“Project Hail Mary” is based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same name and was written by Drew Goddard, who also wrote Ridley Scott’s hit film adaptation of Weir’s book “The Martian.” The parallels don’t end there: “Hail Mary,” like “The Martian,” focuses primarily on an astronaut who is far from Earth and in dire straits. Except, here, the astronaut is Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a former high school teacher left in an amnesiac state by a series of unfortunate events and must piece together his memory in the middle of a space mission to save Earth. humanity. So no pressure?
Helping Ryland on his journey is an alien who, in a very “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”-esque twist, communicates through musical sounds rather than a fully formed language. “Having one of your main characters faceless and speaking through the music is a crazy enough challenge to want to take on,” Chris Miller noted. Adding to that challenge, Weir’s original novel has a non-linear structure, interspersing memories of Ryland’s past with her experiences aboard the Hail Mary. But Miller isn’t worried about the public being able to keep up, and he tells THR:
“When we were first making ‘Spider-Verse,’ there was a lot of nervousness in the studio because people wouldn’t understand the concept and it would be too confusing. And our attitude was, ‘The audience is smarter than you.'” think.'”
It could be argued that that is always the guiding philosophy of Miller and Phil Lord as filmmakers. They’ve always trusted that viewers will be able to keep up with their films, whether it’s their layered meta-humor or their self-reflective commentary on the experience of making commercial art. It’s nice to see that the “failure” of “Solo” has only motivated them to double down on that approach.
