Ottawa film fans have a new reason to head to the multiplex this season. Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary is here, and it's delivering exactly the kind of smart, exhilarating cinema that doesn't come along nearly often enough.
Based on Andy Weir's bestselling novel, Project Hail Mary follows a lone astronaut who wakes up on a spaceship with no memory, tasked with saving Earth from an extinction-level threat. Gosling leads the film, and by all accounts, he absolutely delivers.
The Closest Thing to Interstellar in Years
CBC's review describes the film as feeling like "a lowercase Interstellar", and that's high praise, even with the qualifier. Interstellar is a generational sci-fi classic, the kind of film that rewires your brain a little. Project Hail Mary doesn't quite reach those dizzy philosophical heights, but it's not really trying to. What it does instead is give you a "fantastically good time at the movies."
Think: genuine tension, clever science, emotional stakes, and a lead performance that keeps you glued to your seat. That's a formula that works every time.
Smart and Fun, Both at Once
One of the knocks on prestige sci-fi is that it sometimes gets so serious it forgets to be entertaining. Project Hail Mary doesn't fall into that trap. According to the CBC review, the film is "smart and it's fun", two things that are harder to pull off simultaneously than they sound.
For Ottawa audiences who love films like The Martian (also Andy Weir, incidentally), Arrival, or Gravity, this is very much in that wheelhouse: science you can follow, stakes you can feel, and a story that trusts you to keep up.
Worth Seeing on the Big Screen
This is the kind of film that rewards the full theatrical experience. If you're in Ottawa and looking for a reason to get out of the house and into a proper cinema seat, Project Hail Mary is it. Whether you catch it at Cineplex Rideau, SilverCity, or any of the local screens around the city, the spectacle is designed for a big screen and a dark room.
With spring in Ottawa still being the shoulder season, not quite warm enough for patios, not cold enough for cozy hibernation. There's no better time to settle in for a two-hour space adventure.
The First Banger of the Year
We're only a few months into 2026 and the release calendar has been a bit of a slow burn. Project Hail Mary changes that. If CBC is calling it the first banger of the year, Ottawa audiences would be wise to take that seriously.
Gosling continues to prove himself as one of the most versatile and watchable actors working today, from Drive to Barbie to this. He makes the kind of choices that always seem surprising and, in hindsight, completely inevitable.
Don't sleep on this one.
Source: CBC Ottawa. Original review published at CBC.ca.
