Sitting in the theater, reclining your chair, eyes focused on the screen as music starts to play. If you haven’t read the book, you probably feel exactly how Ryland Grace felt when he first opened his eyes aboard the Hail Mary: utterly confused.
Luckily, I was able to get through the science fiction novel Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, a week before the movie came out. I’d recommend that anyone else do the same; while the movie is quite literally out of this world, it can’t include everything in the book, and you’ll have a much better understanding of what’s going on and appreciation for the cinematography if you read the book first. Spoilers ahead!
Similar to the book, the movie adaptation of Project Hail Mary begins with American astronaut (or so we think), Ryland Grace, aboard a spaceship light-years from Earth’s solar system. We soon learn he is there to observe a star; Earth’s own sun is being eaten by a microscopic organism called Astrophage, and for some reason, this star—Tau Ceti—isn’t. Grace is there to find out why—and send the information back to scientists on Earth—before Earth freezes and everyone dies.
You learn this information from the trailer, as opposed to from flashbacks in the novel, but the trailer sets the scene well for anyone going into the movie who hasn’t read the book. Other than this detail, the movie wonderfully follows the storyline of the book, while making necessary cuts (this is also the case with the science fiction movie adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel The Martian, so I’d highly recommend both that book and movie as well if you enjoyed this one). I loved the flashbacks in the movie—to both the planning for the mission and to Grace’s life as a middle school teacher—but my favorite scenes were the ones with Rocky.
Rocky is an alien Grace meets, one also searching for a solution to Astrophage. Their conversations are both heartfelt and funny, especially as they try to learn each other’s languages, capturing the same humor that is in the book. Ryan Gosling, who plays Ryland Grace, does a phenomenal job during these scenes, especially considering he’s not acting with an actual person. I nearly cried along with him multiple times.
Storyline-wise, if I could change one thing, it would be the pacing near the end of the movie. The eventual solution to Astrophage is its predator, which Grace and Rocky find on Tau Ceti—Grace calls it Taumoeba. In the novel, there’s a Taumoeba infestation in the Astrophage fuel tanks on his ship, an important climax that sends Grace searching for Rocky (who has the same problem) rather than back to Earth. This part is rushed in the movie, likely because it’s already two and a half hours, but I would have liked to see more of this part on the screen. However, the very end is fantastic; Grace is a teacher again, this time to Eridian kids on Rocky’s planet, and the scene conveys the same happiness and sadness as the epilogue in the book.
If you like science fiction in any fashion, you will love Project Hail Mary. It’s comedic, heartfelt, and science-y, but not so science-y that it makes no sense (I would say it’s slightly more on the science side than The Martian). I saw it with my mom the first time, and will definitely be going with my dad to see it again.