Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary brings to the screen Andy Weir's novel of the same name, the author behind The Martian, adapted in 2015 by Ridley Scott with Matt Damon. The film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, a duo whose resume ranges wildly from the animated Lego films and Spider-Verse to the action-comedy of 22 Jump Street, here tackling their first large-scale, more dramatically pitched science-fiction production. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who wakes up alone aboard a spacecraft with no memory of how or why he got there.

He soon discovers he is the sole surviving crew member of a mission launched to investigate astrophage, a cosmic microorganism slowly consuming the Sun's energy, and that of nearly every other star in the galaxy, endangering life on Earth. The narrative alternates between present-day, hard-sci-fi problem solving that stays close to the novel, and flashbacks that gradually piece together how Grace ended up on the mission. As in the book, the emotional core is the bond the protagonist forms with an unexpected alien intelligence, told with a mix of scientific rigor, humor and an almost family-adventure sense of optimism that sets it apart from the bleaker tone of much recent genre fare.

Gosling carries long stretches of the film essentially solo, generating real feeling for an alien presence that is little more than a voice and a shape at the console, a demanding acting task that critics have largely praised. The film is explicitly positioned to repeat the audience and critical success of The Martian, sharing both a literary author and a spacebound survival structure, while aiming for a more intimate register, closer to an interspecies buddy movie, and a more visually ambitious scale thanks to substantial effects work on its deep-space sequences. Reservations exist too, some reviewers found the tone occasionally unsteady in balancing comedy with existential drama, but the overall consensus leans favorable.

The film returned to the spotlight after opening to more than 80 million dollars domestically and roughly 141 million worldwide, the biggest March opening ever for a film outside an established franchise, a result that cemented its status as one of the year's defining releases.