Before Project Hail Mary, here are our 8 favorite movies about getting lost in outer space

Space isn’t a forgiving place to be stuck.There’s no air, no pulling over for directions and no margin for error.

When something goes wrong, you’re left with whatever you have on hand for however long you can make it last.That fear drives the new sci-fi epic “Project Hail Mary,” opening in theaters Friday, with Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft light-years from Earth with no memory of how he got there.Gradually he realizes he’s been sent on a mission to figure out why the sun is dimming and how to stop it.

What begins in isolation turns into something closer to a buddy movie, as Grace ends up working with an alien he names Rocky, another traveler trying to solve the same problem.After going “Across the Spider-Verse,” the filmmaking team Lord and Miller blasts Ryan Gosling off on a funny, inspiring space adventure about the best of humanity.The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, comes from sci-fi author Andy Weir, whose earlier, similarly survival-themed breakthrough novel “The Martian” was adapted by director Ridley Scott in 2015.

That movie put Matt Damon alone on Mars and made the act of thinking through one life-or-death problem after another the engine of the story.The result was a critical and commercial hit that earned seven Oscar nominations, including best picture.

Put someone out in space long enough and the story can go in many directions.Sometimes it’s about survival.

Sometimes it turns inward.Sometimes it gets more horrific or even darkly comic.

Here are eight of our favorite movies about people lost or stranded in space.Watch them somewhere with plenty of oxygen.

Stanley Kubrick’s landmark mind-melter begins as a mission to Jupiter and ends somewhere much harder to define.Once the ship’s computer, HAL 9000, turns on the crew, astronaut Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) is left alone, moving through a vessel that no longer feels entirely under human ...