Neil DeGrasse Tyson, beloved astrophysicist, science communicator, and famous movie bubble-burster, has no problem pointing out when a film's science doesn’t stack up with reality. For example, he famously called out James Cameron for not using the right night sky in Titanic, which Cameron took seriously and replaced in later releases. Now Tyson has aimed his criticism at one of his biggest pet peeves in recent sci-fi movies, pointing to the 2026 calendar release Project Hail Mary as an example of avoiding this specific problem.
For years, one of DeGrasse Tyson’s biggest complaints about science fiction movies has been the fact that whenever a filmmaker designs a new alien lifeform, the same problem pops up over and over again: humanoid creatures. If it's an alien, why would the alien lifeform be nearly identical to a human lifeform? The Cosmos host explains in a new interview with GQ how this film avoids it:
He, once again, blew open the Hollywood stereotype by having an alien that's not humanoid, it's craboid. In fact, it lives in a different kind of atmosphere. It doesn't breathe oxygen. What's up with all the aliens that visit Earth? They step off their spacecraft and they're just breathing our oxygen. What's up with that, okay?
That is such a great, yet nerdy, fact to get hung up on. I love everything about it. Famously, author Andy Weir, whose book became the 2026 page-to-screen adaptation, takes painstaking care to make sure his books, science fiction or not, are grounded in real-life science. And as Tyson points out, the universe is vast and varying. So if there is life somewhere else out in the cosmos, it doesn’t have to be, and most likely wouldn’t be, carbon-based or breathe oxygen.
Of course, most creatives don’t care about this sort of thing. However, The Martian writer does, hence the creation of the beloved crablike rock creator Rocky. As Tyson continues to point out:
People aren't thinking how creative the universe might be, all the ways of being alive beyond the ones that our own physiology and our own biosphere have delivered to us. So Andy Weir goes there and more power to him.
Goes there Weir does, which is why he has been hailed as a type of writer who does his homework. When he wrote The Martian, which Ridley Scott adapted into a film, he tried to make the book as grounded in real science as possible. He took the same approach to Project Hail Mary, and his other novel Artemis, which is set to be turned into a film as well, helmed by Lord and Miller.
It's not every day the Star Talk host and educator praises a film for getting it right. What’s even funnier is that the writer came out earlier this year and revealed he lives in constant fear of getting called out by Tyson. Well, now hopeful he can give a massive sigh of relief, because the longtime NOVA science Now host gives his stamp of approval.
Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, is streaming with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.
