| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: March 20, 2026 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
54
Mixed:
5
Negative:
1
|
Critic Reviews
Mar 10, 2026
It’s a masterpiece of a family popcorn movie, with eye-popping hand-crafted production design and outstanding creature design and puppetry work. This is the kind of movie that could have been made in the era of moon landings and space shuttles, when the general public found science trustworthy and wondrous.
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SlashfilmMar 10, 2026
IndieWireMar 10, 2026
To write more about the pleasures and pains of Project Hail Mary would be (yes, over 1,300 words in) a disservice to what’s most entertaining and satisfying about the film: watching it unfold, enjoying the process, accepting the mission, asking the big questions. That’s about as much as you can ask from any blockbuster film these days.
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Next Best PictureMar 10, 2026
A near-perfect crowd-pleaser. Thanks to clear, confident direction from Phil Lord & Chris Miller, this soaring adaptation is bursting with creativity. Impressively crafted across the board. Ryan Gosling’s flawless turn is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Both an epic journey to save humanity and an intimate story of friendship.
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ColliderMar 10, 2026
Mar 10, 2026
As in Lord and Miller’s animated movies, their tone and pace remain singular. Project Hail Mary might blow past a two-hour runtime and yet there’s rarely a dull moment with all the problem-solving, earnest irreverence and unabashed commitment to imbuing life and wit into every molecule of the story. Daniel Pemberton’s unusual, buoyant score and Joel Negron’s sharp editing are key.
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Mar 10, 2026
At almost every turn, Project Hail Mary attempts to convince you that it is groundbreaking, innovative filmmaking. But in actuality, the movie lands as a grand act of cinematic recycling – the fusing together of familiar, comforting bits and pieces into something determined to please crowds and warm hearts.
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The PlaylistMar 11, 2026
Project Hail Mary cycles through many phases, including a survival thriller, a buddy comedy, and a sci-fi adventure. Lord and Miller build appropriately toward this more serious pivot, even if there’s some herky-jerky motion amidst the transition. But that scrappy spirit of perseverance through imperfection feels in line with their hero’s own default operating mode.
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Pulling this off requires an actor who can balance comedic grace and gravitas with the skill of, well, Ryan Gosling, who’s ideally cast as a man who can ponder big, existential questions at the end of the universe and goof around with an excitable pal from another planet. (Get you a movie star who can do both.) At once zippy and emotionally wrenching, the film performs a similar balancing act as its leading man.
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Mar 19, 2026
Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.
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Mar 19, 2026
Combining the best aspects of “Interstellar” and “The Martian,” but more satisfying in the end than either, this 2 1/2-hour epic Christian allegory recreates the same mix as the best Steven Spielberg fantasies—wonder, adventure, humor, warmth and pathos, all infused with a child’s sensibility.
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Mar 10, 2026
The film’s title doubles as its own description. And the fact that they damn near pull it off is enough to make you feel you’ve also been awakened from a long, deep sleep in which you were forced to settle for large, loud, cine-extravaganzas that forgot there’s supposed to be a human factor in any of it. Rise and shine, folks. You’ve got something to actually see here.
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The TelegraphMar 10, 2026
Mar 10, 2026
Mar 10, 2026
It is such a shame that momentum is allowed to sag as the film shuffles through six endings when either of the first two would do nicely. To that point, Project Hail Mary is a model of high-class popular entertainment. An explicit tribute to a Steven Spielberg classic in the opening third feels like no great overreach.
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Mar 10, 2026
Maybe Lord and Miller knew what they were doing when they went for such a bright and breezy tone. They've crafted a sci-fi epic which is more than two-and-a-half hours long, and which is a one-man show for much of that time. They have filled it not with action, but with mind-stretching concepts, painstaking laboratory research and knotty technical puzzles. To do all that and keep things zippily entertaining throughout is an extraordinary achievement.
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Mar 19, 2026
Executed with incredible craft and style and a whole lot of heart, Project Hail Mary verges on the edge of being too saccharinely sweet. But sci-fi can serve many different purposes for audiences, and maybe that sweetness, combined with a story of cooperation and collaboration for self-preservation, is just the kind of balm we need to take the edge off right now.
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The Film StageMar 10, 2026
As an existential sci-fi, Project Hail Mary doesn’t live up to the mid-2010s blockbusters it’s attempting to emulate, but it does eventually soar when it allows the hangout buddy comedy to take center stage. It’s a gorgeous feat of practical effects on a gargantuan scale, but its biggest pleasures lie in the most intimate character moments.
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Mar 10, 2026
Over two-and-a-half hours, the duo’s film gazes in wonder at alien engineering, opens its heart to human vulnerability through karaoke, and makes the case that inspiring the next generation (or at least perpetuating its existence) is alluring enough to shake the smarmiest manchildren from their self-imposed exile. Most effectively, though, Project Hail Mary sees a personal sense of humor shine through the bludgeoning grandeur of a AAA sci-fi.
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Mar 27, 2026
The fate of the world, and Project Mary as a whole, ultimately rests on Ryan Gosling’s hunky shoulders. The movie might eventually evolve into a two-hander about a pair of mismatched scientists, but one of the buddies here doesn’t even have hands, and Gosling is the only human face on screen for half the runtime. That he manages to hold the audience’s attention, and occasionally makes them laugh and even cry when he has nothing and no one to play off of is a testament to his enormous star power and charisma.
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Mar 26, 2026
Mar 24, 2026
The Film VerdictMar 10, 2026
Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.
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The Film MavenMar 10, 2026
There are countless space movies to choose from and there are moments where Project Hail Mary tries to have the dark human emotion, and ask the big questions, that movies like Arrival and Interstellar have done. There are also moments where it just wants to be a fun space film. The two tones don't gel smoothly, but Gosling is gold.
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