First Trailer for Project Hail Mary Teases Mystery and Survival in Space

In 2015, The Martian landed with critical and commercial success. Weir’s 2011 novel of the same name—which had found its way into American bookstores two years earlier—presented a strange cocktail of irreverent humor and very serious, sometimes tragic drama, with survivalist themes and tons of nerdy science. Directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon, The Martian ended up earning a few awards and nominations, becoming the only entry in Weir’s bibliography to hit the big screen until now.

Project Hail Mary was published in 2021 and is currently Weir’s best-known book (the author’s debut novel, The Martian, still trumps it in terms of overall sales), so the adaptation is being treated with no less expectation. Amazon MGM Studios has released the first official teaser for the upcoming film, and it certainly seems that, from beginning to end, the trailer promises a cinematic experience that viewers will be able to call a “full space journey.”

First of all, the concept and overall design of the visuals are the perfect mix between hard sci-fi, with all the bells and whistles of big-budget filmmaking, and accessible character drama and adventure. The fact that the film has a star of Ryan Gosling’s caliber, Drew Goddard attached to the screenplay, and director Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at the helm means Project Hail Mary has all the hallmarks of a successful sci-fi event.

Amazon MGM announced the project was in development before the novel was even released, and pre-empted the film rights as far back as the novel was on course to be a success. The project was greenlit with Goddard attached to write the adaptation, with Lord and Miller set to direct. Goddard, who wrote the screenplay for the successful adaptation of The Martian, has received an Academy Award nomination for his work, and he, along with Lord and Miller, is already an exciting prospect for fans of Project Hail Mary.

Lord and Miller, of course, are known for directing Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie, as well as other properties. Their interest in space adventure has mostly focused on comedy, so the fact that they’re joining a more earnest adaptation could be seen as out of their usual depth. On the other hand, they have been key in several highly-rated film comedies in the past decade, so a combination of their work and Weir’s careful storytelling may be an ideal synergy.

The Story So Far…

Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a mousy middle school science teacher who, at the beginning of the trailer, wakes up on board a spaceship with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. The film wastes no time with exposition or narrative backfilling in the beginning. He is alone, his memory is shot, and his ship is speeding through the depths of space in the opposite direction from Earth.

Grace soon figures out he is several light-years from his apartment in Pasadena, and the only thing he can recall is a series of flashbacks with an unshaven version of himself in his classroom with his students, having a lesson before being approached by scientists to aid in a mission to save the planet.

The problem is that the Sun is starting to die. Not just the Sun either, but many of the surrounding stars are also dying, and while one of them is inexplicably becoming more luminous, scientists have no idea why. An alien force of some kind is to blame, they presume, but as a former molecular biologist, the head of the NASA team recruiting Grace for the mission, Anderson (David Oyelowo), explains, he may be just the man they need to save humanity.

However, Grace seems more than uninterested in the prospect of leaving Earth to join NASA and embark on what he can only assume is a one-way trip out into the furthest reaches of space. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he tells an interviewer at one point, demonstrating his disdain for the idea, “I can’t even moonwalk!” This doesn’t seem to bother a stern woman with a hot phone charger, Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), who explains it to Grace in no uncertain terms: “If you don’t go, you die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct. If you die, then we all die.”

After some quick training and final preparations, he’s launched on his mission. But by the time he’s conscious and awake on the ship, he’s only just remembered he’s been sent on this mission alone. The rest of his crew died earlier on, an additional trailer hint with the casting of Milana Vayntrub in the role of Olesya Ilyukhina, a dead Russian crewmate.

Grace doesn’t have to wait too long before finding a second space vessel, and through this, he comes into contact with life from another planet for the first time. Rocky, the living organism Grace nicknames him, is unlike anything he has ever seen on Earth, much less space. However, instead of being hostile or alien in the wrong way, Rocky and Grace are introduced as if they’re meeting friends. Rocky is, of course, not even a sapient lifeform by human standards, but Rocky can learn as well as Grace, as he explains in one of the astronaut’s video logs: “He’s kinda growing on me,” the file states, “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?” Rocky is also taught the importance of the thumbs-up, which we see in one of the film’s more memorable scenes.