15 Movies Like 'Project Hail Mary' You Should Watch Next[html]
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Amazon MGM Studios has a rather massive hit on its hands with Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi adventure based on the book by Andy Weir, whose novel The Martian was also met with stellar success when adapted to film around a decade ago (pun intended, by the way). It's a fun and fairly smart popcorn movie, starring a charming Ryan Gosling and his spider-rock-thing best buddy, who save two worlds through the application of science and the power of interspecies friendship.
Though Weir's book stands alone, there's already talk of turning the movie into a franchise. Even if I'm not remotely sold on the idea of some kind of wider Hail Mary-verse, I certainly wouldn't mind seeing more movies like it. In that spirit, here are more brainy, adventure-packed stories that show us the promise and peril of reaching for the stars, in a literal sense.
The Martian (2015)
This one is a given. Also from a book by Andy Weir and a screenplay by Drew Goddard, The Martian finds a likable middle-aged guy—nerdy but not too weird for a mass audience—trapped on his own in a near-future space scenario. Here it's Matt Damon as Mark Watney, a member of a 2035 Mars expedition who finds himself stranded on the red planet after an accident leads the rest of his team to believe him dead. His best chance of rescue is four years away, so he's forced to improvise to survive using only the resources left behind, employing his scientific knowhow to do things like make water from old rocket fuel and grow potatoes in his poop. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Picture, and became one of the biggest hits of director Ridley Scott's career. Rent The Martian from Prime Video and Apple TV.
Silent Running (1972)
Douglas Trumbull, fresh off of his effects work on 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed this environmental parable (don't tell Andy Weir) in which Bruce Dern takes it upon himself to save the last of Earth's plants and animals. Following the complete depopulation of Earth's forests, specimens have been preserved aboard a fleet of ships orbiting Saturn. When the company that owns it all decides that there's no profit to be had in maintaining a bunch of plants, they order everything jettisoned and destroyed, leading to a revolt by botanist and ecologist Freeman Lowell and three reprogrammed service robots. Lowell fakes the destruction of a single biosphere and heads off on his own, hoping to survive long enough to save the trees and plants before he's discovered. Dern is great, and the screenplay was written by the impressive trio of Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (The Deer Hunter) alongside Steven Bochco (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue). Rent Silent Running from Prime Video.
Apollo 13 (1995)
An all-star docudrama that also stands as Ron Howard's best directorial effort, Apollo 13 revisits the doomed(-ish) 1970 lunar mission, which was filled with at least as much drama and far more pathos than the more often dramatized Apollo 11 moon landing. Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris lead the cast as the astronauts and ground crew involved in what would have been the third lunar landing, were it not for an electrical short on the third day that changed the mission into one focused simply on everyone returning home alive. It's thrilling in the way it generates tension not just out of the dangerous situation itself, but from the variety of clever fixes and science hacks employed to solve for it. Rent Apollo 13 on Prime Video.
Adapted from scientist Carl Sagan's only fictional novel, Contact finds Jodie Foster's SETI researcher Dr. Eleanor Arroway tracking an extraterrestrial signal containing a sequence of prime numbers, and tens of thousands of pages of encoded data that's ultimately revealed to be a set of blueprints—but to build what? As the message ignites political and religious firestorms, the movie privileges the importance of science while acknowledging the perspectives of people like Matthew McConaughey's Palmer Joss, a well-meaning faith leader who, nonetheless, clashes with Ellie on the signal's broader meaning. Rent Contact from Prime Video.
Interstellar (2014)
The Earth faces extinction in a near future of blight and dust storms, but there's just the tiniest bit of hope in Christopher Nolan's epic: a wormhole discovered near Saturn that leads to a system with a dozen potentially inhabitable planets orbiting a massive black hole. A volunteer mission has already traveled there, and sent back some favorable results. Former NASA pilot-turned-farmer Joseph Cooper is cajoled into flying a follow-up mission alongside Anne Hathaway's Dr. Amelia Brand, their goal being to colonize a world with human embryos as a back-up plan for the survival of humanity. It's a story of survival on both a personal and a species level, grounded in some impressively rigorous science on display: Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne conceptualized the movie's black hole, and it's become the gold standard; Interstellar also builds one of the movie's most heart-wrenching moments out of the complications of gravity and time dilation, which most other space movies just ignore. Stream Interstellar on Paramount+.
Sunshine (2007)
It's literally about saving the sun, so in terms of premise, we're very much on the right track here. In the near-ish future (2057), the sun is dying and a team is on its way to deliver a type of stellar bomb that will reignite the star. They're not the first ones to try it, as it happens, and a distress signal from the original team redirects the mission, whose members (lead by Cillian Murphy's physicist Robert Capa) hope that information and resources retrieved from the earlier ship will improve their chances. Not the best idea, it turns out, as they incur near-catastrophic damage in the process. With resources at a premium, they'll face practical and existential life-and-death questions before all hell breaks loose. Director Danny Boyle re-teamed with his 28 Days Later screenwriter Alex Garland for the contemplative (until it isn't) film, with a cast that also includes Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Michelle Yeoh. Rent Sunshine from Prime Video.
Oxygen (2021)
A similar set-up to Project Hail Mary leads to a rather different outcome in this French psychological thriller. A woman (Mélanie Laurent) awakens in an airtight pod; suffering profound memory loss, she quickly comes to realize that her oxygen is rapidly depleting. An AI assistant nicknamed M.I.L.O. is helpful, but only to a point—it won't open the pod, though it does help her make contact with a mysterious woman who tells her that, if she does open the pod, she'll die. It's left to her to figure out where she is, and how to survive and escape...if that's even possible. Stream Oxygen on Netflix.
Gravity (2013)
Alfonso Cuarón won a Best Director Oscar for this space thriller with a relatively simple premise so elegantly and impressively orchestrated as to place it among the best films of its year. Sandra Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, an engineer on her first space mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. Very cool—until space debris collides with her shuttle while she's on a spacewalk, sending her and the only other survivor, team commander Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) hurtling through space in near-Earth orbit. If they can reach the International Space Station, they might just have a chance at survival. It's a character piece with just characters drifting through space, thrilling from the first minute to the last, and believably (if not completely) accurate in its physics. Rent Gravity from Prime Video.
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