The Fate of Earth Rests on Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

In 2015, audiences around the world fell in love with The Martian, a tense, action-packed, often-hilarious, and surprisingly emotional adaptation of Andy Weir’s sci-fi debut novel. Released to critical acclaim and buoyed by some surprisingly healthy box office figures, the Matt Damon-starring Ridley Scott film won a few awards and, more importantly, made us believers in smart, heartfelt, sci-fi movies with big ideas.

Four years later, Weir released a sequel of sorts with Project Hail Mary. The follow-up novel also became an instant bestseller and would earn Weir a second visit from Hollywood A-listers eager to tackle his brand of no-nonsense space sci-fi with surprisingly emotional characters. By 2022, Amazon MGM Studios had acquired film rights to the book in advance of its publication and enlisted Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. Fans of The Martian would know Goddard’s work from his sharp, on-point adaptation of Weir’s previous novel, which earned the screenwriter an Academy Award nomination. It was a safe bet to have him return.

It’s the familiar, mind-melting, huge-budget brainpower of Project Hail Mary that’s the big announcement here. But with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) calling the shots, it’s a sign that the movie is looking to subvert hard sci-fi expectations by getting in some laughs (when it can) while not skimping on the stakes. A pair of these guys working in tandem with Weir’s popular source material bodes well for the film. Oh, and Ryan Gosling is playing the lead, so…

Cut to the first trailer, which is a sampler of tense, funny, ridiculous, and unapologetically emotional science fiction. From the opening moments to the closing scene, there’s a clear sense of investment in both Gosling’s character and the overall premise, which, on paper, is more than a little ambitious. The main problem of Project Hail Mary is that the Sun is dimming quickly. Not just our star, but a slew of nearby ones, all of which have an important guest star: an inexplicable, translucent space phenomenon called Rocky. These rocks, it turns out, are speeding across the cosmos, slowly but surely extinguishing starlight.

Scientists, especially those with a knack for using metaphor in the place of actual understanding, don’t know why. But it’s a big problem, one that needs a big idea to save the world. Cue Ryland Grace, a mild-mannered middle school science teacher whose entire life changes when an experiment goes wrong, and he’s shot into space with no memory of his former life. The trailer is in-your-face as it jumps from Grace’s awakening to his subsequent disorientation and panic as he puzzles through a quickfire series of memory gaps before coming to the dawning realization that he’s light-years from home, floating in the middle of nowhere.

We see bits and pieces of his life before it all went dark, learning just enough about a newly clean-shaven, rumpled Grace and his situation before things take a quick turn. He’s in space for a reason: to try to save the Earth. But why him? Grace is no astronaut. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he protests to his confederates. “I can’t even moonwalk!”

Their boss isn’t having it. Played with deadpan seriousness by Sandra Hüller, Eva Stratt pushes back with a harsh ultimatum that sees no room for no: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” Grace eventually caves in, but not before letting us know that he’s a “middle school science teacher with students that I like.” He’ll do it, he decides. But only so he doesn’t have to face losing his class as well as the rest of the world. With that in mind, he heads to space, and we leave him to the likely pains of training before being launched.

It doesn’t take long for his one-man mission to go south. As the next scene reveals, his co-pilots and other essential crew members have all died somewhere along the way. Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub) is listed on the credits as a “deceased Russian crewmate.” The small sample of story progression we get in this trailer continues to tease at the set-up while fleshing out the main problem. The world is ending, and our space-bound hero is the only one who can stop it.

A Crowded Planet Gets a Needed Shot in the Arm

With The Martian still a relative memory, the Project Hail Mary trailer offers a reprieve from feeling like this is The Martian, but with a new set of actors and crew. Still, Amazon MGM is banking on Gosling to front this multi-character, multi-location story. We’ve seen him do this before, so why not? Goddard is on board to give it his all, much like with the first film. Weir wrote a cracking sequel, so it’s only natural that Hollywood would want to tell the story again. And when your setup involves space and a rapidly growing black hole called Rocky, you’re pretty much guaranteed to come out on top.

Project Hail Mary drops March 20, 2026. That’s a long time to keep your eyes off the Internet and avoid any spoilers that may cross your path in the interim. But it also gives those interested in diving deeper into the character before this big day a fair bit of time. The only question is whether or not the film will be able to hold a candle to the source material. That’s the rub with most movie adaptations. Time will tell if it succeeds or not. But right now, it’s looking like a mission worth following.