By Irene Eva Thomas (26A01B)
Warning: Contains spoilers.
Set in the context of decades of cynical and complex sci-fi films, Project Hail Mary, based on Andy Weir’s novel of the same title, had two choices: to align with or stand in opposition to this canon. The stakes were high for directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller—they were faced with expectations from fans of Weir’s novel and the self-proclaimed ‘sci-fi connoisseurs’, those who hail (pun not intended) the likes of Interstellar and Alien.
In its most essential form, Project Hail Mary is a Hero’s Journey. The protagonist, Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), is called to save his home (the sun is dying because of a substance called astrophage). He meets with a mentor (Eva Stratt) and crosses a threshold into another world to travel far from home (space), where he is then tested and makes an ally. After all of this, he gets what he needs (the sample) and is free to take the road back home. There are plenty of stories that follow this exact same trope, and yet, this movie feels anything but formulaic.
In the midst of all these plot points lies the real draw of the movie. It’s a journey of discovery and exploration, not just of space, but of the self. It’s a testament to friendship and hope. And on many levels, the Hail Mary is full of Grace.
The thing is, Grace isn’t actually supposed to be on the ship. Neither does he want to. When an accident in a laboratory kills the only other scientist qualified to be on the ship, Grace is asked to join the mission and, upon rejecting it, is drugged and forced to board the Hail Mary.
Ryland Grace isn’t a hero in any sense of the word. He is alone on Earth, is completely unwilling to save humanity, and—as it is devastatingly revealed—turns out to be all alone in space as well. Implicitly, the film posits that Grace has never loved another human enough to make the choice to sacrifice his own life by embarking on this mission.
Had Grace been a willing hero, the story would have been just another testament to human exceptionalism. Instead, Andy Weir and Lord and Miller, in their adaptation, make a pointed choice: the man tasked with saving humanity is, at his core, afraid. And it is precisely this that allows the film to explore the transformation of man in the presence of ‘human’ connection.
This is where Rocky comes in. The film is faced with the problem of introducing an alien character—one made completely out of rocks, with no face to orient the audience—without descending into absurdity.
The answer, it turns out, is to treat the connection between Grace and Rocky with complete sincerity. He is a person, in every way that matters, and the film embraces this. Rocky’s humour, although comic relief, serves to humanise him and even relatively minor moments, like his “Is Not Enough”, posit Rocky as almost more human than Grace is ever presented to be. In fact, even the pidgin that Grace and Rocky use to communicate reduces language to its most raw form, serving its necessary function, without overcomplicating their connection.
It is thus when Rocky risks his life to save Grace by breaking out of his pressurised habitat that the film makes its moral argument most plainly. Grace once refused to risk his life for all of humanity, and Rocky, without hesitation, risks his for one person. The contrast is not played out for judgment but to set up Grace’s transformation.
In its quieter moments, Project Hail Mary is a film with a deep understanding of loneliness. Grace’s greatest weakness is hardly a lack of intelligence or competence, but his disconnection. He is a man who chose a classroom of elementary school children over the company of his peers, who kept the world at arm’s length his entire life. Space, of all places, is where he finally learns to reach out. There is something almost unbearably poignant in the fact that the first real friendship of Ryland Grace’s life is with an alien.
This is what separates Project Hail Mary from the cynical tradition it inhabits. Where Interstellar turns inward, drowning its emotionality in abstraction, and where Alien and its run of movies emphasise trusting fear above all else, Project Hail Mary insists on hope and warmth. It is not naïve about the cost of things—Grace ultimately gives up Earth and the possibility of home, for the sake of his friend. The ending is a sacrifice, and the film does not flinch from that. But it frames the sacrifice not as tragedy but as the fullest expression of who Grace has become. A hero.
Grace’s heroism here is juxtaposed against his unwillingness to embark on the Hail Mary in the first place and also serves as a parallel to Rocky’s own sacrifice for him, thus making it the perfect resolution for his character.
The film’s structure, beginning in the present, aboard the Hail Mary, with a man who doesn’t know who he is or why he is there, is not merely a simple structural choice. It forms the backbone of Grace’s arc. We discover his cowardice at the same moment he does, roughly three-quarters of the way through the film, when his memory returns in full. By then, we have already watched him be brave a million times over. The revelation of his cowardice thus doesn’t diminish him. It only makes everything he has done since waking up seem even more remarkable in retrospect. He didn’t know he was supposed to be a hero. In a cinematic landscape that sometimes confuses bleakness for depth, Project Hail Mary makes the radical argument that hope is not simplistic. It is hard-won and costly. But it is also, the film insists, the only thing that actually moves the story forward. Grace and Rocky don’t save their respective worlds because they are exceptional. They save them because they chose each other, and because that choice, utterly human in its irrationality, matters.
