‘Project Hail Mary’ delivers something special

Why hello there, Popculturology pals. Welcome to the Friday edition of the newsletter.

What a week. Awards season wrapped up with the Oscars. We got the first trailers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Dune: Part Three. And Project Hail Mary is finally in theaters.

Oh, also, the government registered aliens.gov. I’m sure this’ll be OK ...

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I hope you’re ready to fall in love with an alien puppet

I’ve been waiting for Project Hail Mary for several years now. And the wait was worth it. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller created something special with this one. More specifically, they created something special with Ryan Gosling and the Rocky puppet.

Project Hail Mary has been very high on my list of upcoming movies. I read the book a few years after it was published, but still early enough where I didn’t know that Gosling had been cast as Ryland Grace. I was thrilled to see positive reviews come pouring in over the past week or so while at the same time being incredibly jealous of the folks who got to see Project Hail Mary before its official release date.

Adapting an Andy Weir novel for a movie is no easy task. Weir’s books are dense with scientific details. For some people, that level of attention is too much. For other people (like this newsletter writer), those details are what draw you into his books and what make his worlds real and fully dimensional. But these movies can’t be four hours long, which means that a screenwriter — for both The Martian and Project Hail Mary, this was Drew Goddard — has to figure out how to boil Weir’s books down into films that aren’t going to scare people away.

For The Martian, Goddard scuttled entire chunks of the story where Mark Watney had to navigate Martian storms. For Project Hail Mary, Goddard decided that the core of the story was the relationship between Grace and Rocky, the alien who joins Grace on his quest to figure out how to keep a microscopic life form from making all but one star across the galaxy go dark.

Project Hail Mary is the story of Grace and Rocky.