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| Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) and friend in front of video images of Earth |
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WARNING: spoilers. And see my 2021 review of the novel here.]
2026's Project Hail Mary is a science-fiction movie directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (known in the industry as "Lord and Miller"), the pair who are famous for their comedic and animation-related sensibilities thanks to efforts like Into the Spider-verse, Across the Spider-verse, The Lego Movie, the Jump Street comedies, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Lord and Miller's newest film is based on the novel Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. One of the biggest questions for me, going into this movie, was how faithful it would be to the book. The answer is mixed, but the movie is generally faithful to the book's story beats. So the only issue is how much the book-wise viewer can tolerate the many changes to the plot details. The standard defenses for changes from books to movies revolve around the types of media involved and the need to respect a movie's time constraints. I can understand this to some extent, but then how do you justify it when filmmakers add new material to a story after subtracting material from the original story? To this day, people are still arguing about Peter Jackson's excision of Tom Bombadil from his The Lord of the Rings films while including non-canonical events like, among other things, Aragorn's accidental cliff-dive in the movie version of The Two Towers. I'm beginning to think that, if you take material out for time constraints, you shouldn't add new material in. Fortunately or unfortunately, Lord and Miller's Project Hail Mary, like Peter Jackson's 2001-2003 Meisterwerk, does both.
A brief summary of the movie version of Project Hail Mary would be this. Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is a middle-school science teacher who, years ago, wrote a controversial paper on xenobiology arguing that extraterrestrial life doesn't need to be water-based. He is roped in by the mysterious-but-powerful Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) to help solve the problem of the sudden diminution of our sun's luminosity. After the discovery that the cause of the problem is an alien microorganism dubbed astrophage (Gk. "star-eater"), and the further discovery that the sun Tau Ceti has not been affected by astrophage while so many local stars have, Project Hail Mary is commissioned: a one-way trip by three astronauts on an astrophage-fueled vessel, the Hail Mary, to see Tau Ceti up close, learn the secret of the star's immunity, then bring the secret back to Earth to save our solar system. Grace helps to train the mission team, but when the team's scientist is killed in an astrophage explosion, Grace—a coward—becomes an unwilling replacement. He is the only one to survive the four-year journey to Tau Ceti, and once there, he meets an arachnoid, echolocating, boulder-like alien from 40 Eridani whom he calls Rocky; the two learn to communicate with each other, realize they have the same mission, and work together to save their respective worlds.
For people who've never read the novel, the movie is a fine experience, and I can understand the rave reviews it's been getting. The pacing and editing are both kept tight; the visuals (especially of planet Adrian by Tau Ceti) are often stunning; the dialogue is witty and well written. The scene in which Grace has to select the computer voice he uses for Rocky's translated utterances (Rocky communicates in tunes and tones) contains some hilarious alternatives—like the voices of an orgasmic porn star, Meryl Streep (her actual voice), and a Frenchman—that get discarded before Grace finally settles on a more generically masculine voice (James Ortiz). I was a bit worried, based on dialogue that is heard in one of the preview trailers, that they were going to have Rocky's English-speaking voice quaver like a human's to convey emotion, but for the most part, the voice we hear in the movie is realistically that of an AI, i.e., not very wide-ranging in tone. Instead, Rocky expresses stress by repeating certain words (like the classic "Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!" or "Bad. Bad. Bad."). The rendering of Rocky's English grammar is uneven, but an in-universe explanation might be that the AI translating Rocky's tuneful utterances isn't perfect, which is why, at some points, Rocky seems to have a perfect understanding of human verb tenses while, at other points, he seems unable to conjure up the correct parts of speech. Overall, the movie does indeed catch all of the novel's major story beats, and on the general level, it's a good adaptation.
For people who've read the novel, though, the experience might be a little less positive. A lot gets left out from the book, some major story points are radically changed, and some new story elements not found in the book are added in. Let's talk additions first. One plot element that is added to the film version is a short scene in which Stratt watches video of Ryland Grace with his new Eridian friend Rocky. This repairs what I thought of as a plot hole in the book: I don't recall that Grace, in the novel, ever sends Earth evidence that sapient life exists elsewhere. This could be for prudential reasons: Humans in groups tend to ruin everything they touch, so Grace might be hesitant to let humanity know about the existence of the Eridians. But by including Rocky in a video in Lord and Miller's cinematic version, Grace gives the Eridians credit for helping him to solve the problem of how to get rid of astrophage. Another rather major and character-altering addition is a scene in which Eva Stratt, shortly before her astronauts are to launch on their one-way mission (and before the team's scientist is killed), sings a karaoke version of Harry Styles's "Sign of the Times" (which, frankly, I don't like—not Hüller's singing, but the song itself). The scene humanizes Stratt in a way the novel never does. In fact, the book version of Stratt is straitlaced, generally unsentimental (Stratt bitterly/resignedly muses that she will be jailed for all the stunts she's had to pull to save humanity), and contemptuous of Ryland Grace's cowardice when he refuses to be the replacement for the killed scientist. She admires Grace for his knowledge and teaching ability, but she doesn't respect him at all because, as she makes clear in the book, she took the measure of him and figured him for a coward from the moment she met him. The movie version of Stratt, compassionately played by Sandra Hüller, looks and feels much more weighed down by events, by the burden of having to coordinate a huge interplanetary mission and to send a group of people to their deaths. In the book, Stratt is also in charge of trying to preserve the earth's climate by enlisting a famous climate scientist to induce more global warming as a way to compensate for the sun's astrophage-induced cooling. In the movie, Stratt is much nicer to Ryland Grace; it almost feels, at certain moments, that there might be some romantic potential there. And when "movie Stratt" finally has to force her lead scientist onto the one-way mission, her expression is one of deep regret: she's hurt because she knows that Grace thinks she's betrayed him. A third addition was Grace's boarding of the Blip-A so he could see how a life form navigating by sound might build a vessel.
Several scenes from the book were flat-out missing from the movie; I assume these were cut for time and to keep the story both smooth and comprehensible to the average moviegoer. In no particular order: (1) the use of Beetles (little drones named after the Beatles—John, Paul, George, and Ringo—built to send information rapidly back to Earth at bone-crushing acceleration) as attitude jets to compensate for damage to the Hail Mary; (2) the movie makes no mention of the "coma gene" that allows 1 in 7000 people to undergo long-term comas more or less without ill effects, and which is one reason why Grace—who has the gene—is forced into the mission team; (3) Grace and Rocky's discussion, toward the end, about how similar human and Eridian life are in terms of sapience and social realities, leading to a tentative conclusion in support of the panspermia theory of life-seeding throughout the galaxy; (4) the humorous subplot about Dr. Dubois (the black doctor killed in the astrophage explosion), who is Spock-like in his literalism and perfectly open about falling into a sexual relationship with his backup scientist; (5) the humorous incident in which Dubois confesses that he (and everyone else) had quietly assumed that Grace and Stratt were in a sexual relationship given how closely they worked together; (6) the book's conclusion on Erid, Rocky's homeworld, which leaves off some crucial details, like how the transparent biodome built in gratitude by the Eridian government gives a view of nothing but inky blackness; (7) how Grace subsists on a diet of "meburgers," i.e., cloned meat made from his own cells, or (8) how Erid's 1.5 g (because of its larger mass) affects Grace's aging over the years (he ends up needing a cane). (9) In fact, Grace's 1.5-g acceleration in the Hail Mary isn't shown at all; a whole chapter in the book is devoted to how, as Grace travels to Tau Ceti, he "feels" something wrong with his environment and deduces, through science, that he's experiencing extra g-forces, which leads to his further conclusion that he must be out in space. In the movie, Grace almost immediately has access to windows and scopes, and he can see that he's no longer in Kansas. The movie also doesn't give a clear notion of the time jump from Grace's arrival at Erid to the movie's final scene. The movie does show by implication that some time has passed: A complete biodome has been built to house Grace (better furnished than in the novel), but no mention is made of the thankful Eridian government, or the fact that Eridians in authority (and, presumably, others as well) communicate via a sort of communal telepathy that Grace whimsically calls "the thrum" when arriving at collective decisions.
There were also some outright changes from the book to the movie: In the movie, Grace isn't given the chance to remember his name on his own after he wakes up with amnesia: The ship's AI supplies his name to him. Also: The corpses of his teammates, who have been dead for years when Grace wakes up, aren't nearly as desiccated as they should have been. Third: When Grace encounters the Blip-A (Rocky's ship), the maneuvers that Grace does (in the book, he never tries to evade the Blip-A) aren't the same at all.
Even though the movie mentions Grace's paper on xenobiology—the one that got him in trouble for arguing that alien life doesn't have to be associated with water—it fails to follow through with the fact that Rocky, as it turns out, is proof of the correctness of Grace's thesis: While we do see, in the movie, that Rocky bleeds mercury, there's no explicit mention in the film that Rocky's blood is essentially mercury, and that his biology contains no water at all (Eridians eat minerals, and they consider the act of eating both private and fairly disgusting—something the movie depicts in one humorous scene).
Also unclear to me: In the book, the aircraft carrier that Grace ends up on is Chinese; is it also Chinese in the movie? Whenever I get a chance to rewatch the film (probably when it's on streaming), I'll check out the writing on the carrier's walls to see what language it's in. In the book, the carrier is Chinese (as in The Martian, Andy Weir ropes the Chinese in again). And one more thing that is unclear to me from both the book and the movie: If Eridians initially "don't know about radiation," as Grace says in the movie, how did they perceive the Petrova Line, i.e., the astrophage-created band of infrared radiation connecting a sun to a planet with CO2 in its atmosphere? There are many other unclear things, but most of them are inherent to the original story; they reveal themselves in Andy Weir's novel and are reflected implicitly or explicitly in the movie, e.g., How do Eridians have the same range of emotions that humans do (e.g., recognizable anger, sadness, disgust, alarm, joy, and feelings of friendship)? Why does Eridian impatience and directness sound almost exactly like the frank, honest rudeness of a Korean ajumma? In the movie, when Rocky comes into the Hail Mary and complains about how messy Grace has left the place, how does the Eridian sense or notion of neatness/tidiness map so closely onto the human sense? And in terms of infection control: If Earth and Erid are now saved, what about the rest of the galaxy?
Despite all of the differences noted above, I saw two very interesting parallels. First, we have to talk about the Interstellar thing because a lot of other reviewers immediately brought this up. Not having seen Project Hail Mary when I first learned of these parallels, my first thought was to reject them outright: These are two fundamentally different stories. After seeing Hail Mary, though, I now understand why people have been making that connection: If we leave aside the generic "save the world" impetus that both films have in common, it all really comes down to one dramatic scene in which the Hail Mary is skimming the atmosphere of the planet Adrian in an attempt to collect an organism that Grace names taumoeba, a predator that kills astrophage and is the solution to Earth and Erid's problems. The Hail Mary loses control partly thanks to Grace's shaky piloting skills and partly because the astrophage in one of his ship's fuel tanks bursts out into space in an attempt to migrate to Adrian's CO2-rich atmosphere so as to breed (astrophage, when it moves, moves at almost the speed of light). The ship goes into a high-gee spin reminiscent of a similar scene in Interstellar. Grace is knocked out by the violence of the spin (trivia: remember that centrifugal force might not be a thing), and Rocky—who can't survive in an Earth-like atmosphere—breaks out of his protective, geodesic "spacesuit" to rescue Grace at severe cost to himself. Now, it should be said that, other than this one scene, I still see no reason to draw parallels with Interstellar. But I can understand, given the emotional power of both scenes in both movies, why people might make that connection. The second parallel is weirder. In both the novel and the movie, Ryland Grace ends up on Erid and goes back to doing what he did on Earth: teaching children. Only now, his students are all young Eridians. The movie ends with all of his kids raising their hands when Grace asks them a question about the speed of light; he's obviously bent on teaching Eridians everything he knows about radiation. What's funny (in the sense of being both strange and humorous) is that Ridley Scott's 2015 movie version of Andy Weir's 2011 The Martian also ends with an epilogue on Earth, with Matt Damon's astronaut Mark Watney asking his class if they have any questions. The whole class raises their hands—roll credits. And this movie ends on the exact same beat. What makes director Scott's choice to do this seem almost prophetic is that the classroom epilogue isn't in Andy Weir's novel. The novel ends in space. I doubt I'm the only one to remark on this strange and interesting parallel.
Project Hail Mary got plenty right, though. Rocky's insistent, persistent personality is spot on. Stratt might have been radically changed, but her basically no-nonsense nature is still visible. Ryland Grace is portrayed pretty much as he is in the books—as an affable, knowledgeable coward who has to go through a trial to grow a spine. The movie's portrayal of g-forces isn't quite book-faithful, but whenever the Hail Mary goes into centrifuge mode to create artificial gravity, those scenes are done well. When Rocky steps into the Hail Mary's Earth atmosphere to rescue Grace, his carapace begins smoking dangerously (Eridian body temperature is incredibly high), which is depicted exactly how I imagined it from reading the book. And while Rocky himself doesn't look quite as craggy as my own imagination made him, the puppeteering/CGI team that brought him to life did a great job of ensouling what could have been an utterly blank, unexpressive character. Overall, I was impressed.
I didn't come away thinking Project Hail Mary was the best film I've ever seen, but many of the questions I brought up in this review, along with the flaws I mentioned, are more rooted in the original novel than in the story we see unfolding on screen. I would definitely confirm that this movie deserves to be seen on the big screen. It's big, bold, brave, and beautiful, and it's told with humor and heart. It also works despite having a very limited cast of main characters (Grace, Stratt, Rocky), and that's a testament to the quality of the story itself. Whether the story counts as "hard science fiction" is difficult for me to say since I'm no scientist. But it doesn't trip the usual plausibility alarms. I'm just trying to remember whether the space scenes have any sound in them. Sound in space is the undoing of many sci-fi stories. That issue aside, I do recommend that you see this movie. It's a very good ride.
