A couple of days after it reached town, I went to see the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel PROJECT HAIL MARY, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew Goddard. Goddard wrote the screenplay for the other Weir adaptation, THE MARTIAN, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Matt Damon once again has to be expensively rescued from something. (Someone once calculated that, in total, it would have cost some $900 billion to rescue Matt Damon from shit all those times.) Weir wrote another novel after THE MARTIAN, entitled ARTEMIS, which didn’t seem to be as well-received. And so it seems he went back to the good well for PROJECT HAIL MARY, which is about another brilliant guy abandoned in space.
Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship eleven light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there or why. Most of his memory comes back during the first act.
Ryland Grace was once a molecular biologist, but, after a poorly received paper on how alien life wouldn’t necessarily need water, he quit and become a middle-school teacher. In that role, he has to explain to kids how the discovery of star-eating cells discovered on the sun means they’ll all be dead in thirty years. And that’s when the head of an international project to save the world shows up at his school to draft him, having read his paper.
The cells are all over our region of the galaxy – aside from one star eleven light years away. Once they discover those cells output a huge amount of energy, there’s only one option left – use them to power a mission to that star, find out why that star is uninfected, and send the cure home on small probes. And there’s only enough main-mission fuel for a one way trip.
Not long after Ryland Grace gets there, he discovers he’s not actually alone – there’s an alien spacecraft nearby, from another infected star. It too only has one occupant. First contact, at the end of the world – for two worlds.
I don’t want to go the spoiler route – even though the book has been out for years and the film is an extremely faithful adaptation – so everything I’ve just said is in fact in the first act. It’s a big, long, packed film.
THE MARTIAN is, of course, competence porn in a Heinlein style. There’s some of that to HAIL MARY the novel, but this time it is undercut by the revelations about past events, and that’s maintained in the film. Also maintained, however, is one of my favourite things about the book – two smart beings in first contact solving mutually intelligible speech in a matter of weeks. It works very enjoyably on screen, and they even throw in a new joke or two.
One of the oddnesses about the book is that Grace presents as a little autistic and asexual. There’s a brief mention of a college girlfriend called Linda, but only in terms of the fact that she brought a lot of untidy crap into his neat little apartment, which is in itself something of a signal. He’s not great at making connections. In the book, I got the sense that he was really only comfortable around kids. This may just be me, but I spent the book feeling like there was something off about Grace. The problem the film had to solve was, basically, that Grace was being played by Ryan Gosling. Drew Goddard’s main fix is two lines of dialogue, tying into an overall slight reframing of Grace as conflict-averse, still childlike but also playful and personable in a faintly awkward and insecure way that fits with Gosling. That fix is masterful in its wise simplicity.
There’s an angle on the film where it is, in fact, about a person having to grow all the way up.
Goddard’s solves for the adaptation are, in fact, all brilliant. It’s a gold standard class. Even when his fixes are additive, they are only mildly so, visually driven and smooth as silk.
The first five minutes, Grace waking up from his induced coma on the ship, are played for laughs, and that was smart too. In his book ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE, William Goldman talks about the first two or three pages of the script for HARPER. Paul Newman wakes up in the office he lives in, gets ready for the day, goes to make coffee – and the coffee can is empty. He looks in the bin. Sees old coffee grounds in there. Looks down at them with resignation. Puts them in the coffee machine. Finishes getting ready. Pours the coffee. And makes a face like he’s sucked piss off a nettle. Everyone laughs at the face Paul Newman makes. From that point on, you like him. Because we’ve all been there and we can’t help but laugh at the face he pulls. Same thing happens here. Those five minutes get us on Ryan Gosling’s side. It’s a hard science fiction film, the concepts will always be a bit complicated, but now we are going to stick with it because we are on that guy’s side.
It is beautifully shot. Even the frames in that opening funny scene are gorgeously done, eccentric and wonky and fun. The cutting is fantastic, veering from classical to juddering. The big set piece towards the end is almost psychedelic in its colouring. The set design is REALLY clever – at times it almost reminded me of the wonderful interiors in 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT. A particularly intelligent move was putting controls and screens on ALL the surfaces because the ship is designed to be operated in zero gravity. It is notable how many of the sets are physical. I’ve read that there’s next to no green-screen in this film, and I have to say, it felt like it. It feels like the last of the classically made physical-production big science fiction films.
The alien Rocky, an actual physical puppet by all accounts, moves like a drunken cat. It sees by echolocation and Lord & Miller do flashes of Rocky-vision in ways that remind you they directed the Spider-Verse films. One wonderful touch is that Rocky has “tattoos,” incisions on his rocky form. Every element feels considered.
The big reversal in PROJECT HAIL MARY comes at about the point it did in THE MARTIAN, and broadly has the same effect – it stops the film’s momentum dead, and it has to spin up again. In THE MARTIAN, it spins back up successfully. Not so much here, because it comes after the big effects-heavy set-piece – a set-up you probably shouldn’t think about too hard – and for me the film kind of crept to the end after that. Your mileage will likely vary. You can’t fault Goddard for sticking to the novel’s structure, but the loss of energy is real.
It’s a good film. Like the book, it’s clever, and the filmmakers get a real ride out of it, with a decent number of laughs. (If you read the book, you will be pleased to know that “fist my bump” made it into the film.) I’m still surprised it was released in March, as I think it has summer film written all over it. But nobody’s going to be sad about a big smart well-made blockbuster brightening the spring.
It’s fun. You won’t regret seeing it at all. If you’re a writer, read the book and then watch the film and study Goddard’s choices – you will learn some things. And Lord & Miller and Drew Goddard will get to make anything they fucking want to after this because after this weekend it will have made $160 million in the US alone, the best even opening for a non-franchise film in a March frame. Rough rule of thumb – the studio gets half of domestic box office and a third of foreign. HAIL MARY cost something over 200 mil, I believe. It will earn out in the next few weeks, as it’s only going to drop 42% in the US this weekend.
Bad news: there is already talk of a sequel.
Not out on physical media yet, because it’s on Prime Video (UK) (US+)
(Originally written on my newsletter, 29 March 2026)
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