It’s only April, but I think Project Hail Mary is going to be the best film of the year, or at the very least in the top three. An adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, “Project Hail Mary” follows an amnesiac astronaut aboard the eponymous spaceship as he strives to understand and execute his mission to save the Sun from dying. 

If you’ve seen the trailers, you’ll also know he runs into a mysterious “rocky” alien, with whom he forms a deep and lasting bond.

I read the book my senior year of high school, and as soon as I learned there was going to be an adaptation, it was going to be something I couldn’t miss.

Honestly, reading the book didn’t really help me going into the movie. Not in the sense that the plot had drastically changed—despite having to cut substantial parts of the 400+ page book to fit the two hour and thirty minute movie, the plot and characters were remarkably faithful and represented successfully—but in the sense that my foreknowledge didn’t stop me from crying at every turn of the plot. I think I started blubbering twenty minutes in and I didn’t stop. “Project Hail Mary” evokes the same kinds of emotions as any sad, motivational dog movie.

However, I’d also say that the film is genuinely hysterical. Ryan Gosling shines as the quippy, nerdy everyman Ryland Grace, and carries the film without missing a beat despite being the only human onscreen for most of it. I will say that some of the punchlines read as more cynical or insincere than the book, the approach of which was one of the few things about the movie that didn’t land for me while watching.

Spoiler section ahead.

That, of course, brings me to Rocky, Gosling’s intrepid alien costar, voiced and puppeted by James Ortiz. I’ve seen the characters’ friendship described as “cosmic optimism,demonstrative of all that we can accomplish if we approach one another with empathy, curiosity, and collaboration. Back when I read the novel, Rocky was one of the few book characters who ever made me cry, and like I said, I got even more emotional watching him onscreen.

The scene where Rocky breaks out of his protective ball in order to drag Grace to the Hail Mary’s medical station after he gets injured was the most fascinating to me. The way it’s presented, from the cinematography to the music, could be straight out of a horror film: a threatening, spidery alien dragging the limp astronaut protagonist to lairs unknown, to torture, dismember, and eat. 

That’s not the context of the scene at all, but the film relies on the viewer to have faith in the bond between Rocky and Grace that the viewer has seen so far and trust that Rocky, who is putting himself in mortal danger via exposure to Grace’s biosphere, is going to save his best friend. I loved it.

I highly recommend the movie, and am myself scheming to see it one more time before it leaves theaters.