Project Hail Mary Set to Deliver Big-Screen Sci-Fi Adventure

You may remember The Martian. If you don’t, let us jog your memory. The Martian was Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling first novel. Released in 2015, the movie was science-y, thrilling, laugh-out-loud funny, and, improbably, occasionally quite moving. Matt Damon’s rascally botanist, left behind on the surface of the red planet and somehow surviving, was a natural to bring Weir’s concept to the screen. The Martian was an excellent movie, enjoying good box office and some awards. It’s also not hard to see why, when Project Hail Mary was announced, an adaptation of Weir’s bestselling 2021 novel, smart people got quite excited about what was to come.

And now we have our first official look at the film. Amazon MGM Studios has dropped the first trailer, and it’s all too clear that Project Hail Mary is more or less The Martian 2.0. From the start to the end, the movie features big concepts, scientific ones ,and survivalist ones, and a clear undercurrent of comedy. The trailer promises big-budget space-age thrills aplenty, as well as some humor. The Martian, too, was able to inject some levity into otherwise pretty nail-biting situations. With Ryan Gosling on board to carry the role previously held by Damon, Drew Goddard writing the screenplay, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller on board to direct, Project Hail Mary looks to be a major sci-fi event in the making.

Amazon MGM has been eyeing the project for a while, long before Weir’s novel was even available for purchase. The film rights were scooped up before the release of the book, with Goddard already on board to script. The Martian devotees will remember Goddard as the screenplay writer for Weir’s original story, an adaptation that netted Goddard an Academy Award nomination. His faithful and witty work made bringing him back for the sequel a no-brainer. The team of Lord and Miller may seem like a more unconventional directorial duo for such a hard sci-fi story, but both of those gentlemen have made a career of injecting humor and, well, humanity, into sci-fi stories. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie were two of their biggest hits, for example.

Gosling’s character is Ryland Grace. A mild-mannered middle school science teacher, he wakes up in the cockpit of a spaceship with no recollection of how he got there. At least that’s how the trailer begins. Grace is confused and in a panic as he checks systems and reviews sensor logs. He’s been launched into deep space for a reason, but in the process of all the shuttle and pod and technology techie stuff, he also shows us where he is. Several light years from his home planet, Earth. Flashback sequences then help to fill in some of Grace’s backstory as he, an attentive and wholly cleanly shaven man, walks the halls of his school and teaches his students before being pulled into an office for a briefing.

Grace is a former molecular biologist who’s been recruited by a science agency to go on a special mission. It’s also a mission to save the world, several worlds, even. A number of stars near Earth have begun to dim, and the situation is getting serious. Scientists are stumped, but one name keeps coming up about the cause of the stars’ fading. The Sun, as Grace would know well, is dying. Humanity’s star, Earth’s sun, is on the fritz, and scientists have reason to believe that one of Grace’s former colleagues, another world with a single star in its solar system, is involved. Grace is the perfect man to help the scientific community figure out the case.

Except Grace is kind of less than all in on the idea. His pitch meeting with the scientists isn’t going so well. Grace is noncommittal, his enthusiasm lacking. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he drawls in one scene. “I can’t even moonwalk!” The high official in charge of recruitment, Eva Stratt, played by Sandra Hüller, has a blunt ultimatum. “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” The stakes are raised even further when Grace imagines his face-to-face with his students. He’ll go, Stratt convinces him, just as long as the scientists take the most rigorous of care with his family back home. Grace is sent on a fast-track space program and out into the stars in what is described to him as “a one-way trip to nowhere.”

Grace is alone, but he isn’t for long. The alien ship approaches, and another life form inside, but he’s not the danger or at least not the danger he at first seems to be. An alien life form is on board Grace’s ship. Rocky is the name he gives the new life form he’s picked up. Rocky is an alien and unlike any of Earth’s creatures that humans have ever seen before, but he’s no danger. At least that’s the thinking of Grace, who, in a voiceover, tells his colleague, “He’s kinda growing on me,” and, in the same audio recording, “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” The trailer teases some weird alien-but-familiar fun too, as Grace teaches his new life form the intricacies of the thumbs-up.