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 Eridian 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, 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. And since the book is in first person, readers are also able to simply understand what Rocky is saying, like Ryland does.
However, that’s harder to do on screen, because we can’t literally be in Ryland’s mind. So, I had wondered how they’d deal with the language barrier in the film. Well, the trailer kind of told us how all this will happen.
In the new footage, which gives away a lot more than the first Project Hail Mary trailer and was released five months before PHM’s release, we see two techniques Ryland and Rocky use to understand each other. First, we watch Gosling’s character talk about the hand signals his new companion uses to help him understand. He also explains it in the trailer, saying:
So, I met an alien. He’s a genius engineer. And if I can’t understand what he’s saying, he puts on a little puppet show for me and my tiny brain, and you know what, I don’t mind it.
The technique is seemingly exactly what happens in the book when it comes to Ryland really figuring out how he can fully and easily understand Rocky. That’s right, along with introducing us to the visually stunning world Ryland finds himself in and the alien he’s stuck in space with, we also see the translation tools he uses on his computer. That tells us he will probably develop technology that makes it possible for him to effectively communicate with the only other being he’s in space with.
Then, later in the trailer, when they’re discussing fist bumps, we are able to hear Rocky respond to Ryland and then hear the translation of what he said through the computer. So, that makes me think they’ll primarily communicate that way – which makes sense for the movie.
Now, while we know how the two will communicate, it’s still unclear if Ryland will become fluent in Rocky’s language. There is one scene in this new footage where the human tells the alien that it’s now or never in English, and Rocky responds in the Eridians’ native language. But it’s unclear if Gosling’s character can actually understand what he’s saying.
Personally, I hope Ryland becomes fluent in Rocky’s language and doesn’t need to rely on translation the whole time. It’s such a wonderful demonstration of his intelligence in the novel. However, I won’t be mad if that isn’t the case, and his program is needed every time they communicate, simply because it makes it much easier for the audience to get what’s going on.
To find out how this challenge is fully handled, you’ll be able to catch Project Hail Mary in theaters on March 20, 2026.