There’s no doubt that will be a remarkable sci-fi movie, but it appears even more impressive in IMAX. Last week, filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller previewed several clips from their forthcoming movie on the largest screen available, offering a glimpse of a spectacular journey featuring Ryan Gosling’s unfortunate Ryland Grace and his extraterrestrial partner Rocky. Hail Mary chronicles this improbable duo as they work to prevent a fresh ice age from wiping out their individual home worlds, a mission that will lead them to magnificent alien landscapes.
The creative team responsible for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse clearly mastered the visual component here: Hail Mary transports its protagonists to enormous verdant planets and dimensions visible only through infrared light, and hints at some of that magnificence. However, Project Hail Mary‘s tone aims to challenge conventions. “It somewhat defies genre classification,” Miller informed viewers following the preview. “It’s exciting, it’s poignant, it’s moving, it’s humorous…”
The narrative also maintains strong scientific credibility, courtesy of Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. Weir authored a novel that delves deeply into interstellar voyaging, stellar physics, and extraterrestrial communication. Project Hail Mary proves even more daring by spanning dual timelines. While the book opens with Grace emerging from a coma as the sole remaining researcher aboard his ship, the namesake Hail Mary, the plot regularly revisits his terrestrial existence, mapping the origins of humanity’s clandestine operation. This represents a substantial narrative for any cinematic work, compelling Lord and Miller to innovate in their translation to film.
“We continuously alternate between Earth and space as Grace gradually recalls how he arrived there,” Miller clarified. “Determining how to shift between these narratives while maintaining momentum proved challenging both during screenplay development and later in post-production.”
Eventually, Lord and Miller chose a visual shortcut. Greig Fraser, the director of photography responsible for , assisted in creating two separate visual styles for each timeline. Earth-based sequences are anchored by conventional widescreen dimensions and a somewhat more polished appearance. “It represents a memory,” Lord noted, “so it’s more constrained, it’s condensed, it’s romanticized, it’s tidier.”
Grace’s cosmic exploits, conversely, occupy a significantly larger canvas. Fraser captured those moments using the complete IMAX frame, selecting a rougher film texture: “We aimed to avoid making it seem effortlessly filmed, as though shooting space were a nuisance,” Lord elaborated. “We sought to convey a sense of struggle… Part of achieving authenticity involved resisting the temptation to portray space as pristine. It’s chaotic.”
Yet Hail Mary remains visually spectacular, despite its deliberate roughness. Possibly because nearly everything appears extraordinary when filmed in IMAX and displayed on a screen towering like a building: even the ordinary, sitcom-style moments portraying Grace and Rocky’s initial bond are astonishingly impressive. The forthcoming movie will blend aesthetics with narrative depth; Weir’s compelling tale combined with Fraser’s imagery might establish this as the quintessential cosmic saga for a new era.