Imagine waking up in a strange place with a breathing tube, with no memory, and no one else alive. This is where Project Hail Mary’s protagonist Dr Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) begins his story.
Through flashbacks, we (and Grace) learn he was a middle school teacher, educating his enthusiastic class on gravity, planets, and the “Petrova Line.” This is a mysterious infrared line of dots connecting the Sun to Venus. It is slowly consuming the sun and it will eventually lead to global cooling, global famine, chaos, and the death of billions.
After being contacted by a guarded agent from a mysterious project, Grace learns these dots are single cell organisms, dubbed “astrophages,” Latin for “star-eater”, and that there is one planet, Tau Ceti E, seemingly immune to them.
He is the science officer on Project Hail Mary, so-called because the job of finding why Tau Ceti E wasn’t destroyed and informing his fellow earthlings is so improbably difficult that it needs God’s help to succeed.
Project Hail Mary, based on the novel by Andy Weir, is refreshing and life-affirming, yet bittersweet.
Grace is sent on a suicide mission to save Earth with two other astronauts. But they die mid-transit and figuring out how to pilot the ship, remember who he is, and save the planet is, um, challenging.
But Grace is not alone. Early in his journey he meets a friendly alien from the 40 Eridani A system who looks like a rock. Rocky is also seeking to save his planet.
The alien, puppeteered and voiced by James Ortiz, is the opposite of Grace. Using a solid form of Xenon gas, he invents important contraptions, provides world-saving ideas, and is a positive force on the ship.
Critically, he also has a family, and his wife is lovingly referred to by Grace as Adrian (a nod to Rocky Balboa’s love interest in the Rocky film series.)
The film was written and directed by The Lego Movie duo Christopher Miller and Phil Lord. They translated Weir’s novel to the big screen, making use of the bigger canvas to show the futility of Grace’s desire to get home, how tiny the ship is when compared to Rocky’s, and the gravity weighing on the Hail Mary when things go wrong.
Filmed for IMAX, Project Hail Mary takes full advantage of the format, stretching the deep space to the corners of the ultra-wide screen and condensing Earth into the typical 16:9 aspect ratio.
A science fiction film in the way only Weir (who also wrote The Martian) can do, Project Hail Mary combines creature feature creepiness with pop culture, social commentary, mathematics, bittersweet emotions.
Rocky’s positivity and helpfulness are evident from his first appearance, where his ship is chasing after the Hail Mary. He wants to communicate with the disoriented and frightened human inside. Unexpectedly, they become friends.
This is not the first film to riff on climate anxiety. But the decision to flip the conventional mood on its head is exhilarating. Earth is dying but there is hope.
Project Hail Mary stares down the abyss of impossibility. In other films about environmental decay, Rocky would be evil, Grace could have perished along with his shipmates, the astrophage would win, and humanity would die.
Like The Martian, which focused on an astronaut stranded on the red planet for 500 days, Project Hail Mary is a horror film which chooses not to be.
Rather than wallowing in comfortable defeatism, Project Hail Mary shows the importance of trust and working together for the common good. The take-home message? The reward for making genuine connections is a better world.
Project Hail Mary is rated M and is in cinemas now.
