Photograph Source: Sterling Dee – Public Domain
A couple of weeks ago I came across an image — NASA, James Webb Space Telescope — showing a small quadrant of black sky packed with what looked like a milky scatter of light. The caption said each one of those smears was a galaxy. Not a star. A galaxy. The patch of sky captured is roughly the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length — and it contains thousands of galaxies, some seen as they existed when the universe was less than a billion years old. I sat with that for a while. Galileo moved us off the center of the universe, and postmodernism finished off God, and here was this image doing something quieter and more devastating than either — just showing us how many rooms there are in the house, and how small ours is. We live, apparently, in a multiverse. Verily, man has never felt so small. It seemed, in its way, the most alienating image I had ever seen. Which is why, a few days later, watching Project Hail Mary, I found myself unexpectedly moved. Because the film is, at its core, a direct answer to that image — a story about two specks of consciousness in all that darkness, finding each other.
The Film and the People In It
Project Hail Mary (2025) is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — the duo behind The LEGO Movie and 21 Jump Street — and stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher with a PhD in alternative biology who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there, or why. The answer turns out to be: something is eating the sun. A microorganism called astrophage is feeding on solar plasma and the projections are terminal — within thirty years the sun will have lost somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of its warmth. The tears of Grace’s middle school students are, as he comes to understand, entirely justified.
There is something worth pausing on in the astrophage conceit. The sun — which we have spent the last century treating as an infinite resource to exploit and an infinite dump for our atmospheric waste — turns out in this film to be as fragile as everything else. A microorganism, something at the cellular edge of biology, can swim in plasma hot enough to vaporize steel and eat it like Pac-Man eating dots. The astrophage doesn’t hate the sun. It’s just hungry. Sound familiar? The film doesn’t push the parallel — it’s too crowd-pleasing to want that fight — but it’s there. And there’s a wry irony running underneath: the same astrophage that’s killing the sun turns out, once Grace and Rocky figure out its chemistry, to be the most efficient fuel source ever discovered. Not fossil. Not nuclear. Something alive, something alien, something that crossed interstellar space to eat a star and accidentally handed us the keys to the cosmos. Two kinds of light leaving us helpless — the light we’re losing as the sun dims, and the light we can’t stop generating as the planet warms. The film quietly suggests they might be the same problem wearing different hats. Or maybe it doesn’t suggest that at all and I’m doing it for them. Either way it’s there on the screen, for anyone who wants to see it.
Gosling is well cast. His recent run — Drive, First Man, Blade Runner 2049, the deadpan comedy of Barbie — has established him as someone who can carry long stretches of silence and make interiority readable on screen. This role sits closest to First Man, another film about a man alone in a tin can feeling the weight of what he left behind. Whether this is a career peak is hard to say, but it is comfortably within his better work. The mission’s driving force back on Earth is a scientist played by the Swedish actress Sandra Hüller — I kept thinking, wrongly, that she was the girl from the Swedish film My Life as a Dog, which tells you something about the performance: she radiates that same bleak Nordic purposefulness. She is grumpy, she is correct about everything, and she is trying to save a species that didn’t ask to be saved. Nordic? She was born in East Germany. Fuck it: Same same.
The Themes, Since You Asked
The film is openly derivative and knows it. My son pointed out within the first half hour that the negotiation of language between Grace and the alien — a creature he eventually names Rocky — recalled Arrival. He’s right. Two intelligences, no shared grammar, working from scratch toward something like understanding. The difference is that Arrival treats this as tragedy edged with mysticism, while Project Hail Mary treats it as a buddy comedy edged with genuine warmth. Rocky himself — itself — is visually somewhere between R2-D2, the monolith’s more sociable cousin from 2001, and Grog from the comic strip B.C. He lives inside what looks like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome — all window panes and 60s optimism — which turns out to be the most quietly pointed design decision in the film. Two beings, each sealed inside an artificial capsule, almost but not quite able to touch. That’s the whole movie in one image.
The loneliness theme is the one that hit hardest. Like Dave Bowman in 2001, Grace wakes to find his crewmates dead. The film doesn’t linger on this grotesquely — it moves — but it establishes the emotional frequency everything else runs on. Loneliness is also, not coincidentally, the one thing Grace and Rocky immediately recognize in each other, before they have words for anything. You don’t need a common language for that.
Before long, Grace flies through the steps of grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) and he’s chipper again. There’s a scene that harkens back to the Marx Brothers. Horse Feathers. The mirror scene. Chico and Harpo. Grace is like the bubble boy in the case study classic: Dibs, In Search of Self. Soon follows the geodesic scene and what my son called the reference to Arrival.
But Grace? What kind of name is that for a guy? This a post-Barbie thing? Irony for the anatomically incorrect mob? Or maybe it’s a Hemingway thing. You know, grace under pressure, like the Hemingway Hero. Terrorist comes running at you out of the tall grassland; you fuckin’ shoot; worry about whether she’ll (Rita Heyworth) sleep with you later. Don’t you be no Francis Macomber, whose wife ran off afterward with the hunter who brought them there. Fucker was better off this way. Either way he was going down with his last vision of lyin’ eyes.
The film is careful not to become political. Even the grim-faced generals eventually break into smiles. This is a deliberate choice and a defensible one: it wants to show humanity at its best, which means thinning out the parts where humanity is at its worst. These are, as the film clearly knows, grim times — climate catastrophe, the slow tri-strangulation of democracy, the world’s nervous systems rewired by screens until actual human contact feels like a lost art. The film simply elects not to dwell there. It makes its case for connection on the most extreme possible canvas, and trusts you to carry it home.
The Scene That Earns It
The setup is almost mundane. Grace and Rocky are outside their ships doing coordinated repair work — Grace in his EVA suit, Rocky sealed inside his xenonite geodesic dome mounted on the hull like a translucent work-pod, the two of them communicating through their improvised translator in the clipped, musical shorthand they’ve built together. Procedural. Almost routine. The kind of scene that exists in films precisely because something is about to go wrong.
It does. An energy surge, a violent jolt, and Grace is spinning. Tether gone. Suit compromised. The camera goes to his POV — stars smearing, HUD screaming warnings, audio narrowing to a tunnel — and then silence. He blacks out in open space.
Rocky sees him drifting. Limp. Too far and accelerating.
He tries to maneuver the dome but it isn’t built for pursuit. It’s a habitat, not a vehicle. And here is where the film earns everything it’s been spending: Rocky does the math instantly. Grace dies unless Rocky leaves the dome. Rocky dies if he leaves the dome. The film gives you a beat — just long enough to feel the weight of it — and then Rocky curls his limbs, positions his claws, and shatters the xenonite panel from the inside.
His body convulses as vacuum hits him. He launches anyway.
What follows is one of the more quietly devastating sequences in recent science fiction. Rocky’s denser physiology gives him enough propulsion to reach Grace, grab him with multiple limbs, and push them both back toward the airlock. The camera cuts between Grace’s unconscious face, Rocky’s body deteriorating in open space, and the broken dome spinning away behind them — that beautiful Buckminster Fuller relic, gone. Rocky forces the manual override with his claws. The airlock cycles. Both of them collapse on the floor inside.
At least, that’s the way I remember it.
The film lingers there. Two bodies — one human, one alien — each having just tried to die for the other. Grace wakes up to find Rocky in a sealed medical enclosure, recovering. He says something like: you saved my life. Rocky clicks back weakly. From this point forward the film stops being about the mission entirely. It becomes about what you do with the time you have left with someone you didn’t expect to find.
The Ending, Which I Am Going to Spoil
The film saves its real gut-punch for the goodbye. Rocky has solved the astrophage problem with Grace — synthesized enough alien fuel to get one human home to a planet that was dying without him. The math is clean. Grace goes home, Earth lives. Except Grace, you’ll recall, didn’t exactly volunteer for this mission. He was conscripted, in the polite way that impending civilizational extinction makes conscription feel like civic duty. He knew when he left it was a one-way trip. So the choice at the end — go home to a planet that used him, or stay with the one being in the universe who actually chose his company — is the film’s most poig-nant moment. He chooses Rocky. He follows him home. Incidentally, Rocky is also anatomically incorrect.
Which brings us to the final scene, and here I should perhaps disclose that I may need to reassess my marijuana brand. Rocky’s home planet looks like Earth’s more geologically stubborn cousin — rocks, cave, not a lot of interior decorating. His people arrive, and they are delighted to meet the human, because Rocky has told them everything. The scene plays like a cross between the chimpanzees from that old redneck Red Rose Tea advertisement — the ones who formed a band and romped around with an infectious, slightly unhinged joy — and the apes at the dawn of time in 2001. Quietly bizarre. Warmly bizarre. The Star Child, but in a cave, with better social skills. Whether Grace was happy, I can’t say with certainty. He looked like a man who had finally, improbably, found his people. Even if his people were made of something other than people. Rock and Roll is here to stay. Still, how do rock people fuck?
The Bottom Bread
I wouldn’t exactly recommend Project Hail Mary the way you’d recommend something that demands to be seen, like say, Chinatown. It is derivative in ways that are more comforting than irritating, because what it borrows from is the accumulated longing of decades of stories about humans reaching across impossible distances toward something that might reach back. The choice Grace makes at the end — or rather the choice that surprises him as much as us — is the film’s quiet thesis: that connection, when it’s real, rewrites the mission. In a moment when we seem to be going further and further into our screens and further from anything resembling human contact, when loneliness is less a personal condition than a civilizational one, the film makes a modest, warm, entirely sincere case for the human touch. An ordinary person sitting down with it won’t be disappointed. Light rye. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need.
