Project Hail Mary

READ THIS BEFORE YOU WATCH THE TRAILERS!

Next year a sci-fi movie called Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling will hit theaters. It's an adaptation of another book by Andy Weir, author of The Martian. That book came out in 2011, the film in 2015. Project Hail Mary the book released in 2021 and will be a movie in early 2026, about the same timeline. I never did read The Martian but have to say I enjoyed it on screen, my desire to dislike (Team America voice) Matt Damon notwithstanding. He's been on a real run in recent years btw, with Ford vs Ferrari (2019), The Last Duel (2021), Air (2023) and Oppenheimer (2023) all featuring roles where I've appreciated him. But I'm getting distracted.

I was given this book a couple years ago by my brother and sat on it until this summer. It was super fun, and a really quick read, though there is a lot of science-y stuff. I'm certainly glad I read it before the upcoming movie.

Like The Martian, Project Hail Mary takes place primarily in space and focuses on a stranded astronaut. The stakes are higher here, considerably. Instead of trying to rescue himself, our protagonist is attempting to save humanity on Earth. I'm going to be careful and sparing with my words because how the plot and various crucial tidbits are revealed to the reader happen in sync with how they're remembered by the main character, Ryland Grace, played by Gosling. He wakes up with no memory, not even his name. He has to piece by piece sort out who he is, where he is, and why. Very gradually his memory provides him with one detail, then another, until he understands the mission, his purpose. It's only after some time that he actually knows everything that's happened. So, like I said, you learn about what's going on as he does.

The first chapter reveals he's not on Earth. Grace is a scientist, you see, and he figures that out immediately. He can deduce quite a bit about himself and his surroundings by knowledge he has, even if he doesn't know how he acquired it. He'll be required to engineer much more than that. The second chapter brings back that he was a school teacher, his greatest motivation for wanting to succeed. The third chapter ends with Grace discovering that the star he sees on the monitor before him is not, in fact, the sun. He's in a different solar system. By this point a few flashbacks have started to connect the dots in his brain, but not entirely. I'm going to stop there. Learning too much about the plot will ruin the surprise. Which leads me to my point.

If you're not going to read the book I would suggest bewaring the trailers. An argument could be made that the first trailer (embedded below) already shows too much, but I think it stops just short. The second one for sure you should avoid if you haven't read the book, though it certainly made me excited to see the movie. And there's months left to go, you know there will be more.

It's tricky. They do need hype their big budget film. But half the fun are the reveals. Ah well. I'll just say that you'll get more out of the experience the less you know in advance.

For what it's worth, it looks like they might've nailed it.

From the back cover:

'And with the clock ticking down and the nearest human being light-years away, he's got to do it all alone.

Or does he?'

I can't wait.