PROJECT: HAIL MARY(2026)

Title: Project: Hail Mary

Written by: Drew Goddard

Draft date: 12/15/22

LOGLINE

A disoriented scientist wakes alone on a spaceship in a distant solar system with no memory of how he got there, two dead crewmates, and forty days of fuel — and gradually recalls he was sent on a one-way mission to save Earth's dying sun, a mission that becomes unexpectedly hopeful when he encounters an alien engineer facing the same extinction-level crisis.

Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama

Sub-genre: Space Adventure, First Contact, Buddy Drama

Keywords: Alien Contact, Space Travel, Amnesia, Scientist Protagonist, Male Protagonist, Interstellar, Extinction-Level Threat, Friendship, Sacrifice, Nonlinear Narrative, Based on Novel, Fish-Out-Of-Water, Mentor-Protégé, Redemption, One-Way Mission, Language Barrier

MPA Rating: PG-13 (mild language including a few uses of "fuck," peril, thematic intensity involving death and sacrifice, no sexual content or graphic violence)

Budget Tier: Ultra High ($100M+): Extensive space VFX including two distinct spacecraft, an alien planet, EVA sequences, a fully realized alien character requiring significant CGI/performance capture, multiple Earth-based locations across countries, period-spanning narrative, aircraft carrier sequences, explosion set pieces, and detailed sci-fi interiors.

Pages: 140

Time Period: Near future over approximately 20 years (main narrative spans weeks aboard the Hail Mary; flashbacks span several years of Earth-based preparation; epilogue set 16 years later on an alien planet).

Locations: Approximately 40% aboard the Hail Mary spacecraft (cockpit, lab, dormitory, airlock, tunnel connecting to alien ship); 25% aboard a mid-Pacific aircraft carrier serving as international taskforce HQ (conference rooms, hangar lab); 10% in a classroom at a San Francisco-area elementary school; 5% Russian launch facility; 5% alien ship interior; 5% alien planet habitat (epilogue); 10% miscellaneous (Murphy's Bar, Stratt's office, Travis Air Force Base, fighter jet/flight deck). Requires extensive zero-gravity staging, EVA on spacecraft hull, planet atmospheres (Adrian), explosion/shockwave at launch site, and an alien habitat dome.

Lead: Male, approximately 40s at mission start (60s in epilogue), race/ethnicity unspecified. A molecular biologist turned sixth-grade science teacher — brilliant but self-deprecating, conflict-averse, and deeply afraid, who discovers genuine courage through friendship.

Comparables: The Martian (2015) — lone scientist problem-solving in space with humor and ingenuity, adapted from an Andy Weir novel; Arrival (2016) — first contact built around the painstaking construction of interspecies communication; Gravity (2013) — intimate survival thriller foregrounding a single character's emotional journey against the vastness of space; E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) — deeply emotional human-alien friendship anchoring a larger sci-fi premise.

SYNOPSIS

RYLAND GRACE (40s) wakes disoriented in a medical bay aboard a spacecraft. A computerized voice prompts cognition assessments. He tears free of IV tubes and discovers a viewing window revealing deep space. In fragmented flashbacks, he recalls watching a NASA newscast at Murphy's Bar as the Arclight probe detects moving organisms in the "Petrova Line," an infrared arc through the solar system — possible evidence of extraterrestrial life.

Back on the ship, Grace cannot remember his own name. He discovers two other medical bays containing mummified corpses — his dead crewmates. A flashback places him in his sixth-grade classroom at West Grover Cleveland Elementary, teaching students about the dimming sun. EVA STRATT (adult), an authoritative UN-appointed leader of the Petrova Taskforce, arrives and recruits Grace — a disgraced molecular biologist — to examine Astrophage samples recovered from the Petrova Line.

Aboard the ship, Grace recalls his name, explores the vessel, and determines he is traveling at extraordinary speed toward a star that is not the Sun. The ship is called the Hail Mary. He calculates only forty days of fuel remain. He spirals into despair, drinks vodka from a dead crewmate's personal effects, and records a rambling observation log.

In flashbacks, Grace works in a hazmat lab and confirms the Astrophage are living organisms that consume solar energy and propel themselves via light emission. Stratt flies him to a Chinese aircraft carrier in the Pacific where an international taskforce is assembled. DIMITRI KOMOROV (adult), a Russian scientist, proposes using Astrophage as fuel. CHIMAMANDA (adult), an African diplomat, and XI (adult), a Chinese scientist, join the effort. Grace learns that Tau Ceti, 11.9 light years away, is mysteriously uninfected, and the taskforce plans to send a ship there to find out why — Project Hail Mary. The crew must be placed in long-term comas, and only one in seven thousand people possess the necessary genetic resistance.

Grace jettisons his crewmates' bodies with a heartfelt eulogy and prepares for arrival at Tau Ceti. He discovers the star's Petrova Line — then detects an alien spaceship approaching. After initial panic, Grace exchanges thruster flashes with the vessel. The alien sends a canister containing a star map identifying its home as the 40 Eridani system, and a model proposing the two ships connect via tunnel. Grace adds a Petrova Line to Sol on the map and sends it back, confirming they share the same crisis.

Through the translucent tunnel barrier, Grace meets ROCKY, a dog-sized, five-legged, rock-like alien with no eyes who communicates through musical chords. Rocky waves, mimicking Grace's earlier gesture. Grace determines Rocky perceives the world through sound, not light. They exchange molecular models representing their respective atmospheres — oxygen for Grace, ammonia for Rocky. Grace builds an audio translator using laptop software, and they painstakingly construct a shared vocabulary through clocks, numbers, and gestures.

In flashbacks, Stratt assigns Grace to train the Hail Mary's astronaut crew: Commander YAO (adult), OLESA ILYUKHINA (adult), and science expert MARTIN DUBOIS (adult). Grace demonstrates the devastating power of the Astrophage spin drive. The astronauts casually discuss their preferred methods of death for the one-way mission; Grace says he would choose to stay on Earth.

Grace and Rocky discover they are both sole survivors — Rocky lost twenty-two crewmates to mysterious illness, Grace lost two in coma sleep. Grace deduces Rocky's crew died of radiation sickness; Rocky's engineering workshop near the Astrophage fuel shielded only him. Rocky moves aboard the Hail Mary for safety. They become roommates, watching each other sleep per Eridian custom.

Rocky offers Grace over two million kilograms of surplus Astrophage — enough fuel to return to Earth. Grace, who had resigned himself to dying, breaks down in tears of relief. They share Earth imagery on the ship's "Don't Go Crazy Wall" and grow closer.

They travel to the planet Adrian (Tau Ceti E) and collect atmospheric samples. Grace discovers Adrian hosts an entire biosphere, including an amoeba-like predator — "Taumoeba" — that consumes Astrophage. This is the answer: introduce the predator to their home stars. They breed a nitrogen-resistant strain of Taumoeba through eighty-two trials.

A flashback reveals that an explosion killed DUBOIS and backup scientist ANNIE SHAPIRO days before launch. Stratt informs Grace he must replace them. Grace refuses. In her office, he declares he is a teacher who belongs on Earth. Stratt calls him a coward and orders guards to sedate him and force him aboard — she has always planned for this contingency.

Grace and Rocky prepare to part ways, exchanging gifts — Grace gives Rocky a laptop containing humanity's knowledge. They say goodbye. Alone on the Hail Mary, Grace discovers the nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba can penetrate xenonite, Rocky's primary building material. Rocky's fuel is being consumed; his ship will fail. Grace faces a choice: go home or save Rocky. He launches four data probes toward Earth, records a final message for Stratt, and reverses course.

Grace reaches Rocky's dead ship and bangs on the hull. Rocky appears — injured but alive — and expresses overwhelming joy that Grace returned.

Stratt receives Grace's message on Earth. Below her office window, scientists assemble delivery rockets. Grace's video tells her she was right about purpose beyond self.

Sixteen years later, on the planet Erid, an aging Grace lives in a human-compatible habitat dome built by the Eridians. Rocky visits with news: Sol has returned to full luminance. Earth is saved. Rocky offers to prepare the Hail Mary for Grace's journey home. Grace says he'll think about it, then heads to work — teaching a classroom full of Eridian children the speed of light.

COMMENTS

PREMISE — Excellent

The premise is exceptionally strong: a scientist with amnesia wakes alone on a one-way interstellar mission to save a dying sun, and the central question — can one unremarkable, self-identified coward rise to an impossible occasion? — provides inherent tension at every level. The concept gains additional richness from the dual-timeline structure, which withholds how and why Grace ended up in space, transforming what could be a straightforward survival plot into a mystery of character. The first-contact element elevates the material beyond comparables like The Martian by introducing a genuinely alien intelligence whose communication barrier becomes the emotional engine, not merely a logistical obstacle. The premise's thematic spine — that purpose transcends self-preservation — is articulated directly by Stratt and tested in Grace's climactic choice, giving the concept both clarity and weight. The Astrophage itself is an elegant sci-fi conceit: a single organism that functions simultaneously as existential threat, fuel source, and plot catalyst. Few premises so efficiently embed conflict, character, and world-building into a single idea.

STRUCTURE — Good

The dual-timeline structure is the material's most sophisticated architectural choice, and it works well for most of the runtime. The present-day amnesia thread provides immediate stakes and mystery (Grace wakes alone, two dead crewmates, forty days of fuel — all established by page 20), while the flashback thread gradually answers the questions the present raises. The inciting incident lands efficiently: Stratt's arrival in the classroom (12-14) commits Grace to the Astrophage problem, and the alien ship's appearance (39) commits the present-day thread to its true narrative. The midpoint — Rocky's offer of fuel (86-87) — is emotionally devastating and lands at the right proportional beat, reframing the entire trajectory from survival to partnership. The break into the final movement comes when Grace discovers the Taumoeba leak (130-131), which forces the central moral choice: go home or save Rocky. The climax — Grace returning to Rocky's ship (134-135) — resolves the character arc rather than the scientific one, which is the correct instinct. One structural weakness is that the flashback thread occasionally clusters exposition-heavy scenes (the aircraft carrier meetings on pages 26-35) that slow momentum precisely when the present-day thread is building urgency. The epilogue (137-140) provides emotional closure but runs slightly long, with the Eridian classroom reveal functioning as a thematic echo of the opening that earns its place despite adding four pages after the natural climax.

CHARACTER — Excellent

Grace is the material's greatest asset — a protagonist whose defining trait is not competence but reluctance. His arc from self-preserving coward to self-sacrificing hero is the spine of the entire work, and it is executed with remarkable patience. The backstory (fired academic, underachieving teacher) establishes a man running from responsibility, his clear want is to go home (60-61), and his internal need — to accept that his life has purpose beyond self-preservation — is dramatized rather than stated. His refusal of the mission (124-126) is the arc's crucial beat, and the material earns it by showing us a Grace who genuinely means it when he says he's a coward. Rocky functions as both the emotional co-lead and the catalyst for Grace's transformation. His personality — impatient, literal, loyal, messy — makes him instantly endearing, and the "I alone" confession (73) establishes vulnerability that deepens the relationship beyond scientific collaboration. Stratt is a compelling antagonist-ally: her pragmatic ruthlessness (forcing Grace aboard at 125-126) is made credible by her earlier characterization, and her quiet warmth in the epilogue (136) completes her arc efficiently. The astronaut crew — Yao, Ilyukhina, Dubois — are differentiated through their death-preference conversation (63-65), which does triple duty as character work, tonal levity, and thematic foreshadowing. No supporting character overpowers Grace's centrality, which is structurally sound.

CONFLICT — Good

The central conflict operates on three escalating levels, each clearly defined and satisfyingly resolved. The external conflict — save two dying stars from Astrophage — provides the macro-stakes, but the material wisely keeps the focus on proximate, personal obstacles: forty days of fuel (20), the communication barrier with Rocky (53-58), the Adrian collection mission (102-107), and the Taumoeba containment failure (130-131). Each obstacle escalates from the previous one, and the Adrian sequence delivers the highest physical stakes — hull breach, centrifugal force, Rocky's injury (110-112) — at the right moment in the narrative. The internal conflict is where the material distinguishes itself. Grace's cowardice is not a flaw to be corrected through action-hero transformation but a genuine psychological reality that the material respects. His "I made my peace with it" speech to Rocky (84-85) is immediately exposed as a lie when Rocky offers fuel (87), and the final choice — home versus Rocky — resolves the internal conflict with devastating simplicity. Scene-level conflict is generally strong, though the Stratt-Grace dynamic could use one additional friction point between the aircraft carrier scenes and the launch; their relationship jumps from antagonistic to warmly professional without a clear turning point.

DIALOGUE — Good

The dialogue is consistently strong, with distinct voices for each principal character maintained throughout. Grace speaks in the register of a teacher who treats everyone like a smart sixth-grader — informal, self-deprecating, prone to tangents — and this voice is audible from his first classroom scene ("We're probably gonna need a better name for it than that," 8) through his final video log ("You're smart. You'll figure it out," 133). Rocky's translated speech achieves the remarkable feat of conveying personality through vocabulary limitations: "Sad sad sad" (86), "Fist me!" (121), and "Many ways to die" (99) all land as character-defining moments. Stratt's dialogue is perhaps the sharpest — her "Stop pretending this is about the children" speech (125) is the material's most potent confrontation, delivered with an economy that matches her character. The dialogue's one recurring weakness is exposition delivery in the aircraft carrier scenes, where characters occasionally ask questions solely to prompt answers the other characters (and the reader) need to hear (29-30). The translator voice-selection scene (70-71) demonstrates confident tonal control, using the Incredibly Scottish Voice as both comedy and a naturalistic beat in the language-building process.

PACING — Good

The pacing is well-managed across 140 pages, with the dual-timeline structure providing natural rhythm: present-day scenes generate suspense, flashbacks provide context and relief. The opening twenty pages move briskly, establishing the amnesia, the dead crewmates, and the fuel crisis within a tight sequence of discoveries. The middle section — roughly pages 40 through 100 — is where pacing is most vulnerable to drag, particularly during the extended language-building sequences between Grace and Rocky. These scenes are charming and thematically necessary, but the clock/number/atom chain progression (53-58) could be condensed without losing emotional or informational content. The Adrian mission (102-112) is the material's best-paced sequence: the briefing, EVA, chain retrieval, hull breach, and Rocky's injury unfold with escalating urgency across ten pages. The final act moves swiftly from the Taumoeba discovery (131) through Grace's decision, the return to Rocky (134-135), and the epilogue, though the multiple "Grace addresses camera" interludes (131-133) create a brief deceleration at a moment that demands acceleration. The epilogue itself walks a fine line between earned resolution and indulgence but lands on the right side.

TONE — Excellent

The tonal balance between scientific wonder, emotional intimacy, and humor is the material's most consistent achievement. The opening pages establish existential dread (alone in space, dead crewmates, amnesia), and the drunken observation log (21-22) modulates that dread into dark comedy without undermining the stakes — Grace's "All things considered, I think I'm handling it well" plays as both joke and coping mechanism. The first-contact sequence (47-49) exemplifies the tonal control: genuine terror at seeing the alien gives way to pantomime mirroring that is simultaneously funny, tender, and awe-inspiring. The astronaut death-preference conversation (63-65) is the tonal tightrope at its most daring, blending gallows humor with the grim reality of a suicide mission. Two moments risk tonal inconsistency: Stratt's forced sedation of Grace (125-126) is tonally darker than anything surrounding it and could feel jarring, though it is dramatically necessary for the character arc. The epilogue's warmth — Grace teaching Eridian children (140) — earns its sentiment because the preceding 135 pages have not been sentimental, allowing the ending to land as catharsis rather than indulgence.

ORIGINALITY — Good

While the material shares DNA with The Martian (lone scientist, problem-solving, Andy Weir source material) and Arrival (painstaking first-contact communication), its execution distinguishes it from both. The Martian is fundamentally a survival narrative with a static protagonist; here, survival is subordinate to moral transformation. Arrival builds its alien communication toward a philosophical revelation about time; here, the communication serves the relationship itself, and the emotional payoff is friendship rather than metaphysics. The Rocky-Grace dynamic — two sole survivors from different species, each grieving dead crewmates, building trust through jazz hands and clocks and sleep-watching — has no direct cinematic precedent. The material's most original choice is structural: making Grace's cowardice the central dramatic engine rather than his competence. The decision to have him forcibly placed on the ship (125-126), rather than volunteering heroically, inverts the expected arc of the genre protagonist and gives the climactic choice (save Rocky or go home) genuine moral weight. The Astrophage-as-fuel conceit elegantly collapses the threat and the solution into one organism, avoiding the genre's tendency to separate the problem from the means of solving it.

LOGIC — Fair

The internal science is presented with enough specificity to feel credible and enough simplification to remain accessible, and the material is largely consistent with its own established rules. One potential issue: Grace calculates forty days of fuel (20), but the timeline aboard the ship — language building, Adrian mission, Taumoeba breeding — seems to span considerably longer without explicit accounting for how the fuel budget accommodates this. The discovery that nitrogen-resistant Taumoeba can penetrate xenonite (131) is a well-planted reversal that follows logically from the established science, though the material does not fully explain how Grace determines this on a "molecular level" with the equipment available. Rocky's ability to survive Earth atmosphere long enough to rescue Grace (112) is acknowledged as damaging but the duration seems brief enough to remain plausible. The forced-boarding scene (125-126) raises the question of why Stratt did not simply drug Grace earlier if she always intended to force him aboard, though her dialogue ("I'm trying to help you understand what I'm about to do next") suggests she preferred voluntary compliance and only escalated when refused. The epilogue's sixteen-year time jump (137) leaves the logistics of Grace's survival on Erid largely to inference, which is acceptable for an epilogue but does raise unanswered questions about how Eridians sustained a human habitat.

CRAFT — Good

The writing is clean, propulsive, and confident in its management of information. Character introductions are efficient and vivid — Stratt's entrance ("the type of effortless authority about her that makes you want to sit up straight and apologize for something you didn't do," 12) is among the draft's strongest lines of description. The material uses direct-address narration sparingly but effectively: "Wait... Grace is a sixth grade teacher? How does he end up in outer space? Sit tight" (7) establishes a conversational voice that builds trust with the reader without becoming cloying. Action description is economical where it needs to be — the Adrian EVA sequence (105-107) conveys physical stakes in short, punchy paragraphs — and expansive where spectacle demands it, as in the first exterior reveal of the Hail Mary (11). The camera-POV observation logs (20-22) are a clever formatting device that naturalizes exposition as character behavior. Rocky's dialogue formatting — translated text appearing on screen before the audio translation is established, then shifting to subtitled speech in the epilogue — tracks the evolving communication cleanly. Minor formatting note: several pages carry asterisks in the margins indicating revision marks that are typical of working drafts but add visual clutter.

OVERALL — Recommend

Project: Hail Mary is a science-fiction drama about a reluctant scientist who wakes alone on an interstellar mission to save Earth's dying sun and discovers both an alien partner and the courage he never believed he possessed. Its strongest elements are character and tone: Grace's arc from coward to hero is the emotional spine, and the Grace-Rocky relationship — built through jazz hands, sleep-watching, and fist bumps — is genuinely moving in a way that transcends its genre. The dual-timeline structure serves both the mystery and the thematic argument effectively, though the flashback exposition scenes on the aircraft carrier represent the material's most significant pacing vulnerability. Dialogue is sharp, distinctive, and often funny without undermining stakes. The premise is elegant, the science is credible enough to sustain suspension of disbelief, and the climactic choice — go home or save your friend — lands with full emotional force because the material has spent 130 pages earning it. The epilogue is generous and warm, perhaps a shade long, but the final image of Grace teaching Eridian children completes the thematic circle with precision. This is an accomplished, commercially viable, and emotionally resonant piece of work whose central relationship will determine everything in execution — if Rocky works on screen, the material works.