10 Hard Sci-Fi Movies That Are Even Better Than Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary has already established itself as one of 2026's standout science-fiction movies. Ryan Gosling stars as Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up alone aboard a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there, only to discover that solving an astronomical crisis may be humanity's last chance. Like Andy Weir's earlier The Martian, the story manages to make experiments, calculations and scientific problem-solving genuinely exciting.

That puts Project Hail Mary firmly in the tradition of hard science fiction, a branch of the genre that places greater emphasis on scientific plausibility and technical detail. The definition can get fuzzy around the edges, particularly once movies start dealing with alien life or theoretical physics, but there is still a noticeable difference between hard sci-fi and the more fantastical space opera movies that deserve another look.

There are already plenty of sci-fi movies that make excellent Project Hail Mary double features. This list sets a deliberately higher bar. As good as Project Hail Mary is, generations of filmmakers got there first with movies that are more rigorous, stranger or simply more ambitious about the questions science can raise.

Calling any of them "better" is inevitably subjective, especially considering how successfully Project Hail Mary balances dense scientific ideas with blockbuster entertainment. Still, each of these 10 hard sci-fi movies makes a convincing case.

The Martian

It is nearly impossible to discuss Project Hail Mary without returning to Andy Weir's breakout story. Directed by Ridley Scott, The Martian stars Matt Damon as Mark Watney, an astronaut accidentally left behind on Mars after his crew believes he has died. Survival becomes a series of problems to solve, from producing food and water to finding a way to communicate with NASA.

The movie takes some scientific liberties, including its famously exaggerated Martian windstorm, but its greatest pleasure is watching Watney think his way out of seemingly impossible situations. Project Hail Mary may be the bigger production, with a reported budget nearly twice that of The Martian, but Scott's movie is arguably more disciplined. The smaller scale keeps its focus on ingenuity, and every breakthrough feels earned.

Moon

Duncan Jones' Moon takes almost the opposite approach to the vastness of Project Hail Mary. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the lone worker at a lunar mining facility nearing the end of a three-year contract. His only regular companion is GERTY, an artificial intelligence voiced by Kevin Spacey. As Sam's health begins to deteriorate, he discovers that his supposedly straightforward assignment is hiding something disturbing.

The technology remains speculative, but the stripped-down environment makes the movie feel unnervingly plausible. Isolation becomes as important as engineering, while the economics of exploiting workers in space give the story an edge Project Hail Mary never really seeks. Rockwell also carries almost the entire movie himself, turning what could have been a clever sci-fi puzzle into something far more personal and unsettling.

Adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, Robert Zemeckis' Contact treats discovering alien life less like an action-movie event than the greatest scientific breakthrough in human history. Jodie Foster stars as SETI astronomer Ellie Arroway, who detects a signal coming from Vega. Hidden inside it are instructions for constructing a mysterious machine, setting off an international argument over what humanity should do next.

Project Hail Mary finds enormous heart in first contact, but Contact asks more difficult questions about what such a discovery would mean back on Earth. Science collides with government bureaucracy and religious belief while Ellie struggles with the frustrating limits of proof. The result is less immediately crowd-pleasing than Weir's story, but more interested in what confirming extraterrestrial intelligence might actually do to the people waiting at home.

Arrival

Denis Villeneuve's Arrival also begins with extraterrestrial visitors, but its central scientific challenge is communication. Amy Adams plays linguist Louise Banks, who is recruited after 12 alien spacecraft appear around the world. Rather than firing weapons or decoding futuristic technology, Louise must slowly construct a shared language with beings whose entire conception of communication is radically different from ours.

The movie takes inspiration from linguistic relativity before pushing the idea well beyond established science, particularly in the way language affects Louise's perception of time. Yet that speculative leap serves an extraordinary emotional story. Project Hail Mary makes communication across species charming and ingenious, while Arrival explores many of the same ideas through a much stranger lens. Its final revelation also changes how the audience understands everything that came before.

Primer

Few movies have ever been less interested in simplifying their science for the audience than Shane Carruth's Primer. The film follows engineers Aaron and Abe after an experiment in a garage accidentally produces something capable of manipulating time. Their discovery begins as a technical problem before the consequences of using it become increasingly difficult to control.

Carruth, who trained as an engineer, lets his characters speak to each other like technically-minded people instead of stopping every few minutes to explain themselves to the audience. The result can be bewildering, and Primer remains notorious for how complicated its time travel becomes. Where Project Hail Mary makes difficult science wonderfully accessible, Primer refuses to translate. For viewers willing to work for it, that uncompromising approach is part of the appeal.

Interstellar

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar takes hard sci-fi concepts and gives them the scale of a blockbuster. As crop failures threaten Earth's future, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) joins a mission through a wormhole in search of another habitable world. The journey brings the crew into contact with gravitational time dilation and the enormous black hole Gargantua.

Nolan worked closely with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, and the film's approach to space science became an unusually important part of its development. Even astrophysicists have praised the accuracy of Interstellar's black hole visuals, despite other elements moving firmly into speculation. Project Hail Mary makes its science easier to follow, but Interstellar takes bigger intellectual risks. Miller's planet alone turns relativity into a devastating dramatic device.

Europa Report

Europa Report imagines a privately funded mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, where evidence suggests an ocean may exist beneath the icy surface. Presented largely through footage recovered from the spacecraft, the movie follows an international crew traveling farther than any humans have gone before in the hope of discovering signs of extraterrestrial life.

The found-footage format could easily have been a gimmick, but it instead gives the mission an almost documentary-like quality. Procedures matter, equipment can fail and communication with Earth is never conveniently instantaneous. Unlike Project Hail Mary, there is no central genius who repeatedly produces an answer at exactly the right moment. Europa Report is colder and far less sentimental, but its willingness to let scientific curiosity lead intelligent people directly into danger gives the movie an eerie authenticity.

The Andromeda Strain

Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, adapted from Michael Crichton's novel, proves hard sci-fi does not need spaceships at all. After a military satellite crashes near a small New Mexico town and nearly every resident dies, scientists are brought into a secure underground laboratory to determine what killed them. Their investigation points toward a lethal extraterrestrial microorganism carried back by the satellite.

The movie unfolds more like an investigation than a conventional disaster thriller. Microscopes and containment procedures take precedence over explosions, and the scientists spend much of the runtime simply trying to understand what they are dealing with. Project Hail Mary has considerably more warmth, but The Andromeda Strain is more committed to the painstaking realities of scientific discovery. More than 50 years later, its clinical approach still makes the danger feel disturbingly credible.

Gattaca

Andrew Niccol's Gattaca brings hard science fiction back to Earth. Ethan Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, a man born without genetic selection in a future where DNA helps determine a person's social status and career prospects. Desperate to travel into space, Vincent assumes the genetic identity of Jerome Morrow (Jude Law), allowing him to infiltrate the elite aerospace corporation Gattaca.

Rather than inventing spectacular futuristic machinery, the movie builds its dystopia around genetic screening and the temptation to reduce human potential to biological data. That restraint is one reason Gattaca continues to be praised for the plausibility of its science-fiction world. Project Hail Mary celebrates science as a way to overcome impossible circumstances; Gattaca is more suspicious, asking what happens when scientific progress becomes another way to decide who deserves an opportunity.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey remains one of the landmarks against which serious cinematic science fiction is measured. Co-written with Arthur C. Clarke and released a year before the Apollo 11 moon landing, the movie follows humanity from its prehistoric origins into a spacefaring future, eventually joining the crew of Discovery One on a mission toward Jupiter under the supervision of HAL 9000.

Its depiction of weightlessness, spacecraft movement and the silence of space still feels remarkably convincing more than half a century later. Yet Kubrick was equally interested in artificial intelligence and the possibility that humanity's evolution might be tied to forces we cannot understand. Project Hail Mary is warmer and easier to love, but 2001 is operating on an entirely different scale. Modern hard sci-fi movies are still wrestling with questions Kubrick was putting on screen in 1968.