WARNING! Spoilers for Project Hail Mary, the book, are ahead! Read with caution.
I read Project Hail Mary in preparation for its upcoming book-to-screen adaptation, and when I finished it, I had a ton of questions about how they were going to adapt Andy Weir’s novel into a film. My biggest one, though, had to do with how Ryland (Ryan Gosling) and the alien he meets in space, Rocky, would communicate. Well, the official trailer for the project on the 2026 movie schedule has been released, and I think it just answered that question.
I’m not kidding, right after I finished Project Hail Mary, the questions about the movie came flying out of me. One of my biggest ones had to do with how Rocky and Ryland would communicate. In the book, Gosling’s reluctant astronaut develops technology that helps him translate the alien, and partway through the story, he becomes fluent in Rocky’s language. So, I had wondered how they’d deal with the language barrier in this film. Well, the trailer kind of told us how all this will happen.
In the above trailer, we see two techniques Ryland and Rocky use to understand each other. One is exactly what happens in the book. We see the translation tools Ryland uses on his computer, which tells us he will probably develop technology that makes it possible for him to effectively communicate with the only other being he’s stuck in space with. The other shows the astronaut starting to understand the alien through hand motions.
However, where it will go from there is unknown. Personally, I hope Ryland becomes fluent in Rocky’s language and doesn’t need to rely on translation the whole time. However, I won’t be mad if that is the case, simply because it does make it much easier for the audience to get what’s going on.
To find out how this challenge is fully handled, though, you’ll have to catch Project Hail Mary in theaters on March 20, 2026.
More to come…