The official trailer for Project Hail Mary is out! Release date for IMAX is 20 March 2026. Happy! YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m08TxIsFTRI
Amazing! That’s one of my favorite books of all time. I wonder how they’ll do Rocky’s vision.
OK, looking forward to this one.
Is this the appropriate place to demand that someone explain to me what Project Hail Mary is?
(Just kidding, I googled it in two seconds.)
For anyone else, it’s another book by the guy who wrote The Martian. Project Hail Mary is much more interactive, since it has more than one main character. It’s a great and easy read.
Can’t wait!
I hope that the trailer isn’t indicative of how much time is spent before the launch vs after.
The book, if you’re not aware, starts in media res: He wakes up on the spacecraft, and has lost his memory. The before-launch bits are all told in flashback, as his memories recover (while meanwhile, he’s dealing with various crises “in real time”).
Haven’t read Project Hail Mary, LOVED The Martian (book & movie.) And one of my favorite actors, Ryan Gosling? I cannot wait.
I envy you the good reading you have ahead of you. The audiobook version of PHM is wonderfully done! The reader makes each voice sound distinct, and accurate to their gender and national origin.
I listened to this as an audio book and loved it. I’m definitely excited for a film version.
Can we ask for no spoilers here from those that have read the book please?
The trailer has book spoilers, but the book has been out since '21. The book is long, so the movie is going to have to eliminate a lot of good stuff from the book. I hope what remains is as fun as the book was.
Specifically, starting at around 2:12 in the video. The last spoken words before then are “I conquered zero-g in five hours”, at 2:07. So if you want to avoid spoilers, stop it before then.
While the heavy spoilers are at that trailer point, from the narrative context of the novel the entire trailer (even the setting) contains spoiler elements that are meant to be “big end-of-chapter reveals”.
I’m skeptical of how well this will translate to the screen. I’m sure I’ll see it, but it’ll be a bigger lift than was needed for the Martian.
Agree that the audio book is excellent.
I think PHM is more cinematic than The Martian, and it looks from the trailer they are keeping the most film-worthy parts. We’ll see. There’s no book so good that movie makers can’t mess it up.
I tried reading the book on the recommendation for someone who assured me that I’d love the science and engineering details, and instead found myself frustrated with oversights and technical issues that took me out of the story. The plot contrivance that the problem is also the solution was also a bridge too far, and when I skipped ahead and found out that the other alien species managed to build a giant ship capable of interstellar transit but doesn’t understand general relativity I gave it back unfinished to the person who loaned it to me.
The problem with writing hard science fiction is that in order to be ‘hard’ the technical details have to be (mostly) correct, and the story was just too many leaps of procedure, technology, and basic science. I was able to give some of the more egregious errors in film version of The Martian a pass even though I laughed openly at the scene where Donald Glover is sitting in the middle of a computing cluster waiting for his laptop to pop up a window saying “Calculations Correct!”, and at one point couldn’t help myself from saying “JPL doesn’t look like that!” in response to the polished and futuristic set design of the campus because the the character of Mark Watney was compelling. Project Hail Mary just didn’t grab me enough to overlook all of the easily corrected problems with the science.
Also, so much of that trailer is Ryan Gosling mugging for the camera and Sandra Hüller insisting that he’s the only biologist on the entire planet suitable for the job that I got tired of that schtick before the trailer was over. Maybe the film is more subtle and less contrived than the trailer makes it out to be but I’m disinclined to endure the cinema to find out.
Stranger
I don’t think this book was as well received as The Martian, but I never looked into the reasons. Anyone have any guesses that don’t spoiler too much?
Couldn’t have been that much of a failure to be making a movie about it.
My impression was that this book was at least as well-received as The Martian. It was Artemis, the book he released in between those two, that people didn’t seem to like as much.
[Moderating]
@Stranger_On_A_Train , your spoiler tags were malformed. They need [square brackets], not <angle brackets>. I fixed them.