“So I met an alien. He’s a genius engineer, and if I can’t understand what he’s saying, he puts on a puppet show for me and my tiny brain,” says Ryan Gosling, back in his awkward hero best in the new trailer for Project Hail Mary — the upcoming adaptation of the Andy Weir novel of the same name.
In the film’s first trailer, which was released in July, Gosling’s Ryland Grace says to a room full of grim faces, “I’m not an astronaut. I’m not an astronaut! I put the not…into astronaut.” That’s the bewilderment of the school teacher being charged with the job of going into deep space to find out why our sun is dying.
The first trailer revealed the book’s big twist: Grace isn’t alone out there. He runs into a fellow alien scientist, the adorable mineral-clad creature that he dubs ‘Rocky.’ In this latest trailer, soundtracked by “Champagne Oasis,” we find out that Rocky’s planet is in the same danger as ours, and together they must “save the stars.”
Many book readers complain that the trailers give away too much of the story, but unprepared viewers can rest assured that this relationship between the two travellers will warm as many hearts and cause as many tears to fall as it did on the page.
The film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the director duo behind The Lego Movie and its sequel, the animated Spider-Verse films, both 21 Jump Street and 22 Jump Street, Cocaine Bear and The Mitchells vs. The Machines. The screenplay is written by Drew Goddard, who also helped to develop the other motion picture adaptation of an Andy Weir novel, The Martian.
Joining Gosling on-screen are Sandra Huller (Anatomy of a Fall) as no-nonsense mission chief Eva Stratt, Milana Vayntrub (This is Us) and Ken Leung (Old) as scientists Olesya Ilyukhina and Yáo Li-Jie, respectively. Providing the puppeteering for Rocky is James Ortiz (The Woodsman).
With the book regarded as one of the best science fiction novels of the decade so far, there’s a high expectation for the film to follow suit. If The Martian is anything to go by, we’ll be in for a treat.
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Project Hail Mary is set to release in theatres and IMAX on March 20th, 2026. Watch the trailer below.
