From Earth to the Edge of the Galaxy: Project Hail Mary’s First Look

The Martian, released back in 2015, won audiences over with its mix of humor, science, and surprisingly human drama. Based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel of the same name, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the sci-fi survival story was a box office and awards contender, despite some mixed early reviews. It was the perfect film for anyone looking for a mix of hard science fiction and character drama.

So, when fans first caught wind of a new Weir adaptation in the works, this time based on his 2021 bestseller Project Hail Mary, the excitement was palpable. While there are still plenty of other big sci-fi releases coming over the next few years, the announcement of a film about cosmic mystery, species extinction, and unlikely survival seems to tick all of the right boxes.

A first official trailer has now been released for the film, and it shows all the ingredients for another successful entry in the genre. It’s big-budget, big-idea stuff, but from the start to finish of this first look, it’s clear that Gosling, Goddard, and the directing team of Lord and Miller have the makings of a space epic on their hands.

A Screenplay and Cast in Place Before the Book Even Released

In many ways, Amazon MGM Studios’ interest in Project Hail Mary came before Weir even finished the book. It purchased the film rights to the novel before it had even been published, also locking in Drew Goddard to write the screenplay. This move will come as no surprise to fans of The Martian, which Goddard also adapted for the big screen, and for which he received an Oscar nomination for his faithful and clever work.

Lord and Miller are no strangers to sci-fi either, having already directed films like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie. While both filmmakers have expressed a somewhat begrudging fascination with science fiction and its lack of humor in the past, it could be the right balance for a space adventure inspired by Weir’s work.

Gosling plays Ryland Grace, the star of the film, who at the start of the trailer wakes up in his space suit on board a ship with no recollection of how he got there. The first half of the trailer is him trying to work out where he is, with our hapless hero quickly working out that his current location is a long way from Earth—and by a long way, we mean light years away from Earth.

Flashbacks of a clean-shaven Gosling fill in some of the blanks on Grace’s past. He is seen back on Earth teaching his class and then being called on to lead a mission to save the planet. His job: to find the reason why the Sun is dying, and take on a solo mission to figure out the mystery.

Stars are dying around it. A small cluster of suns around Earth is all dimming, with a single outlier in the mix. No one knows why, but scientists suspect an unknown force and believe it has some connection to a peculiar cosmic phenomenon. Grace, who used to be a molecular biologist, is their best chance to find the missing pieces.

Grace is not impressed, much to the chagrin of the people who hired him. In a telling early exchange, he notes: “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut. I can’t even moonwalk!” This apathy doesn’t fly with Eva Stratt, played by Sandra Hüller, and it seems to be a race against time to get Grace to the launching stage. The stakes are very high, and as she bluntly puts it, “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” The prospect of losing his class and all of human life on Earth is a powerful motivator, and soon he reluctantly agrees.

Grace’s training is a quick montage after which he is launched into space and on a long journey alone. The problem is that his memory is fuzzy when he wakes up on the ship, and his flashback reveals that the other team members and crew are dead. This information was leaked with the casting of Milana Vayntrub as Olesya Ilyukhina, one of the three crew members with Grace on his way to the other side of the galaxy.

Loneliness doesn’t last for long in space, however, and not long after, Grace finds another spaceship. The shock for him is that it’s not just his species he encounters in the vastness of space: he has also found another form of life. He names the creature Rocky after a brief scan that reveals he is a form of alien biology that human eyes have never seen. Rocky is very much not a hostile invader, though, and the first contact trope is subverted for a human/alien buddy-cop-style dynamic.

“He’s kinda growing on me,” Grace comments in his spaceship log to an unseen recipient. “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” Grace also has a heart and a funny bone, and there is some clever visual comedy in the scene where he is teaching the alien how to do the thumbs up. No words are needed, but it shows the bond being struck between man and alien.