Project Hail Mary: A Sci-Fi Story of Hope, Humor, and High Stakes

In 2015, The Martian made audiences fall in love with Andy Weir’s thrilling, witty, and unexpectedly moving adaptation of his self-published debut novel of the same name. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, the film went on to earn both critical acclaim and strong ticket sales, and to notch up a few award nominations as well. Now, four years after that last Weir adaptation’s release, a new one has been making the rounds. Weir’s 2021 bestseller Project Hail Mary has found its way to the big screen, with Gosling set to star in what fans of Weir’s character-driven hard science fiction novels have every reason to be excited about.

Amazon MGM Studios has since released the film’s first official trailer, which looks like it hits just the right combination of science, survival, and wry humor. From the first scene to the closing frame, the glimpse of the film we got is brimming over with what it takes to make a blockbuster epic on the scale of a space opera. Gosling at the center of a cast, Drew Goddard on the script, and a directorial team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Project Hail Mary looks to have all the trappings of a major science fiction production.

The studio first came into contact with the book before the novel even hit shelves. Amazon MGM Studios bought the film rights in advance of the book’s publication, and they also signed Goddard to the screenplay adaptation well before Weir’s novel was released. Goddard’s sharp, adaptation-faithful work on the screenplay for the previous Martian film, for which he earned an Oscar nomination, made him a prime candidate for Project Hail Mary, so his return to the fold for that job was unsurprising. Lord and Miller’s approach to directing could seem like an odd fit for a hard science fiction story, but their work on animated comedies like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie showed they could handle humor and heart well enough to match Weir’s intent.

Ryland Grace is Gosling’s character in Project Hail Mary, an unassuming middle school science teacher who wakes up in a spaceship with no recollection of how he came to be in that position. After an opening crawl that tosses the audience into panic as he grapples with his situation, Grace realizes that he is several light-years from home, very far from his apartment back on Earth, in any case. A series of flashbacks then show us the story of how he got to this point, as an even less-haired Grace is on Earth at a school where he teaches. After the final lesson of the day, he is approached with a job offer: a mission that can save the entire planet.

The catch, of course, is that the Sun is on the verge of burning out. It’s not just Earth at risk, either. Several nearby stars are inexplicably dimming, save for one particular exception in the night sky. The scientists behind the discovery don’t know what’s causing the Sun’s death, but they believe a specific cosmic anomaly is responsible, and they need Grace’s expertise as a former molecular biologist to figure it out.

Grace is not enthusiastic about the idea. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he quips in a later scene, when he realizes that his interstellar voyage is for real. “I can’t even moonwalk!” This is only more of the same for Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a superior with a no-nonsense attitude. Her delivery is succinct and to the point: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” Reluctantly, Grace signs on the dotted line, now with the added potential loss of his students and the rest of humanity as a motivator.

He soon finds himself en route to wherever it is that he’s going and, after a course in space training in record time, he has rocketed through space and launched. By the time he awakens on his new spaceship, however, he’s discovered that he has temporary amnesia, and the realization quickly sets in that he’s not just on his own—he’s the last crew member standing. We know the rest of his original crew has died on some part of the journey, thanks to casting news that Milana Vayntrub will play a Russian crewmate named Olesya Ilyukhina.

Grace, of course, is not alone for long. He soon encounters a second spacecraft and an entirely new form of life inside it. The alien being, whom he affectionately dubs Rocky, is unlike anything mankind has ever seen before—but he’s also not the kind of extraterrestrial threat that audiences might be expecting. “He’s kinda growing on me,” Grace reports on a recorded message at one point. “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” Rocky even receives a lesson in human culture, with Grace teaching him the universal sign of the thumbs-up.

Humor, Heart, and Space Travel

The Martian served as the gold standard for fun, touching science fiction on a grand scale, and if the Project Hail Mary trailer is anything to go by, this new project will tread the same balance between stressful spacefaring survival and engaging, personal humor. Gosling in the lead role, Weir’s hard science that always manages to ground his characters’ approaches in science we understand, and the Lord and Miller directing team’s storytelling sensibilities seem like the perfect formula for a worthwhile science fiction blockbuster.