Project Hail Mary Trailer Reveals Its Clever Twist On A Classic Sci-Fi Trope
No one’s getting lost in translation.
Amazon’s upcoming Project Hail Mary is setting itself up as a companion piece to 2015’s The Martian. Both are based on books by Andy Weir, follow solitary space adventurers, and have scripts written by veteran TV writer Drew Goddard. But while The Martian was directed by sci-fi legend Ridley Scott, Project Hail Mary is being helmed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the minds behind Sony’s Oscar-winning Spider-Verse trilogy.
Lord and Miller’s signature creative tone looks to be present as well. The story follows Dr. Ryland Grace (Gosling), a molecular biologist sent on a last-ditch effort to save the Earth from a galactic catastrophe. But as a new trailer shows, he’s not so alone after all, as he’s joined by a strange alien who finds an interesting way to communicate. Check it all out below.
In the trailer, Ryland encounters “Rocky,” an alien whose species has sent him on the same mission to save the galaxy. Naturally, Rocky doesn’t speak English, which means the duo will need to find a way to communicate. “So, I met an alien,” Ryland says in the trailer. “He’s a genius engineer. And if I can’t understand what he’s saying, he puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain, and you know what, I don’t mind it.”
Using crude models of Ryland and his ship, Rocky manages to communicate that they share a common goal. Then, to keep the movie from becoming one big game of charades, it appears that Ryland develops a translation machine that essentially provides in-universe subtitles for everything Rocky says. In the trailer, we see it spit out a single sentence: “Grace Rocky save stars.”
Project Hail Mary focuses on an unlikely pairing.
It’s a creative way to get around one of the first problems sci-fi stories have: communication. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the Babel Fish, Doctor Who has translation technology in the Tardis, and now Project Hail Mary’s little computer trick will put communication issues in the background while still maintaining the language barrier that makes Rocky seem so alien in the first place.
