Ryan Gosling and faceless alien named Rocky wow crowd at 'Project Hail Mary' Comic-Con panel

SAN DIEGO -- SAN DIEGO (AP) — Comic-Con got a lot of Ryan and a little bit of Rocky at a panel on “Project: Hail Mary,” the forthcoming film that's equal parts space adventure, real-science deep-dive, broad comedy and relationship drama.

“What's up Hall H!” a giddy Ryan Gosling in a trucker hat and flannel shirt shouted to the crowd of more than 6,000 at Comic-Con's biggest venue.

Amazon MGM Studios showed the opening five minutes and several other slightly unfinished scenes from the first third of the film, seven months before its planned release. (Spoilers for that section follow).

It included an extended glimpse at Rocky, the stone-shaped and faceless alien who becomes Gosling's mission partner as they attempt to save the universe from ecological disaster.

Phil Lord, who codirected the film with Chris Miller, said the relationship between the two beings stuck alone together in space represents the central theme.

“If the universe depended on it,” Miller said, “can adult men make friends?”

Rocky is already a cult favorite for readers of Andy Weir’s novel, and is sure to be a future staple of Comic-Con cosplay.

Asked where Rocky might rank among his great screen relationships, Gosling declined to answer, saying it's too soon to know.

Weir, who was part of the panel, chimed in: “From Emma Stone, to person of stone.”

The film is adapted by screenwriter Drew Goddard, who also wrote the script for the 2015 Matt Damon movie “The Martian,” based on Weir's first novel.

Gosling said he got on board the ship immediately after reading “Project Hail Mary” in manuscript form, and was only partly kidding when he called Weir, who was sitting next to him, “the greatest sci-fi mind of our time.”

“I knew it would be brilliant, because it’s Andy, but nothing could prepare me,” Gosling said. “It took me places I’d never been, it showed me things I’d never seen, it was as heartbreaking as it was funny.”

Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher and underachiever drafted for the mission.

“I connect to his reluctance," Gosling said. “Aside from he fact that he has a doctorate in molecular biology he’s quite an ordinary person. He reacts to a lot of things that I might or a lot of us might. He's terrified — appropriately — of the task at hand.”

The opening five minutes show a gloppy, long-bearded, amnesiac Gosling as he awakes in a pod. He climbs out, confused. He finds other people in pods who are clearly dead. Then he finds a window and learns he's in space. He gives a mealymouthed scream of “Where am ?!”

When the lights came up in the room, Gosling said that he'd looked in the scene like a “space caveman” in a “placenta onesie.”

The movie represents the return to directing, and return to space, of Lord and Miller for the first time since they were fired and replaced by Ron Howard by Disney and Lucasfilm from 2018’s “Solo.”

Like, “The Martian,” the movie goes heavy on the science — Weir, also a producer, said he spent hours going over every equation one very white board.

But it takes the messy, kitchen-sink, everything-is-comedy approach Lord and Miller used in films like “The Lego Movie.”

“This movie is not a Mac, it's a PC,” Lord said. “It can be beautiful, it just can’t be pretty."