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Project Hail Mary: The Book Was a 10, The Movie Is a 7

A spoiler-light review of Andy Weir's novel and the 2026 adaptation — what the book does better than almost any sci-fi I've read, and where the film earns its cuts.

a person on a Manhattan rooftop beside a geodesic sphere sculpture, looking out at the skyline with the Empire State Building in the distance

The short version

The book is the best hard sci-fi I’ve read in five years. The movie is a competent, heartfelt adaptation that loses some of what made the book special and gains almost nothing in trade. Read the book first. If you’ve already seen the movie, read the book anyway. It’s a different experience.

This review stays spoiler-light. I’ll gesture at things, not describe them.

Why the book works

Andy Weir writes problem-solving the way other authors write dialogue. The Martian was a proof of concept; Project Hail Mary is the full thesis. A scientist wakes up alone in a situation he doesn’t understand, and for the next 450 pages he figures things out, using napkin math, first-principles reasoning, and the kind of stubborn optimism that feels like a personality rather than a plot device.

What makes it sing, specifically:

  1. The problem reveals itself at the same pace the character understands it. You’re never ahead of the protagonist and you’re rarely behind him. That’s a hard trick, and Weir nails it.
  2. The science is load-bearing, not decorative. You can skip the equations and still follow the plot, but the equations aren’t padding. Every one of them pays off. The book trusts you.
  3. The friendship at the center. I won’t say more than that. The word “friendship” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and the book earns every ounce of it.
  4. The humor. Ryland Grace is the rare first-person narrator who is funny, and Weir trusts the joke to land without underlining it. Some of my favorite laugh-out-loud moments in fiction this decade.

Book score: 10/10. I’d hand it to someone who says “I don’t really read sci-fi” without any caveats.

Why the movie is fine but not great

Phil Lord and Chris Miller directing, Ryan Gosling as Grace, Drew Goddard on the script. On paper, this is the dream team. In practice, the movie is fine. It’s lovingly made, it hits the emotional beats, and the visual design of the other thing (you’ll know what I mean if you’ve seen it) is genuinely fantastic. The theater audience I saw it with applauded during one specific sequence, and they were right to.

But the movie has a structural problem: cinema can’t do what prose does with this particular story.

The book’s superpower is thinking in real time. Pages of it. Grace noodling with back-of-envelope calculations, running mental experiments, rejecting three hypotheses before landing on a fourth. That’s not cinematic, and the film does the sensible thing. It compresses. Solutions that took forty pages of careful reasoning become thirty-second montages scored with a building synth line. You get the result of the thinking. You don’t get to do the thinking alongside him.

Which is fine. It’s a movie. Movies compress. But the compression means you lose the thing that made the book feel like a collaboration between you and Grace, and you’re left with a well-shot survival thriller. Nothing wrong with a well-shot survival thriller. Nothing special about one either.

Specific cuts I missed (no spoilers):

  • The long problem-solving stretch in the middle third. Compressed into maybe two scenes. It’s the structural spine of the book. In the film it’s a montage.
  • The interior voice. Gosling is a great casting choice and does real work with a mostly-alone screenplay, but voiceover narration couldn’t fully replicate the texture of the book’s first-person present-tense running commentary. The filmmakers were smart not to try to fake it. The loss is just real.
  • One specific scientific revelation that the book lets you sit with for an entire chapter gets about ninety seconds. It should have gotten five minutes. That’s the single biggest pacing choice I’d push back on.

Things the movie does better, credit where it’s due:

  • The visual language for the science. Some of it I’d only half-pictured while reading. Seeing it on screen locked it in.
  • The ending. I think the film’s ending lands slightly harder than the book’s, partly because the film leans into the visual where the book leans into the epistolary. Reasonable people will disagree with me on this one.

Movie score: 7/10. Worth seeing, especially with the book fresh. I wouldn’t re-watch it, and I’ll re-read the book every few years for the rest of my life.

The order

If you haven’t touched either: book first, movie second. The book has one of the great “wait, what?” reveals in recent sci-fi, and the movie, for obvious marketing reasons, can’t protect it the same way a novel can. Seeing the movie first flattens the book’s best trick.

If you’ve already seen the movie: read the book anyway. Genuinely. It’s not the same story twice. It’s the same story at 4× the resolution. You know the plot, you don’t know the texture, and the texture is most of what’s good here.

Closing

Weir has a thing he does that I don’t have a better word for than competence as love language. Characters who are good at things, working hard, being patient, taking problems seriously without losing the humor. That’s what I respond to in his books and it’s why Hail Mary is the one I’ll keep gifting. The movie is a solid adaptation. The book is the real thing.

Next up on the nightstand: The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, Eric Jorgenson’s curation of a decade of Naval’s tweets and interviews into a wealth-and-happiness almanac. Different lane entirely.