(Credit: Jonathan Olley)
The Apollo space missions, and the 20+ movies that immortalized them, featured daredevil former military test pilots heading into the unknown and returning as heroes. These brave souls forged new frontiers for nation-states and planted the right flag for posterity.
But we live in different times. As the four Artemis II mission specialists await their launch date from Kennedy Space Center, the focus now is on planetary science experimentation, identifying how to mitigate the risks of deep-space radiation and microgravity, validating long-range communications networks, and developing autonomous navigation guidance systems. It's major-geek-level space.
For those of us who can't blast off into space, however, Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary, opening this weekend, is perfect for this new Artemis era. Based on the novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary stars Ryan Gosling as Dr. Ryland Grace, a microbiologist and middle school teacher who is forced by a government official (Sandra Hüller) onto a spacecraft and wakes up 11.9 light-years from Earth with a case of amnesia. His task: Stop the rapacious interstellar organism known as the Astrophage, which could herald a new ice age and, in time, the end of our species.
If that's not enough, an alien ship soon docks nearby. However, its sole occupant is not a killer bot but an alien engineer named Rocky. Instead of a stand-off or battle for dwindling resources, Dr. Grace and Rocky team up to run experiments, make stuff, break stuff, hack workarounds, and bypass AI systems (sans HAL 9000 consequences, but perilously close). All while chowing down on ramen and chips and writing on whiteboards. It's pleasantly nerdy and, well, feels real.
Before this week's premiere, PCMag scored an invite to a special event at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), where the cast and crew of Project Hail Mary gave a behind-the-scenes talk to a packed theater of what JPL Director Dave Gallagher called "space geeks."
On hand were Gosling, Hüller, Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, screenwriter Drew Goddard, and Weir. They were joined by veteran astronaut Kjell N. Lindgren, now serving as deputy director of the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center. No, they didn't bring Rocky. "He's hanging out in a hotel room in Beverly Hills," quipped Gosling. "With snacks."
During a Q&A, Gosling told PCMag he was drawn to Project Hail Mary because Dr. Grace doesn't set out to be a hero. "He's a microbiologist, but he's also a teacher, and an ordinary person who doesn't see themselves as a hero. Someone who doesn't want to be a hero, has no fantasy of being a hero, and yet finds out that the fate of the world is in his hands."
This isn't Gosling's first time jetting off to the cosmos on the silver screen; he played Neil Armstrong in 2018's First Man. "But it was kind of liberating, in [Project Hail Mary] to not have to be stoic, or brave, or to handle it like maybe a hero should in a film," he laughed.
Directors Lord and Miller were determined to get space right. "We went to a bunch of different consultants at NASA," said Lord. He called out Lindgren—who has logged 311 days in space so far—as "very helpful."
"We talked to [Lingdren] a lot about how ‘messy' space is, and how clumsy zero gravity is, especially your first time," Miller added.
The duo showed Lindgren "a little bit of footage of Ryan trying to navigate the ship for the first time," said Lord. "He was bumping into stuff everywhere, and Kjell laughed and said, ‘Yes, that's exactly what it's like,' and we felt really proud."
It's been 11 years since Weir's first novel, The Martian, was made into a blockbuster movie starring Matt Damon. But Weir told us he went back to the same NASA sources when writing Project Hail Mary, starting with Dr. James Green, former chief scientist at NASA. Accuracy, or at least plausibility, is vital to Weir's storytelling (even when he's dealing with alien lifeforms).
Green "directed me to some planetary scientists because I wanted to make sure the planet Erid, Rocky's home world, made sense from a planetary science point of view," Weir said.
While consulting NASA specialists on orbital mechanics and astrophysics, Weir came up with an interesting twist to his interstellar science research. "NASA isn't looking at local stars; they're looking at far-off galaxies. So they told me it would be amateur astronomers who would be the ones who noticed that the local stars are dimming. I thought that was really interesting."
Essentially, Weir explained, if the sun dimmed and nearby stars went first, the first warning wouldn't arrive via an official NASA briefing. It would show up on a forum, in someone's backyard observatory log, or on a Discord server full of people arguing about calibration error. That combination of real-life science coupled with tackling existential planetary threats runs throughout Weir's work, and Project Hail Mary is no exception.
Although Lord and Miller said they didn't talk to anyone involved in the Artemis program itself, Gosling's Dr. Grace portrays a fictionalized account of what those astronauts will face, including isolation, improvisation, and reliance on science to ensure survival in extreme conditions. Authenticity (alien encounters aside) was important to the directors to ground the film and convey the very real dangers inherent in space exploration.
"The Artemis mission is about people coming together to do a seemingly impossible thing," Lord pointed out. "And Project Hail Mary is about that same thing: it's about two beings [Dr. Grace and Rocky] who couldn't have been more different from each other, finding a way to problem-solve together."
Project Hail Mary opens in theaters on March 20.