PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

A couple of days after it reached town, I went to see the film adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel PROJECT HAIL MARY, directed by Lord & Miller and written by Drew Goddard. Goddard wrote the screenplay for the other Weir adaptation, THE MARTIAN, directed by Ridley Scott, in which Matt Damon once again has to be expensively rescued from something. (Someone once calculated that, in total, it would have cost some $900 billion to rescue Matt Damon from shit all those times.) Weir wrote another novel after THE MARTIAN, entitled ARTEMIS, which didn’t seem to be as well-received. And so it seems he went back to the good well for PROJECT HAIL MARY, which is about another brilliant guy abandoned in space. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship eleven light years from Earth with no memory of how he got there or why. Most of his memory comes back during the first act. Ryland Grace was once a molecular biologist, but, after a poorly received paper on how alien life wouldn’t necessarily need…