The Aliens Want To Direct Their Own Project Hail Mary, Too.
- Azra
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 16 hours ago
With raving thumbs-down (IYKYK) and cinemagoers leaving theatres calling it a perfect ten, Project Hail Mary has quickly become one of the highest rated films of the year. Our Film editor and writer, Azra, discusses why this adaptation stands out amongst all its other sci-fi peers.
The thing about Project Hail Mary is this: you’re going to stand up for the first time in 156 minutes after the movie ends and feel those knees throbbing. Just like the black stars flashing rhythmically in front of your eyes. As if you’re still in space. Were you ever in space? Was that IMAX screen the Milky Way? You think Project Hail Mary dares to ask you this. Then you get out of the theatre, and you would breathe in deeply and finally think — “I’m gonna live today.”
It sounds dramatic, but it was exactly what I felt after watching the movie.
Science fiction films set in space, featuring astronauts dispersed across the darkness of the universe, with time uncertain and food stocks running out — make up a whole genre of their own. There’s the classic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the critically-acclaimed Gravity (2013) and Nolan’s beloved Interstellar (2014). Before watching the movie, I thought Project Hail Mary was just another book-to-film adaptation, about to slide itself among the others like a shiny acquaintance. Surprisingly enough, I was wrong.
Who Said Space Is Scary and Boring?
This is the board of Assumptions:
1. Space is quiet and dark.
2. It’ll give you a sense of fear…
3. …because there are things that exist up there that we will never understand…
4. …and they are not like us.
Project Hail Mary redefines all of these. It redefines what we think of our solar system.
The first is factual, but the movie dismisses that darkness and silence , filling them instead with humour and a stellar lineup of original soundtracks and pre-existing songs. The theatre was often filled with laughter; its humour lands well for all ages. In the film itself, the music and instrumentals speak profoundly within the narrative rather than merely serving as background noise. I find this charming, since a conventional space flick would want to hammer home the eeriness of the hushed silence. But not this one. This one had The Beatles when the sun was dying.
The movie is so ridiculously beautiful that I refuse to give you even flimsy synonyms to describe it, because it’s meant to be experienced. It’s remarkable how Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (also directors of the masterful The Lego Movie) managed to bring out these ‘visually unimagined’ aspects of Andy Weir’s book to life so spectacularly.
But with the magic of cinematography, space still does give you immense fear. The movie doesn’t try to deny this; pretending that the vastness isn’t anxiety-inducing, no matter how beautiful it is (down to the threat itself, I find the astrophages really cute!) would be disingenuous. Fear, existential crisis, moral crisis: all of it is packed into our main guy, Ryland Grace, played by the one and only Ryan Gosling. Though the kicker is that the root of the fear wasn’t due to unknown murderous entities but something more mundane. Ryland Grace is a normal science school teacher who rides a bike to work and fears what we fear: the self, death and loss.
Then there is the ‘thing’ that exists up there – the entity. The entity is incomprehensible, with physicalities unlike humans, but it wasn’t depicted as threatening. It instills peace and connection. For me, the standout aspect of this movie is actually the alien itself. Its portrayal is like the marriage of the brooding linguistics in Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and the whimsy of Wes Anderson’s alien in Asteroid City (2023). It pivots the portrayal of aliens from the cliched alien-invading-Earth narrative to the viewpoint of “the aliens would want to save their planet too”. Perhaps the aliens would, too, want to direct their own science fiction (whatever their sci-fi is) films starring a Martian Ryan Gosling or whatnot. So are they really different from us?
Project Hail Mary, in a way, rejects certain assumptions about space, replacing them with something more unique and charming.
Should We Die?
I went into the theatre completely blind, so I was very much taken aback by how profound, beautiful, and weirdly depressing yet hopeful the movie is.
This movie is about humanity. Not exclusively the ‘human’, but what it means to be humane. It contemplates life, death, the act of sacrificing and what it truly means to be noble. Totally mundane things were happening up there in space, which I find to be transcendentally beautiful and life-affirming. Whether you have watched the movie or not, there are questions that we have to ask ourselves:
When should we die, if given the choice? When would be the right time to give up our lives, or give in our names to the stars? And should we actually die? If so, what for? For humanity? Should we die for the woman we barely knew? Should we die so that other people could live?
Portrayed by Sandra Hüller, Eva Stratt, who is so wildly different from Ryland Grace on the surface, embodies these questions. Her role in the movie is more of a concept than a character. A concept that begs Ryland Grace himself to rethink everything he has ever known, and begs us, the watchers, to think about the idea of “making peace [with something]”, or, as the Bahasa Malaysia subtitles had interpreted it as, the idea of ‘reda’.
A Breath of Oxygen
The movie received such a strong public reception, and I have a feeling we’ll eventually see it recognised at major award shows. I highly anticipate it happening, despite some critiques that undermine the movie by calling it too Marvel-like or too lighthearted and not edgy like the other space movies they like. Personally, I have to disagree. I think the movie was a breath of fresh oxygen.
Project Hail Mary won’t just accompany the other science fiction movies or adaptations on the shelves. There has to be another shelf for this newly released movie, categorised as: WHIMSICAL SCI-FI MOVIE THAT AFFIRMS HOPE IN HUMANITY WITH ALIENS AND THE BEATLES PLAYING IN THE BACKGROUND. I can’t wait for more movies to fit within this category.
Author’s Note:
Sign of the Times by Harry Styles is starting to hit differently.
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