Project Hail Mary – Friendship rocks
Warning: Contains spoilers
A man wakes up, alone, aboard a spaceship near a strange star. The man does not remember who he is, how he got here, or most crucially, what has happened to him. He soon discovers however, that the survival of mankind rests on his shoulders. Project Hail Mary is the story of how he responds.
Project Hail Mary the movie is based on the eponymous book by Andy Weir, known from previous novel-made-movie The Martian, which similarly tells the story of a lone man surviving against the odds. It continues a venerable tradition of movies about cosmic calamities that require a brave few to boldly go where no man has gone before to blow up an asteroid (Armageddon, Deep Impact), rekindle the sun (Sunshine), or find a new home for humanity (Interstellar). This time, our reluctant hero is Dr Ryland Grace (played by Ryan Gosling), disgraced microbiologist, who is sent to Tau Ceti to find a cure for an interstellar infection that is dimming the Sun. At Tau Ceti he joins forces with an alien astronaut, baptised ‘Rocky’, from 40 Eridani, who was sent to Tau Ceti on a similar rescue mission.
Project Hail Mary works on two levels, the macro and the micro, the cosmic and the personal. And despite its stunning visuals evoking the vastness of space, it is decidedly stronger at its smaller scales, in no small part to strong acting by Ryan Gosling, who must carry much of the movie on his own. As I noted in my previous review, good sci-fi doesn’t predict the future, but holds up a mirror to the present day. Project Hail Mary works convincingly as a story about hope, friendship, and collaboration, but it does require a fair amount of willing suspension of disbelief to get there.
The unavoidable question confronting both audience and Dr Grace himself is why he finds himself alone on a mission to save humanity. A series of flashbacks gradually reveals a backstory that withstands critical scrutiny about as well as a human withstands the vacuum of space. It takes an unreasonable number of accidental and unexplained deaths, combined with an astonishing lack of redundancy planning, to result in our lonely spacefarer, who then by a stroke of luck the size of Jupiter finds himself in Tau Ceti at the exact same time and place as Rocky. It is probably more plausible than the universe making me a cheese sandwich out of quantum fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation, but not by much.
All of this is set in motion by an existentially threatening reduction in the output of the Sun, caused by the presence of a cosmic bacterium labelled the Astrophage. The Astrophage absorbs radiation at all wavelengths apart from infrared (not unlike chlorophyll, then) and is breeding on CO2 rich Venus while presumably covering the entire Sun in a shell of radiation eating bacteria. It is rather like that alien goo in Prometheus in possessing precisely the properties the plot demands: seeming faster-than-light spread, consuming the energy output of a star which is 1.5 million times larger than the planet on which it procreates, and then biochemically storing the output of a small fusion reaction in a petridish so that it can be easily harnessed as a stardrive to send our hero on his mission in the titular ‘Hail Mary’.
After Grace’s arrival at Tau Ceti the physics are fortunately grounded back in reality, enabling Project Hail Mary to elegantly interweave it with its narrative. The relativistic speeds attained by the Hail Mary have resulted in measurable time dilation, which means Ryland Grace is over 10 lightyears from Earth, yet has only aged 4 years since departure. Gravity on board is only available when under thrust or through an ingenious centrifuge mode, and the movie cleverly uses the presence or absence of gravity to telegraph what is going on. Orbital manoeuvres and the interior of the spaceship also feel authentic and produce some spectacular visuals, making it easy to see why the movie was filmed with IMAX in mind.
Dr Grace’s alien counterpart Rocky is also intriguingly and profoundly alien. Here we do not have some humanoid with pointy ears or purple skin, but a five-legged rock-based species (splendidly operated and voiced by James Ortiz), that has mastered the atomic level manipulation of xenon to construct vast structures, including the spaceship on which they traveled to Tau Ceti. It makes for a brilliant contrast between the messy complexity of humanity and the monolithic elegance of the Eridians, but it leaves the viewer with a lot of questions that the movie doesn’t so much not answer, as never even ask. I’m not an eminent exobiologist, but am nonetheless curious how Rocky’s species nervous system and metabolism function. Or how technology based seemingly on the manipulation of a single element produces the complex artefacts necessary for manned spaceflight. It is therefore somewhat of a shame that despite his putative past interest in alien life, Ryland Grace is astonishingly uninterested in Rocky and the world he hails from. We get an excessive number of scenes where Rocky and Grace bond over footage of Earth on the Hail Mary’s rudimentary holodeck, but there is barely any reciprocal interest in Rocky’s planet, culture or technology, and it takes until the end of the movie before Grace even visits Rocky’s spaceship.
Maybe Ryland Grace’s lack of interest is explained by how surprisingly human Rocky is, despite being an animated rock with a sensory apparatus based on echolocation. Although Grace has to construct his own universal translator to interpret Rocky’s vocalisations, it transpires that Rocky’s language is surprisingly amenable to English grammar and syntax, not to mention implausibly compatible with a human conceptual framework. Excepting a few recurring mistranslations that serve to remind the audience of the underlying language barrier, as well as for comic effect, Rocky passes seamlessly as American. Contrast this with Arrival, where the attempt to understand aliens who have a fundamentally different conception of reality is the point of the entire movie, rather than the work of a five minute montage.
Most of this can be forgiven because without the rapid establishment of common ground, the relationship between Rocky and Grace would never lift off, and it is here where the movie really shines. Ryan Gosling puts in an excellent performance, managing to strike the precarious balance between comedy and pathos in both the Hail Mary scenes and the pre-launch flashbacks. Gosling easily persuades us to emotionally connect with Rocky, an animated object with even fewer humanoid features than WALL-E, but who nonetheless evokes endearment and sympathy. This investment pays off across several moving moments when our heroes have to overcome the inevitable challenges and risks imposed by the harsh nature of space and the demands of the plot. In the scenes on Earth, Gosling plays the more familiar ‘outsider turned insider’ scientist, but without falling back too strongly onto one-dimensional stereotypes.
The flashback scenes back on Earth are also the ones infused with an almost surreal optimism, presenting us with a world where in the face of an existential threat, humanity does actually manage to band together to try and face it off. The international nature of the Hail Mary project is reinforced at every turn, showing us a global scientific community, Chinese cosmonauts, German administrators and Russian ground control all working together. The prominent shots of an American aircraft carrier are maybe a tad unfortunate at this particular point in time, but it would be unfair to hold that against the movie.
Drawing both strands together, Project Hail Mary is suffused with a profound optimism that acts as a welcome antidote to our present times. It wholeheartedly affirms that forging connections across boundaries, whether cultural, linguistic or technological, is possible, and that people will make the right decisions when it comes down to it, even if they sometimes need a little push to do so. The multinational cooperation to remove the Astrophage threat draws from a poorer cinematic tradition than the disaster movie elements of Project Hail Mary, but nonetheless recalls movies like Arrival or Pacific Rim, series like Stargate Atlantis, or videogames like X-COM and Mass Effect, all keeping a hope alive that we can work together across boundaries and borders to further the common good. At a time when a declining US empire seems intent on disrupting any attempt at global cooperation, reminders that another approach is possible are an unalloyed positive.
On the whole, Project Hail Mary is an eminently enjoyable movie with stunning visuals, a potent mix of comedy and scientific seriousness, and a heartfelt relationship at its core. Given its committed message of hope, it feels unkind to hold its basic premise of the sole, vaguely antiheroic man saving the world, against it. Nonetheless, it remained a discordant note for me throughout, diminishing the effectiveness of its emotional appeal through the sheer amount of contrivance deployed to fabricate a situation where this man – and as always it is a white, American man – must single-handedly save the world. If I was qualified to psychoanalyse, I might speculate that the movie is indicative of a profound anxiety afflicting affluent white American men who fear that even they no longer have any agency in our increasingly out-of-control world. The message of hope is thus tinged with a hint of frightened wish-fulfillment, complete with the stern Germanic mutti figure to take command and tell us that everything will be fine.
In the real world neither Germanic mutti’s nor metrosexual American men will come and save us. It will be a shared struggle, and insofar as Project Hail Mary inspires us to believe that humans can work together to overcome insurmountable odds and that every everyman will find it in them to do the right thing, while giving us some good laughs and cries along the way, it is a movie made for its time.
Notes & suggestions
- My unwillingness to accept the '‘single white male hero” trope has been sharpened recently by Ada Palmer’s writing on agency and protagonists in fiction, especially science fiction. This in itself draws on older writings, including Ursula K. le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. I have gone into this in more detail in my reviews of Mass Effect 3 and Andor.
- The theme of connection is also key to Marvel’s Thunderbolts*, and despite its more goofy superhero plot and self-referential B-movie vibes, I actually think it made the point better.
- Knowledge is power, which is why those in power so often hate science. US readers in particular may be worried about the attacks on science and scientific institutions in the US. Organisations like the Union of Concerned Scientists recognise the independence of science to democracy, and are fighting to keep scientific endeavours alive.
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