE MUSIC IS FUCKING AMAZING AND SUPER UNDERRATED AND I DON’T HEAR ANYONE TALKING ABOUT IT!
Seriously, what the hell is this soundtrack?
I’ve got tons of movie and game scores I love — Doom, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Bayonetta, Stellar Blade — shit that makes you feel like a badass, like you’re fighting for something, like a witch using her hair to murder demon angels.
But Project: Hail Mary does something different. It puts you right there on that ship with Ryland and Rocky. It drops you into the middle of an alien planet while neon-green auroras burn across the sky. It throws you on an aircraft carrier during an end-of-the-world party celebrating hope. Every background cue, every lyric, every single piece of music feels completely intentional.
It never feels like over-the-top orchestral bullshit trying to emotionally manipulate you. It just makes you feel present.
And goddamn, it succeeds.
I highly recommend you go listen to the Project: Hail Mary soundtrack right now.
Because not only does it do everything I just said — it also keeps this tiny thread of childish, listless, dumb, beautiful hope running through it, even in the darkest moments.
Just go listen to “The Message” by Daniel Pemberton.
Holy shit. It’s simply brilliant.
The Ending
Spoiler alert, dweebs
The movie ends exactly how it should. And how often can you honestly say that? How often do movies actually stick the landing perfectly?
Project: Hail Mary does. It ends exactly how it should.
After a film packed with action, stunning visuals, betrayal, humor, heart, terror, love, and compassion, it somehow sticks the landing flawlessly.
Honestly, I was impressed the entire way through, and I still wondered: how could it possibly end this well?
Ryland Grace sends the solution back to Earth. With Rocky’s help, he has saved all of humanity… but he can’t go home. Even though Rocky gave him enough fuel to make the return trip, Grace chooses not to. Because his friend is in trouble. He decides to sacrifice his chance to go back and instead risks everything to save Rocky.
This hits hard because the movie makes it very clear that Grace started as a bit of a coward — the kind of guy who abandoned everything the second it got difficult. He had to be put to sleep, kidnapped, and basically forced onto this mission in the first place. Yeah… that kind of “hero.”
But by the end, Ryland finally finds something worth risking it all for. He gives up his ticket home to go save his friend. One last Hail Mary.
He saves Rocky.
The film ends with Grace living in a giant bubble on a stony beach on Rocky’s homeworld of Erid. He’s teaching astrophysics to a class of Eridian children in a cave. He’s happy. He’s smiling. And the movie fades out.
Earth is saved. Erid is saved. Grace is living on a planet where he’s appreciated and treated like a hero, right beside his best friend, doing what he loves.
To say this is the perfect ending for both the story and this character doesn’t fully capture it without spoiling everything about who Ryland Grace really is. I don’t want to do that. I want you to experience it yourself. But if you watch it, you’ll feel exactly what I mean.
Closing Remarks
I'm not even sure I know the true purpose of this blog...
Sometimes it’s just therapeutic to talk about something good. To gush about the things you love. The characters you relate to, the ones you fall in love with, the stories that light a fire in you creatively and personally.
Project: Hail Mary did exactly that for me.
It inspired me — not just as a creative, but as a person. It reminded me that I still see hope more often than dread. That I still refuse to believe we’re all as terrible as the news wants us to think. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe I’m foolish. Maybe I’m too much of a coward to admit the world might be darker than I want it to be.
But I’m going to hold onto that foolish hope anyway.
As a film (I haven’t read the book yet), Project: Hail Mary is everything we say we want from art: outstanding acting, sharp writing, a killer story, unforgettable characters, incredible music, breathtaking visuals, and real passion poured into every single frame. It’s the kind of movie that restores your faith in cinema itself.
But more than that, it’s wholesome, heartfelt, emotional, intense, funny, sweet, and genuinely human. It doesn’t lecture you. It doesn’t try to make you feel guilty for being who you are — white, black, straight, gay, liberal, conservative, whatever. It doesn’t have an agenda. It just wants to remind you, for a couple of hours, to believe in hope, friendship, sacrifice, courage, humanity, and life.
After decades of saying my favorite movie was Kill Bill, this one took the crown. I traded blood and style for hope and substance.
And that’s why it hits so hard. That’s why a movie about a lonely astronaut and his five-legged rock alien best friend matters — not just to cinema, but to the world right now.
Because it reminds us what actually matters: real friendship, real love, and refusing to let go of hope… even when you’re lost in the darkest corners of space, feeling completely alone.
An Amaze, Amaze, Amaze out of 10.
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