'The trailer for Ryan Gosling's Project Hail Mary is so good I need the film now'
The first trailer for the sci-fi film landed on Monday, 30 June, revealing Ryan Gosling as a man sent to space alone in a bid to save humanity from extinction, his character Ryland Grace is out of his depth and feels woefully unqualified for the mission as a middle school teacher — though he does have a doctorate in molecular biology.
The preview comes almost nine months ahead of the film's release, and it has got me so excited for the film itself I already can't wait to see it. Project Hail Mary's trailer felt like a breath of fresh air compared to previous teasers, giving just enough away to be get me (and audiences) excited and ready to spend my hard-earned cash on tickets.
What is it about the trailer that is so great? Well for one Gosling is always charming and he already seems to be having a ball in this teaser for Project Hail Mary. His utterance of the phrase "I put the not in astronaut" is just sublime, give him his Oscar nomination now please and thank you.
The promise of a fun sci-fi epic is also an enticing one, especially when the writing is already as strong as it appears in the trailer. This can definitely be linked back to the source material from Andy Weir, the creative mind behind another excellent sci-fi novel The Martian.
There are some that have complained that trailer has given just slightly too much away by revealing a glimpse of an interaction between Ryland and alien life, but it also feels like it fits with the comedic, fish out of water feel of the movie.
It's not just the visuals that are a spectacle in the trailer, it's also the strength of the music choice — in Project Hail Mary's case the use of Harry Styles song Sign of the Times. It's something that was done well in another excellent trailer, the one made for 28 Years Later.
The preview for Danny Boyle's return to the 28 Days Later franchise was a real masterstroke, showing some of the best bits without actually revealing the context. Slicing terrifying action sequences together to the tune of Rudyard Kipling's poem Boots, a poem with a tempo so repetitive it unsettles the listener. It perfectly encapsulated the sense of dread needed for the British horror film and has been described as one of the best trailers made in recent years for good reason.
In this digital age it's always hard to break through, and so for a trailer to make a mark like Project Hail Mary has is a real feat. And I for one can't wait to see the film, but I may also read the book ahead of its release because I'm so excited I already want to know what happens to Ryland in space.
Project Hail Mary is coming to UK cinemas on 20 March, 2026.
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Shop Now Gasly immediately keyed into the responsibilities of what it means to be an F1 driver. 'I think some of the core values of the movie, between the dynamic between the teammates, are very well portrayed,' he says. 'The stakes, as a driver, [of] carrying the responsibility of a thousand people working in a team… it's a sport where you put [it] all out [there], but you're not always rewarded on track if the car doesn't perform. That's very well showed.' Colapinto notes that the in-race experience felt very accurate to him. 'If you're not in the grandstand or on the track as a photographer or a marshal, you can't really feel that speed when you watch it on TV,' he states. 'You see that we are very quick, we're going fast in the corners—but you can't feel that adrenaline we've got. You can't feel that sound, vibrations, and all those things that we actually feeling. Or that the fans feel when they're here watching. Unfortunately, [we] can't take that to the fans that are watching from home. I think the movie was a great way to put a lot together to bring to the fans. The camera angles, the ways they were filming the races, and the ways they managed to recreate some scenes are very special and very unique.' Gasly also noted that the sport is very, very data-driven. A lot of F1 can come down to ensuring drivers on a good tire strategy or that pit crews hit a tire change in (literally) two seconds. That's not always the most cinematic thing to behold. 'A lot of other moments [in F1] will be purely boring,' Gasly notes. 'You sit down behind a computer and look at data and make decisions based on that. Then, you go back in the car and push it to the limit … they showed both sides of it in a very smart way.' So, big picture, the Alpine lads were very excited about the way the sport is portrayed in the film, feeling it to be overall quite accurate to what they experience behind the wheel of an F1 car. While it makes for some fun dramatic tension, Sonny's (Brad Pitt) sudden reappearance at the end of the movie on race day is a moment of 'science fiction,' as Colapinto notes. There are a handful of rulings around driver eligibility, including regulation numbers 32.2 ('A change of driver may be made at any time before the start of the sprint shootout at each competition where a sprint session is scheduled') and 37.1 ('No driver may start a sprint session or the race without taking part in at least one practice session'). Sonny wouldn't be allowed to race on the day without having participated in either practice or qualifying. While we hate to be buzzkills, Sonny showing up to save the day on the track couldn't have occurred in the manner in which it does. If he'd participated in strategy for Pearce (Damson Idris), well, that'd be a different story. But he wouldn't have been allowed in the driver's seat. This is a very minor issue, but the montage of races that occurs in the middle stretch of the movie slots the Belgian Grand Prix after the Mexico Grand Prix. That's not technically correct. While F1 is certainly a globe-trotting affair for the most part, races are typically stacked in the same part of the world to cut down on extensive traveling. In fact, the Belgian GP is part of the middle stretch of the calendar, featuring a handful of European races including Austria, Great Britain, Hungary, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy. While some of those races swap weeks here and there, F1 wouldn't go from North America all the way back to Europe with only a few weeks left to go before the season concludes. Around the midpoint of the film, Pearce has a very intense crash. While accidents and even deaths are not uncommon in F1, one of this magnitude is a little more on the rare side. In a press conference about the movie, Kosinski confirmed that Pearce's crash is inspired, in part, by the 1966 movie Grand Prix. Sort of the F1: The Movie of its era, the John Frankenheimer-helmed and James Garner-led film features a big crash sequence that's similarly staged. As for the real-life stakes of an F1 race, well, here's what Gasly had to say. 'There was one crash where it looked pretty dramatic,' he tells us. 'Hopefully, we will never see that happening on track… I think it was to make people understand, [to] get that sense of danger and fear, because when you see a car pass—most people see a car pass [while] we go at crazy speed, 350 [kph]—it's fine. People understand [that speed]. But sometimes you go at a hundred, and it looks safe. The reality is, speed is very dangerous [and] sometimes you need to make it look slightly more dramatic to get that sense of fear.' 'It's quite unrealistic,' Colapinto added. Again, it's not that deaths don't happen in the sport; the last major F1-related death happened in 2014 when Jules Bianchi passed away as the result of injuries sustained during an accident at the Japanese Grand Prix. In the aftermath of Bianchi's death, the Halo—a ring-like bar that sits right above a driver's head—was implemented and has now become a standard safety practice across a variety of motorsport activities, including Formula 1 to 4, and even IndyCar. But having a car fly off the track in that manner is highly unlikely in the course of the sport nowadays. The most significant and most glaring difference from an actual F1 race to F1: The Movie involves Sonny's—ahem—suspect race strategy. His plan to intentionally stroll debris across the track, by clipping his front wing and then driving through a sign, would, simply, not fly in today's F1 climate. 'I really doubt the FIA will let [that] happen,' Gasly says. 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