This week sees the highly anticipated release of Project Hail Mary, the adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel from 2021 that stars Academy Award nominee Ryan Gosling and marks the first film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller since 2014’s 22 Jump Street. Weeks before it premiered, Project Hail Mary was already earning rave reactions, and the reviews are backing it up, too, confirming that the new film might very well be the first sci-fi masterpiece of the year and a potential awards contender a year from now.
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Project Hail Mary, like The Martian before it, is a film that goes heavy on the science. With the 2015 film starring Matt Damon, the stakes are clear and come down to Damon’s Mark Watney using his smarts to survive. With Project Hail Mary, the stakes are intergalactic and depend on Gosling’s Ryland Grace solving a problem that will save billions of lives. Adapting a 475-page novel into a 2-hour and 40-minute movie means the film moves fast, and Project Hail Mary only holds your hand so much. So if you’ve left the theater confused, or just want to know what’s going on, spoilers for Project Hail Mary will follow.
Wait, What Happened at the Ending of Project Hail Mary?
The central plot of Project Hail Mary is combating the threat of Astrophage, single-celled organisms that have taken to the sun in our galaxy and begun to feed on its electromagnetic radiation, which will eventually absorb all the energy from the star and cause catastrophic changes. Aboard the Hail Mary, Dr. Ryland Grace has been sent to the distant star of Tau Ceti, which somehow appears resistant, to find out why and send back the details to Earth to stop it. While there, he encounters Rocky, an alien from the 40 Eridani system who has arrived with the same goal.
Throughout their time orbiting Tau Ceti and the nearby planet, dubbed Adrian, Grace and Rocky discover what they call Taumoeba, additional microscopic organisms that actually feed on Astrophage, offering a fix for the problem. The only trouble in the plan is that in Grace’s solar system, the Astrophage breeds on the much hotter planet of Venus (with a similar event happening in Rocky’s system). As a result, they must breed Taumoeba that can survive in Venus’ atmosphere, pulling this off by using Rocky’s xenonite materials to create a similar environment.
Having found their plan, the pair are forced to go their separate ways and return to their respective home planets. While on his way back to Earth, however, Grace realizes a major problem with the plan, as the Taumoeba have not only been selectively bred to survive the conditions of Venus, but also evolved and adapted to break free of their xenonite casings, allowing them to enter the fuel bay for the Hail Mary and eat the Astrophage that Grace has been using for fuel.
Well aware that Rocky’s entire ship is made of xenonite and that he will never make it back to Erid as the Taumoeba will consume all his fuel, Grace sends his gathered data and research back to Earth via pre-programmed drones and turns to save his friend, who is headed the other direction. Grace eventually finds Rocky and his ship, saving his pal and accompanying him back to Erid.
Project Hail Mary’s Ending Adds a Scene Not in the Book
For the most part, the conclusion of Project Hail Mary, the movie, plays out almost identically to what happens on the page in the books; however, there is one additional scene in the film that’s not found in the actual book itself. In both versions of the story, Ryland Grace accompanies Rocky back to Erid, where the scientist community has built him a habitat, including an area where he can teach young Eridians about science.
In the pages of the Project Hail Mary book, there are far more details about Grace’s time on Erid, which has been sixteen years as of the final chapter. As the final sequence begins, Rocky comes to Grace with some news that the Erid scientists have observed through their own technology that the sun in Earth’s solar system has returned to its full luminescence, meaning Grace’s probes with all of the Taumoeba and information he acquired around Tau Ceti not only made it back to Earth but they were able to utilize it to stop the Astrophage and save the planet. It’s a great moment for Grace, who has spent almost two decades wondering if it even worked out on his home planet.
With the Project Hail Mary movie, there’s an extra sequence for the finale of the story. As Grace sends off the “beetles” with the information that the scientists on Earth will need, the film actually cuts back to the Earth, where we see Eva Stratt examining the information and watching one of Grace’s videos that he recorded explaining everything. Stratt is visibly older in the scene, living on an aircraft carrier that is traversing the frozen sea of the Earth before the teams get to work.
What the scene makes clear is, yes, things clearly got bad on Earth while Grace was out in space, with the sun dimming enough to cause mass temperature drops and major ice flows in the oceans. Furthermore, Stratt shows one of her only smiles of the entire film while watching the video of Grace and placing the xenonite-created model of him on her console station. In the end, this extra scene only adds a few seconds to the runtime of Project Hail Mary, but it does give book readers something that they didn’t expect when they see the movie: an extra element of closure to the finale of the story.
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