Project Hail Mary review: This Andy Weir adaptation delivers

Anticipation for Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary arrived with a fair bit of anxiety: friends and fellow moviegoers kept asking whether the film could stick the landing. If you’ve been worrying, the answer is simple.

The movie gives fans of the book what they want and remains a lot of fun for everyone else. The story opens with Ryland Grace alone on a spacecraft, waking with amnesia after a long coma and gradually remembering his mission through flashbacks. Earth’s sun has been infected by microscopic life called astrophage, dimming its radiation and threatening catastrophe, so Ryland was sent to the Tau Ceti system to find out why its star is different.

The trailers reveal two of the book’s biggest twists up front, a choice that frustrated some fans, but the film is not primarily a twist-driven picture. Like The Martian, Project Hail Mary plays out as an intelligence-centered procedural thriller: a scientist using physics, biology, and ingenuity to tackle escalating problems.

project hail, andy weir, phil lord, christopher miller, ryland grace, astrophage, tau ceti, the martian, adaptation, spacecraft