A few short weeks ago, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller graced us with an extended first look at their upcoming sci-fi adaptation, Project Hail Mary. The three-minute trailer for a movie not coming out for nine months displayed supreme confidence in the project, and after watching it, you could see why.
So to then bring the film to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, along with its iconic star Ryan Gosling, felt almost like too much. We already have this glorious trailer. What more could we see? Well, Lord, Miller, and Gosling were joined by author Andy Weir to talk about all things Project Hail Mary and show a ton of new footage. The crowd ate it up, and now, we’re even more excited.
We got over 10 minutes of new footage from the film, all of which was from the first third of the movie. So while it seemed like it was revealing a lot, apparently, it is not. Scene one was, fittingly enough, the first five minutes of the movie. An elaborate claw machine opens a zipper and sucks a tube out of the mouth of Dr. Ryland Grace (Gosling). He’s been in deep cryosleep and is disoriented. The machine asks him what 2+2 is, but he can’t speak. So each garbled response is called “incorrect” by the machine. It keeps trying to help him with his awakening, but he’s freaking out a bit. He falls face first off the table in an orange sleeping bag. The machine tries to pick him up, but he slips out. He stumbles around the room as the machine tells him he can’t move yet and tries to shoot some goo into his mouth to feed him. Eventually he finds his way to a ladder and starts climbing it. On the way up he sees the pods of his friends, but they are all dead. He gets to the top of the ladder, still confused, and says, “Where am I?” It’s then he looks and sees that he’s in space. He didn’t know and is terrified.
Scene two is back on Earth as Ryland is approached by Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) at his school. He doesn’t want any part of what she’s doing, but she tells him they found a substance on the surface of the sun and need him to look at it. This hard cuts to Ryland in a huge remote lab, in a big suit. He’s about 20 feet from Stratt and about 12 military leaders who are all behind glass. “Am I expendable?” he asks them, at which point they shut off the communications and tell him no, they’d prefer he live. This isn’t encouraging. Basically, they want him to look at this sample they took and tell them what it is. This kicks off a sort of mini montage as Ryland starts to get geeky about experimenting. Eventually, he has a eureka moment. “It’s a cell!” he exclaims. This is first contact with an alien species. But, as he’s freaking out, he realizes the cell has died.
The third scene is back in space. Ryland is acclimated to it by now and has a sense of his mission. But the ship is stopping. He doesn’t know what that means, and when it does, he’s put into zero gravity for the first time. He freaks out, starts screaming, and holds on for dear life. Eventually though, he grabs onto a telescope so he looks out at it. He follows a trail in the sky to see what appears to be a smudge. Only, it’s not a smudge. It’s an alien spaceship that slowly comes next to his craft. He watches in awe and terror.
The final scene in the panel was Ryland connecting with the alien ship. He slowly drops down into a large, rocky tunnel, which dead-ends at a rock wall. He looks through it when two large fingers appear and scare the crap out of him. When he composes himself, he goes back and tries to communicate. Two flat fingers do the almost come-hither motion. As he looks closer, the alien has created a little cutout of a human. “Is that me?” Ryland asks. It’s also made a cutout of his ship, and the alien uses it to try and tell a story visually. Either run back to his ship or run into the alien ship; Ryland can’t tell. Eventually though, he just goes back.
Each of the scenes did a great job of being funny and sweet, while also being super intriguing and dramatic. Lord and Miller, with the help of Gosling, really seem to have struck that perfect balance that will bring things into focus. And, with a mix of practical and digital effects bringing the alien, Rocky, to life, we are more than encouraged. We are over the moon.
From the first moment we read Project Hail Mary, through the early look at CinemaCon, and now the Hall H panel, our excitement for the project is only growing. We are ready for this ride.
Written by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary opens March 20.
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