Project Hail Mary: You Owe Yourself To See It
Project Hail Mary Is So Amazing It’s A Little Unreal
Project Hail Mary is a technical wonder. The movie will stick in the mind of its viewers (me included) because of its emotional buddy-duo adventure section, but it cannot be understated how impressive this movie is from both a movie-making technical level (meaning sets and camera work) and from a writing perspective.
It’s impressive partially because Project Hail Mary shouldn’t have worked. Taken as its barebones form, it’s a movie about one person in a spaceship (who has no real reason to speak aloud) who doesn’t know who he is and is doomed to die out in space. The reasons he’s even out there takes tons of exposition—it takes literally the whole movie to give out all the information, stretching long beyond it feeling like a mystery—and even then, it relies heavily on montages to get through slow sections in both timelines. It should’ve been a dull, too-scientific movie only appreciated by devoted hard sci-fi fans about a man quietly half-saving the Earth. But it’s not that. It’s perhaps one of the most effective crowd-pleasers I’ve ever seen, and I mean that as the highest compliment. Sometimes, you want to walk out of a theater (or however you watch it) with a big smile on your face and feel mentally stimulated, and Project Hail Mary is that movie.
Its secret sauce is that it’s achingly human. The threats from the universe are bleak—relentlessly so—but the movie is about people of all types helping one another, being brave for one another, and being (and this is so important) silly for one another, and through that the movie feels like a warm hug. I need to make clear how much of an emotional tightrope this film walks. People die in Project Hail Mary. Things go so very wrong, and it honestly feels hopeless at times. But the movie is about indomitable spirit and relentless hope. The massive cast of side characters get this across through so many tiny scenes, but the movie’s core duo is the true manifestation of this thematic throughline.
The True Heart Of This Movie Is Rocky And Grace
If you talk to anyone who’s seen Project Hail Mary, the odds are good that the first thing they’ll talk about is Rocky. This is because Rocky is goddamn amazing. It is no small feat to make an audience love a very alien character with no face. I consider one of the ultimate challenges of a science fiction narrative to be imagining alien (or mechanical) intelligences distinct from humans. It requires immense imagination. Project Hail Mary clears that challenge with Rocky. I muttered, “If anything happens to Rocky, I swear to God…” while I was watching this movie, and—in hindsight—I had only known the character for like twenty minutes of actual screen time. But I knew his species is really vulnerable when they sleep, and I didn’t want him to be alone anymore. That’s how you do it.
And that’s not even mentioning every other instance of economy of information. It’s not an uncommon thing to notice among well-made movies, even semi-good movies, but I still appreciated how well plotlines paid themselves off. If a detail showed up somewhere, it usually came back around, and even sometimes had multiple uses. Almost never did something seem added for no reason. Case in point, Grace wrote a paper about lifeforms and, hey, look at that, an alien species that seems to match his hypothesis. In a movie this long, it’s easy to leave things behind—but Project Hail Mary remembers its details and interweaves them expertly.
So, is there anything I don’t like about Project Hail Mary? Not anything obvious. There is one decision that’s baffling because of how easily it could’ve been avoided. You have to pay attention to the chronological order of events and minor characters, but somehow even this movie kills the Black astronaut first. That’s what that explosion was about toward the latter part of the movie.
I also did sometimes notice a particular joke’s placement to be for the sake of keeping me engaged as a viewer. Right at any point the movie might become melancholy or too sad, something funny would happen. But that’s like complaining that I could detect delicious garlic in my soup or realized there would be a kickass guitar solo soon in a song. The jokes are funny. That’s what matters.
I suspect that by the time you’re reading this, Project Hail Mary will no longer be in theaters, but watch it on the biggest screen available to you. The movie is a special effects wonder. An emotional odyssey of hope and loss and yet more hope. It’s perhaps the best big-budget movie of the year and is almost assuredly the best big-budget science fiction piece in years.
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