In March 2026, Project Hail Mary was released in the United States. Based on the novel of the same name by Andy Weir, the blockbuster features Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace. The movie follows Grace’s journey to save the Earth, and how he meets the other main character of the adaptation.
Rocky, an alien, is a favorite character of many viewers of the movie.“Everyone’s gotta love Rocky. [..] He’s like a little puppy dog, you know? He’s just, he’s so fantastic. Yeah. I really like him,” said Anders Millican, a Freshman at Skyline who both watched the movie and read the book. Many people love Rocky because of the way that he acts and the way he speaks to Grace, allowing for many quotable scenes.
The movie has a way of switching back and forth between the present and the past, which is somewhat unlike many movies.“I liked the way that we just, like, woke up with him and had no idea what was happening. And then we see the backstory as he remembers it,” Charisse Stephens, an English teacher at Skyline who also read the book, said when asked about the format of the movie.
The scenes switch back and forth, showing how Grace got to the point where he is in the movie. Millican said that it stayed quite faithful to the book, giving it praise in that regard. The overall consensus of people’s expectations walking into the theater is that they were excited.
“I expected it to be a pretty good movie. I’d seen the trailers. Ryan Gosling is a great actor. I mean, […] other adaptations of Andy Weir books have been really good,” Millican said, Project Hail Mary is Gosling’s highest rated movie, earning a 94% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 8.4 on IMBd. The other Weir movie Millican refers to is The Martian, which also was rated highly. The rating reflects how people felt when leaving the theater.
Millican explained, “There’s always that anticipation when you’re going into a movie theater for a story that you really like, you know, that’s being adapted into a movie: […] ‘I really hope they don’t screw this up.’” Many movie adaptations will leave important details out or forget to give characters some defining details. An example of this would be in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, when Dumbledore’s funeral was completely excluded from the movie but was an important part of the book. The only place where this showed up in Project Hail Mary was the main problem of the movie. The Petrova Line wasn’t as developed in the movie as it was in the book, leaving some fans with a feeling for more to be desired.
Millican elaborated, “I like the way that the book develops that a lot more, because they go into much more detail about, you know, what it is, what the problems are.” The movie revolves around an amoeba that’s “eating” the sun. Stephens added, “It just felt like, ‘here’s the premise we made up to send somebody far out into space.’” Many people who have read the book noticed that the creators left out this detail, possibly to shorten the movie’s running time.
Project Hail Mary captivated audiences around the world, left a lasting impression on the sci-fi movie industry, and set a new standard for movies revolving around space. “They did a really faithful adaptation that they squeezed into a manageable time frame. So, I think it was a really good movie,” said Millican.
