Over the past year there has been a tendency to rush to define films made with high competence as masterpieces. Sinners (2025) and One Battle After Another (2025) both had interesting concepts and demonstrated filmmaking that was impressive from a technical standpoint, but each lacked a powerful story strong enough to elevate it to masterpiece status. In an era whose focus has often drifted toward social engineering, audiences have been starved of films that pay deep attention to the craft of filmmaking. So when these films arrive, people mistake that starvation for greatness in a wave of over-excitement.
There is also an element of social contagion behind these reactions. On release, Marty Supreme (2025) was declared the best film of the year and widely predicted to have success at the Oscar’s. However, after some in the arts crowd developed distaste for comments made by Timothée Chalamet suggesting opera and ballet were dying art forms that few people care about anymore, that hype seemed to vanish overnight. Suddenly people didn’t appear quite as convinced that Marty Supreme was as fantastic as they remembered. A film’s success often depends on its relationship with the crowd, and that relationship can be crushed by a comment or controversy completely unrelated to the merit of the work. It illustrates a weakness in the relationship between art and its audience. Admiration for beauty is often conditional, tied to the shifting mood of tribes and cultural groups.
One film I doubt will stir up such controversy, and therefore may enjoy a longer wave of success, is Project Hail Mary. Early reviews are already declaring it a masterpiece, but this feels like another case of over-excitement. The film certainly has all the ingredients for broad audience appeal. You have the charming Ryan Gosling as the lead, an actor with a well-established positive reputation. You also have a WALL-E-style companion character accompanying him on an epic sci-fi journey in which humanity’s survival depends on the actions of one man in space. Add grand visuals and an emotive score, and the result is something that resembles a heartwarming, Interstellar-style epic. So what’s the issue?
My main problem with the film is its tone. We’re presented with a serious existential threat to humanity, yet most of the characters approach the possibility of extinction with surprising lightness. Their attitude seems designed primarily to entertain a family-friendly audience, turbo-charged by Gosling’s character, who is portrayed as a somewhat goofy, immature, happy-go-lucky figure tasked with saving the human race. None of it feels particularly authentic to how people might behave in the real world. Yet this tonal choice exists in many successful family-friendly films that deal with life-threatening situations, such as Jurassic Park (1993). Audiences are often willing to forgive a lack of realism when humour and optimism are injected into the equation.
To be fair to the filmmakers of Project Hail Mary, this tone may have been necessary to prevent audiences from becoming bored watching a single man alone in space for long stretches—at least until he encounters the cute, rock-textured alien creature with whom he eventually forms a friendship. And if a human is to bond with such a creature, perhaps a slightly immature chemistry between the two is needed to make the relationship work.
The relationship between Gosling’s character and the creature he calls Rocky ultimately becomes the central focus of the film, even more so than the mission itself. It provides a welcome distraction from trying to dissect the technical mechanics of the plot. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel some warmth toward Gosling’s character and the emotions building from his friendship with Rocky. The film is clearly designed to pull at your heartstrings. However, because the characters never quite feel authentically grounded in the world they inhabit, the emotional pull never fully lands. Gosling’s character doesn’t feel entirely real, which makes it difficult to fully surrender to the emotions being engineered.
Despite that resistance, emotion is the dominant element throughout the film, largely driven by its score, which is undoubtedly its strongest asset. Composer Daniel Pemberton delivers remarkable work here—so remarkable that the emotion embedded in the music often feels stronger than the emotion generated by the story itself. At times it even evokes the grandeur of the score from The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, though without the same perfect harmony between music and narrative.
What constitutes a masterpiece ultimately depends on individual perception and the standards one applies. For me, a masterpiece requires every element—story, performances, direction, technical craft, and everything beyond—to operate at a high level while working together in harmony. That harmony must feel authentic and logical to the world being presented, producing genuine awe and admiration within the spectator. While certain elements of Project Hail Mary reach that level, not all of them align in a satisfying way, preventing the film from achieving that sense of unity.
If you’re suffering from a famine of truly great cinema and haven’t yet consumed enough examples from film history to develop higher standards, it’s understandable that you might rush to declare Project Hail Mary, Sinners, or One Battle After Another masterpieces. If a film feels like a masterpiece to you, then naturally you’ll describe it that way. The danger lies in applying that label to any film that simply demonstrates competence in the craft of filmmaking. When that happens, the term itself begins to lose its meaning—and we may eventually find ourselves inventing new categories just to preserve the value the word once carried.
Out in UK cinemas from 20th March