Project Hail Mary Promises a Mix of Wit, Wonder, and Danger

Science-meets-survival-meets-serendipitous-self-discovery, The Martian was the unexpectedly funny, tense, and moving adaptation of Andy Weir’s self-published science fiction bestseller. Released in 2015, Ridley Scott’s film was both a critical and commercial success and led to a couple of award wins. Fans of the book (and the film) were understandably thrilled when a new adaptation was announced: this time, it’s Weir’s 2021 bestseller Project Hail Mary that’s making the jump to the big screen.

It seems like the movie is shaping up to fit the bill in every way. Weir’s storytelling—the thrilling mix of detail-oriented science, character-based suspense, and surprise humor—feels like a perfect match for writer-director duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. (You may know them from their work on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie.) Combined with a script from the reliably clever Drew Goddard (Willow, The Martian) and the star power of Ryan Gosling, Project Hail Mary is starting to look a lot like a blockbuster event. Or, at the very least, the next major sci-fi outing since The Martian.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are a more unexpected choice, though one that might actually be ideal for Weir’s work. The two have been known for light-hearted comedy, especially on the smaller scale of animated features. They’re also known for their ability to ground fantastical elements in humor and heart. Their involvement in the production could be the secret ingredient needed to pull off the challenging balance of big science and relatable characters.

Project Hail Mary‘s protagonist is a middle school science teacher named Ryland Grace. Played by Ryan Gosling, Grace is your typical—sort of—everyman, albeit an exceptionally capable one. The first shot of the trailer finds Grace waking up on a spaceship with no memory of how he ended up there. The panic and fear of waking up in space are quickly gone, though, as Grace takes stock of his situation.

When he blinks, he is light-years away from Earth, and he’s the only human being for millions of miles. The revelation is punctuated by quick glimpses of Grace back on Earth. We see him teaching a group of students and preparing for bed at his apartment. He’s clean-shaven and wearing a comfortable nightshirt, but when he wakes up in space, he’s fully suited and masked and clearly spooked by the situation.

As the film jumps back and forth between the ship and the classroom, we begin to see what has happened. Grace was recruited by a faceless agency, though we know that Eva Stratt, played by Sandra Hüller, is one of the more important officials. Their pitch is simple: something is killing nearby stars, and Earth is next. As a molecular biologist, Grace may be just the person to crack the case and come up with a solution to the dying Sun problem.

He’s not enthusiastic. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” Grace says in one of the more comedic scenes. He follows it with another zinger: “I can’t even moonwalk!” But it’s not much of a choice. Stratt is blunt in her warning: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” Grace’s students have already started to disappear, and when faced with the extinction of the entire planet, he has no choice but to agree.

Grace is launched into space for what he’s been told is a one-way mission. But before he goes, his memory is wiped clean. When he awakes on the ship, he is effectively on his own. The rest of the cast, and crew, is dead. Casting information released for the film reveals that Milana Vayntrub plays Olesya Ilyukhina, a Russian scientist who has already died on the journey.

Grace doesn’t get long to mope around the spaceship before something new shows up on the radar. A second spacecraft has crashed into his, but it’s not a rival or enemy. Instead, it’s a brand-new, never-before-seen form of life. Grace, still half asleep, calls the friendly extraterrestrial Rocky.

“He’s kinda growing on me,” he tells a recording of himself, referring to the creature’s habit of hibernating in inconvenient places. “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” Later, he gives Rocky a lesson on the classic thumbs-up gesture, a small moment of inter-species camaraderie that sets the stage for the rest of the film.

Humor and Heart in Space

Like The Martian, the trailer for Project Hail Mary paints a film that’s just as tense as it is touching and surprising. Space as a backdrop offers so much opportunity for drama and danger, but in the right hands, a story can also use the depths of space to connect its characters and bring a few chuckles along for the ride.

In Weir, Gosling, Lord, Miller, and Goddard, it’s looking more and more like Project Hail Mary has the right talent to walk that line. While the 2026 release date is still a long way off, it’ll give plenty of time to either avoid spoilers or read the book and be ready for the film’s arrival. With the many, many strands of the story to explore—mystery, survival, strange friendship—it’s looking like one of the most anticipated science fiction films of the 2020s. If it doesn’t measure up to the book, that’s always a bummer. But if it does, then we have a sequel to The Martian on our hands.