Humanity’s Survival Hinges on One Man in Project Hail Mary

Remember The Martian? The 2015 hit movie? A gripping, funny, unexpectedly sentimental adaptation of Andy Weir’s first novel? Directed by Ridley Scott, it starred Matt Damon and was a breakout success for the book’s author. It landed critical acclaim, strong box office results, and a few awards, as well. When a new film was announced, based on Weir’s next book, the 2021 bestseller Project Hail Mary, science fiction fans had reason to be enthusiastic.

Amazon MGM Studios has posted the first official trailer for the new adaptation. The footage certainly looks like it’s got the same ingredients: humor, a suspenseful survival story, and a whole lot of science. This looks to be a science fiction blockbuster, in the classic sense: big budget, big ideas, big star. It’s got Ryan Gosling, Drew Goddard on the screenplay, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directing, and in those elements alone, it has most of the key ingredients for a surefire sci-fi hit.

Amazon MGM was interested in Weir’s next novel well before it had even been released. The film rights were purchased before the novel even came out, and Goddard was attached to write the screenplay. Goddard was one of the talents behind the scenes of The Martian; his adaptation of Weir’s work was smart, largely faithful, and earned him a nomination for an Academy Award. This time around, Goddard will return, but the new directors might be a surprise. Lord and Miller, whose previous collaborations include Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, are better known for comedies. That said, comedy is also one of The Martian’s strengths, and Lord and Miller are no strangers to heart as well.

The film stars Gosling as Ryland Grace, a “soft-spoken” middle school science teacher, who wakes up one day in a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. Almost immediately, the film’s first trailer thrusts the audience into the action, and they immediately share Grace’s growing realization of his dire predicament. At some point, he’s woken up on the spaceship, but he can’t figure out how, and when he checks the interstellar map, he realizes he’s many light-years from home. Grace’s early panic soon gives way to flashbacks of his life before waking up on the spacecraft, revealing a clean-shaven Grace, before he’s even arrived at school on Earth. He’s with students, discussing some scientific point, when he’s approached about the mission of a lifetime, if not the galaxy: the chance to save the planet from extinction.

The problem? The Sun is dying. Not only Earth, but several other proximal stars are dimming, with one sole exception. Scientists are baffled, but they know something is amiss, and a mysterious space phenomenon may be at the heart of it. Grace, a former molecular biologist, is the potential key to figuring it all out.

The catch is, Grace is far from excited about this mission. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he says in a scene. “I can’t even moonwalk!” But for Eva Stratt, a stern official (played by Sandra Hüller), there is no such thing as reluctance. Grace is given a straightforward ultimatum: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” Stratt’s directness is an effective argument, and with the knowledge that if he refuses to go, his students will die as well, Grace relents.

He gets a crash course in space travel and the mission details, and off he goes. But he quickly loses his remaining crew to an accident, and the second he wakes up on the ship, he realizes he is completely and utterly alone. The trailer reveals that this character, the sole remaining member of the other crew, is an unidentified Russian crewmate, played by Milana Vayntrub.

But he isn’t alone for long, as it turns out. After discovering a second spaceship, Grace makes contact with its alien occupant: a wholly unfamiliar form of life, and not a hostile one, it seems. “He’s kinda growing on me,” Grace records in one scene, “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” As we watch Grace explain the various reasons not to eat the alien, they pause to communicate via a thumbs-up, the first successful interspecies contact.

A Space Epic with a Sense of Humor

In many ways, the trailer for Project Hail Mary gives viewers a lot to like. Fans of The Martian will already be familiar with the combination of humor, warmth, and tension in Weir’s writing, and that’s present in this trailer, as well. Gosling in a science fiction adventure is an effective lure, and Goddard’s and Lord and Miller’s successful track records as storytellers in this genre certainly point to a promising film.

Project Hail Mary has a release date already. It’s set to launch on March 20, 2026. That’s a long time to either avoid spoiling reading the book, or reading the book, to catch all the details as soon as the film comes out. A large part of the story’s hook is a mystery about what exactly happened before Grace woke up on the ship. The film’s main setup is a survival story in space, with danger from the natural world, as well as the ordinary terrors of space travel (radiation sickness, dying alone in space, and so on).