Project Hail Mary

and the “guy doing stuff” movie

Three men in heavy, dark clothing are standing in a room with marble walls. They nonchalantly toss all the furniture in that room to one side, leaving the other completely empty but for its one feature: a giant metal door to a safe. Having finished this task, one man holds a 3 meter long metal rod attached to a giant gas tank and points it towards the door. A second man ignites a handheld butane torch and uses it to ignite a stream of gas coming out of the end of the incredibly long rod, creating a shower of sparks flying across the room. The third picks up a fire extinguisher, and begins putting out the fires underneath the metal rod caused by the incredible spray of sparks. The three men don hazmat masks and begin walking in sync towards the vault door. Upon reaching it, two of the men crouch and hold the metal rod steady, pointed at one section of the door, while the third continues to watch for fires and put them out. Smoke from the sparks and CO2 gas from the fire extinguisher begin to flood the room, obscuring everything but the incredible shower of sparks from the rod. Eventually the heat from the rod melts a section of the door, and the men methodically move the rod to an unmelted section. Sparks begin to fly into the interior of the vault and molten metal begins dribbling onto the floor as the small hole in the door becomes a long line, until finally the door locking mechanism of the door clangs to the ground, separated from the rest of the door. The incredibly heavy and thick steel of the vault door has yielded to the men’s efforts, leaving them free to enter and take what they please.

This is what happens during the “burn job” scene of the Michael Mann classic Thief (1981), and to the best of my recollection, it was during a watch of this very scene that my buddy Jesse first referred to a film as a “guy doing stuff” film to me. The “guy doing stuff” film is a classification I think a lot of people have a sense of, but don’t really have a name for. I delight in a good “guy doing stuff” film, and I think that understanding it is an excellent way to describe why this year’s Project Hail Mary falls short of what it could be.

As the coiner of the term, I’ll present here Jesse’s four pillars of the ideal “guy doing stuff” experience.

1. The guy¹ has to be filmed doing stuff

2. He does not narrate what he’s doing or have voiceover

3. The stuff is visually interesting but, but it’s not always clear what’s happening

4. It shows a specific level of competence in a specific way.

Given that this is a novel descriptor at present limited to one groupchat, it’s difficult to say what the history of the “guy doing stuff” movie is. I will say that none of us have ever seen a classic Hollywood studio film of the 1920s – 50s that qualifies as a “guy doing stuff” film, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if there were, say, a Hitchcock film or something that qualifies. What is absolutely the case is that “guy doing stuff” cinema became more commonplace during the French New Wave, with films like Rififi (1955) and Le Samouraï (1967) having long sections of dialogue-free crime activity. New Hollywood followed suit, releasing notable “guy doing stuff” activity in Taxi Driver (1976) as Travis builds his handgun quick-draw rig, and Sorcerer (1977) as the four men attempt to clear the jungle road from a fallen giant tree. In the years since, “guy doing stuff” has become a normal piece of cinematic vocabulary, with recent releases like Send Help (2026), The Mastermind (2025), and Black Bag (2025) all containing excellent “guy doing stuff” material.

Travis Bickle: Sociopath doing stuff

The joy of “guy doing stuff” cinema is the respect it has for the audience. It posits that there is a problem: the three burglars in Thief need to get into a vault door without means of getting in. It then shows the solution to that problem by simply demonstrating how it’s done: a giant three-person blowtorch operation. We’re never told “the fire extinguishers are needed because the thermal energy expended by the blowtorch would otherwise set the building on fire”, we simply see the fires start briefly and the fire extinguisher puts them out. We are never told “the tube on the blowtorch needs to be incredibly long because otherwise the operator would burn their hands”, it’s simply surmised by watching the flame melt several inches of steel like buttercream on a cake in July. We see the problem being solved and its logistical hurdles being overcome in real time. We are not told that the character solved the problem; we are brought into the problem-solving process. Frank and his fellow jewel thieves do not tell us how to get into the safe. It’s that he and the audience figure out the best way to get into this safe together.

On its face, Project Hail Mary seems like it could be a perfect “guy doing stuff” movie. Project Hail Mary is the story of Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher who is summoned by a consortium of the world’s biggest governments due to a white paper he’d written about the potential of non-carbon-based life and how it could exist. It turns out that such a life form does exist. They’re called “astrophages” — Greek for “star eater” as they are currently eating the sun. At the rate they’re going, the astrophages will consume enough of the sun that human life will be de facto extinct in a matter of decades if it’s not stopped. Grace is ultimately sent on a rocket ship called the Hail Mary to Tau Ceti, the closest star in the galaxy that appears to be immune to the astrophages to figure out how to stop them. Upon arrival at Tau Ceti though, something has gone wrong, and the crew of the Hail Mary is dead except for him, and he has a nasty case of amnesia. Thankfully, another life form has arrived at the same time, a Xenon-based critter Grace calls “Rocky” (puppeted and voiced by James Ortiz), and between the two of them they get cracking on how to save their respective planets from solar death.

Project Hail Mary is the second big motion picture adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, the first being 2015’s The Martian. The Martian began life as a self-published serialized novel about an astronaut named Mark Watney stranded on Mars and struggling to survive. Its original serial nature can be seen in the finished product and its adaptation, as the story is broken up into individual discrete problems for the titular Martian to solve, each of them being tackled with a combination of rigorous scientific accuracy and a kind of earnest nuts-and-bolts “how do I actually accomplish this seemingly impossible task” can-do attitude.

This is the perfect recipe for “guy doing stuff” cinema, and in this, The Martian does not disappoint. In its first 15 minutes after it’s quickly established that Watney has been assumed dead by NASA and abandoned on Mars, there’s an extended dialogue-free section where he frees himself from the debris that impaled him, returns to the now empty Mars base, and performs surgery on himself to remove the debris from his abdomen and staple the wound shut. The film opens with peak “guy doing stuff”.

Mark Watney: Astronaut doing stuff

Immediately afterwards he lays out the stakes in a video log. He’s in a habitat designed to last for 31 days and the soonest a manned mission to Mars can rescue him is four years away, and he needs to figure out how to produce the means of his own survival for that long if he hopes to make it. For the next 2 hours and 15 minutes that’s exactly what happens and it rules. Watney needs to produce food, so he finds a stash of fresh potatoes in the food bins and tills martian soil to create a crop bed. The crops need water, so he burns excess hydrogen jet fuel which produces oxygen as a catalyst to water them. Each problem is laid out, and Mark solves it, slowly, methodically, figuring things out as he goes, and bringing us into the problem solving process. Despite periodic logfiles of Watney explaining his goals (see pillar 2 above) the majority of the film is classic “guy doing stuff” stuff.

Project Hail Mary is similarly presented as a series of problems to be solved, with a guy solving them. The problem with the film is that it completely lacks the nuts and bolts of the problem solving that The Martian had. It’s not that I hate the film. Its film’s spectacle is magnificent. The space stuff looks gorgeous. The alien ship looks cool as hell. The action of spacewalks are breathtaking. The alien is really cute and fun. You can get a long way with quality space stuff and a cute alien. The problem that keeps Project Hail Mary from going from “good” to “great” is the utter lack of “guy doing stuff” material.

When Mark Watney needs to re-pressurize his habitat in The Martian, we get him searching for scavenged material, taping it over the habitat with speed tape, and looking for leaks by building a small smouldering fire and seeing which way the smoke goes. In Project Hail Mary when Ryland Grace needs to figure out how to communicate with an alien with completely different senses of sight and sound… he just does it. With a computer. When Mark Watney needs to figure out how to fertilize his potato crop, we see him digging in the human biowaste bin and creating a batch of human manure to achieve his task. When Ryland Grace needs to figure out how to replicate sufficient astrophage to create a sufficient amount of fuel to get the Hail Mary to Tau Ceti at near-light speed… he writes some stuff on a whiteboard and it’s done.

Some of this is due to the nature of how much of Project Hail Mary delves into the speculative and fictional, where The Martian is fiction firmly based in science fact, but a lot more of it is due to filmmaking choices. Some of it is value judgements: Project Hail Mary’s directors Lord & Miller give us a Home Depot shopping montage instead of demonstrating Ryland Grace building an artificial venusian atmosphere in a cardboard box, likely because they thought it was more fun. Some of it’s due to pacing, with Lord & Miller opting to have more individual problems shown onscreen than showing us how each problem is solved in more detail. What we end up with is a predictable pattern. A problem is introduced. The camera closes in on Ryan Gosling’s wrinkled brow at a computer or a whiteboard. He then announces that he has a solution to the problem. Onto the next problem. Everything about this is to the detriment of the final film.

In The American Crisis, early American writer Thomas Paine famously quipped “that which we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly”, and without having that sense of how hard Ryland Grace needs to grind to get things done, it doesn’t feel like he worked on these problems. It feels like they were solved by magic.

Spoilers for Project Hail Mary to follow.

In the film’s final act, Grace and Rocky have parted ways to deliver solutions to the astrophage problem to their respective home planets, but en route back to Earth, Grace discovers that the xenon-based containers that hold the astrophage-predator organisms have been compromised. He can solve the problem on the Hail Mary, but Rocky’s ship, millions of kilometers away and headed in a different direction, is basically one big xenon-based container, vulnerable to catastrophic failure. Grace then needs to make a choice. He can continue back to Earth, ultimately saving the planet and coming home a hero, but likely dooming Rocky and his entire civilization to extinction, or he can split what little fuel he has between a probe back to Earth and Rocky’s ship, saving Earth while likely never seeing it again and hopefully Rocky’s planet as well. Due to the nature of every problem in the film being presented and then almost immediately solved by magic, it strips what should be a gut wrenching moral quandary down to a momentary story beat. If every problem is quickly and easily solved off camera / via a brief non-explanatory montage, it strips Ryland Grace of being a human being with human foibles and turns him into a machine that turns problems into solutions and one-liners. Of course he’s going to save Rocky. That’s the correct choice, and Ryland Grace never really falters due to difficulty. He just solves the problem with a wry grin on his face. The solutions to these problems that we gain too cheaply go esteemed too lightly by its audience, robbing us of catharsis and joy at them being solved.

When Mark Watney is saved at the end of The Martian, I got choked up a little at the power of human ingenuity and problem-solving. When Ryland Grace saves Rocky at the end of Project Hail Mary, my first thought was “I should get out of my seat now so that I can go to the bathroom before a line starts forming”. When you give me a guy doing stuff, this guy feels stuff.

---

In this post, I’ve attempted to define a kind of film that you, my dear reader, may already be familiar with. If the “guy doing stuff” idea resonates with you, if you think “yes! I love it in the movie when the guy does stuff” then I implore you, please tell me what your favorite “guy doing stuff movies” are. You can reply to this email if you got the newsletter as an email. If you’re reading it on the website you can comment on it, or you can just hit me on socials at @sprobeforebros on instagram or @sprobeforebros.bsky.social on bluesky. Please, wreck my mentions with “guy doing stuff” content.

1. To address the elephant in the room, the term uses “guy” in a gender-neutral context. “Person doing stuff” doesn’t have the same ring to it, but any proclivity towards men being the guy doing the stuff is only due to the andronormativity of the film industry / living in a patriarchal society. Notable examples of Women Doing Stuff include the “prank the grocer” scenes from Amélie (2001), the back half of Gone Girl (2014), and virtually all of Jeanne Dielman 23 Commerce Quay 1080 Bruxelles (1975)