Review of Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

I recently started an 8-5 job and have been trying to reclaim my sanity and hobbies by finding fun things to do on the weekends and after work, and one of my saving graces truly has been my AMC A List subscription. I’ve always had one on and off throughout graduate school, and I recently reclaimed my subscription after a brief stint of thinking I was going to move to India (long story).

Sometimes the movies I really want to see aren’t included on AMC A List, which is sad, but I accept the reality of the situation. I get a ton of use out of this subscription despite that. On a slightly different note though, I used to work professionally as a film critic, which is very much a dying career, and when I would go to the film festivals I watched everything that really excited me.

A List is also an opportunity for me to go outside of my comfort zone. Recently, at the time of typing this, I’ve seen a handful of movies I don’t think I would have ever seen if I had to actually pay for them. I see so many movies throughout different states on A List that I basically make money off of AMC, rather than spending money. I have an entire spreadsheet for it.

My sister and I both wanted to see Project Hail Mary, but we waited a bit to see it because of how crowded the theaters are. If I didn’t work an 8-5 I would totally go see all of the new releases in the middle of the day, as that means dealing with people less. The audiences these days are horrible to deal with.

Let’s get into the review! Lots to cover with this movie.

A middle school science teacher with a PhD finds himself alone on a spaceship—with a mission to save Earth.

Full disclaimer: I never read the book that came out before this movie. So everything I’m watching on the screen in front of me I had no idea was going to happen.

The film starts with the main character, Ryland Grace, waking up from a coma in the middle of a spacecraft. The only other two people on the ship are dead, and he can’t remember who he is or why he’s on the ship at first.

We learn from the flashbacks throughout the movie that he was a middle school science teacher when the Petrova Line, recently discovered, starts snuffing out the sun with a microorganism called astrophage. A government agent, Eva Stratt, comes to his school’s campus to recruit him based on his PhD thesis.

At first Grace seems like a lost cause with the research, but Stratt keeps him on. He’s given top security clearance and learns that the Earth will actually die if nothing is done about the Petrova line, and that there’s a suicide mission in the works to try and find out a way to fix the problem—but the astronauts will not survive.

Grace eventually figures out he can use the astrophage to power the engine of the spaceship, and that other stars in the universe are becoming infected. He’s forced onto the mission by Stratt, not by choice, after the original astronaut and his backup are killed in an explosion.

In the present day, Grace and the ship approach Tau Ceti, where he encounters an alien ship. He meets its sole occupant, that Grace dubs Rocky, and he ends up rigging a system to interpret its language and have real communication with him. Rocky is the only survivor of radiation sickness—the other twenty-three workers who came with him all died.

Rocky creates a ball of xenonite to join Grace’s ship and continue working on a solution that will save both of their planets. It’s on a planet called Tau Ceti E, which they dub Adrian (after Rocky’s mate), that they discover there’s a living organism that eats the astrophage in the atmosphere.

They engage in a risky mission to gather living specimens, but a fuel leak forces some major decisions as they escape the atmosphere. Grace is knocked out and injured, and Rocky, in an act of desperate, breaks his pod and ends up saving Grace. He almost dies in the process because of the different atmosphere, and when Grace wakes up, he lets Rocky go into hibernation as he solves the mystery of Adrian’s atmosphere.

He breeds it and tells Rocky when he wakes back up what he’s done, then they return to Rocky’s ship. Rocky gives him enough astrophage to get back to Earth, but days later a leak in the ship has Grace realizing that he bred the organisms too well.

They’re able to get past the xenonite and now eat his fuel. Rocky’s ship is made of xenonite and is effectively screwed, so Grace makes the decision to send the specimens he has back to Earth and save Rocky.

Stratt, back on Earth, receives the probes and is ready to save their planet. Rocky takes Grace back to his planet, where they build a biodome for him, and they fix his spaceship. Grace has to make the decision, but before he does so he goes to teach a class of Eridian children.

Overall Thoughts

Plot holes aside, including how Rocky was able to understand Grace so suddenly despite the language barrier, this is a really good movie. I’m glad I saw it on a big screen because of how certain scenes pop on the screen and really come alive in a movie theater.

That said, everyone in this movie also did a great job. From the actors to cinematography, this feels like such an experience that definitely deserved all of the people talking about it. I think we’re getting a lot of sweeping, longer movies with sustained screenplays and good writing in the past few years, and this is one of them.

All in all, I’m really happy I saw this movie in the end. I don’t know if I would return to it, especially considering I’m not the biggest science fiction fan, but I was happy with the fact I spent an evening watching it.

Go see it if you have the chance and haven’t already!

Follow me below on Instagram, Letterboxd, and Goodreads for more.