Phil Lord's and Christopher Miller's 2026 sci-fi film "Project Hail Mary," based on the novel by Andy Weir, is one of the best films of the year, exemplifying the sci-fi genre in ways that are too rarely explored in modern cinema. Like Ridley Scott's 2015 film "The Martian," also based on a Weir novel, "Project Hail Mary" is about the power of intelligence and the importance of remaining learned in the ways of science. In "Project Hail Mary," Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is on a mission to study a distant star to figure out why it's not being extinguished like Earth's sun. Space missions, Andy Weir is sure to tell us, are complex, dangerous, and hardly guaranteed to work. Bruce Dern plays Freeman Lowell, one of four astronauts on board the space ship Valley Forge.