First Look at Project Hail Mary: Ryan Gosling Heads to the Stars

In 2015, the world fell in love with The Martian, a tense, funny, and unexpectedly touching adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling debut novel of the same name. The Ridley Scott-directed Matt Damon vehicle was a critical darling, box office success, and awards-season dark horse, so when a follow-up to Weir’s acclaimed debut started making the rounds, anyone with even a passing interest in character-focused science fiction had every right to be excited.

Amazon MGM Studios has released the first official trailer for that film, and it appears the feature has all the necessary ingredients to bring the same blend of science, survival, and silliness that made The Martian so successful. From its opening seconds to its final shot, the preview makes it clear that Project Hail Mary is a slick, big-budget sci-fi endeavor that traffics in ideas as much as it does explosions. Add in a cast led by Ryan Gosling, Drew Goddard on script, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directing, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide event picture in the making.

Production on the new adaptation began long before Weir’s latest novel hit the shelves, and Amazon and MGM Studios were just as eager to purchase the film rights before it ever made it to print. The studio secured a deal early on to have Goddard take a crack at penning a screenplay for the film, and the choice to include him on the team is a no-brainer for fans of The Martian. Goddard’s work on that adaptation of Weir’s novel was equal parts smart, effective, and often more than a little faithful to the source material, and his work earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Lord and Miller, the comedic duo with directing gigs on the duo’s resume, might not be the first names to spring to mind when it comes to hard science fiction, but those two have proved their worth in pairing humor with genuine emotion, and their presence in the director’s chair should bring a nice balance of levity and heart to the proceedings.

In the film, Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a soft-spoken middle school science teacher who awakens on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there. The trailer jumps right into action, as Grace quickly realizes he’s several years and light-years away from home in a state of total panic. He eventually comes to find that he is on a spaceship flying out of the solar system, thousands of years away from his apartment in the outer suburbs. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals more details about his backstory. Viewers are given a glimpse of a clean-shaven Grace on Earth back at his classroom before he is approached about a mission like no other: preventing the planet from dying.

The catch? The Sun is dying, and it isn’t just Earth’s home star that’s in trouble. Multiple stars within the same general vicinity are dimming, with a single exception. The scientific community can’t agree on why this is happening, but all signs point to an unknown, cosmic anomaly as the cause. As a former molecular biologist, Grace may hold the key to unraveling the conundrum.

Grace’s research career has long been behind him, but that doesn’t stop a collection of government officials from pursuing him about a possible mission to space in an attempt to turn his knowledge on its head. He’s not exactly thrilled at the proposition, at least at first. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” Grace quips in one scene. “I can’t even moonwalk!” His objections are quickly brushed aside by Eva Stratt, a stiff upper-echelon employee played by Sandra Hüller. Her elevator pitch for the mission is brutal in its clarity: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.” Reluctantly, Grace accepts the offer, finally seeing an opportunity to keep his students alive in the offing.

He soon undergoes a compressed crash course in space acrobatics and is suitably launched on the years-long journey. He wakes up on a spaceship and, thanks to temporary amnesia, quickly realizes something is off. Grace is not only the lone crew member on board, but also the last, as the rest of his peers have died in the interim. As a nice piece of trivia on that note, the casting details for the film have been released as well, revealing Milana Vayntrub in the role of Olesya Ilyukhina, a Russian crewmate of Grace who is also deceased.

The time alone on the ship, however, doesn’t last long. Grace soon discovers another spacecraft, as well as a completely alien form of life inside. This surprise interloper, a single-celled life form he names Rocky, is like nothing humanity has ever seen. It is not, however, the aggressive, extraterrestrial infiltrator the trailer and title might suggest. “He’s kinda growing on me,” Grace mentions in a recorded voice message. “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” The trailer even lets viewers in on a moment of human-alien bonding, as Grace tries to teach Rocky to do a thumbs-up.

Sci-Fi in Space with a Side of Silliness

If the trailer is anything to go by, then Project Hail Mary will have the ability to balance the tension and desperation of a high-stakes deep-space survival thriller with levity and pathos, just as The Martian did nearly a decade earlier. The blend of Gosling’s restrained screen magnetism, Weir’s talent for weaving hard science and accessible characters together, and the Lord and Miller’s storytelling savvy is more than enough to signal a must-watch science-fiction odyssey in the making.