The moment this movie ended, I realized that I wanted it to be one that I would show my future kids. I usually find myself glancing at the time while at the theater when watching this kind of movie, but this is a long science fiction film that actually doesn’t bore me. Project Hail Mary, released on Mar. 20, is a very comforting movie even though the start of it is quite scary and makes you think about the situation of our planet.
The story starts with main character Ryland Grace (usually referred to as Grace), played by Ryan Gosling, waking up on a ship. I believe that Gosling does an amazing job with this role. The emotion in this film feels natural and I felt like the friendship between Grace and his future best friend Rocky was real.
He doesn’t remember anything and gets extremely shocked when he realizes he’s not even on Earth. Grace is a clearly overqualified middle school science teacher for eighth graders, but he doesn’t remember that when he wakes up on a ship miles from home.
The challenge that all life on Earth is facing in the story is something called Astrophage, an alien microbe from an undiscovered planet and is more commonly known as the “star eater”. This is a threat to the Earth because of its consumption of the Sun’s energy, meaning that soon enough the planet could drop in temperature fast and make it hard for the people to survive. The threat seems real in this film because we see how urgently Grace and the other scientists are working to try and save the planet.
While watching this part, I was thinking about our own relationship with the Earth and how we are making progress to revive the Earth from the past, but also reversing some of our progress to a cleaner planet at the same time. I really think that this film does a good job at giving viewers a slight warning to treat our planet with more care and fragility.
At the beginning, one of Grace’s students asks him what Astrophage is and Grace politely avoids the question and continues on with his lesson for the period. But as weeks go by, more students begin to become interested in the threat, and Grace finds himself unable to avoid the questions anymore. He ends up admitting to his students what is really going on with the world and the fact that the students and everyone on Earth may be in extreme danger of not being able to live so comfortably and freeze. But he doesn’t just give up, he becomes extremely interested in Astrophage himself and decides to get to the root of the problem.
His coworkers and other higher level scientists start to recognize that Grace is way too smart to be just a middle school science teacher, and he gets put up to an impossible task: to save the entire Earth by leaving it. Later on, Grace has to relearn everything he used to know while not even being able to see his home planet.
One thing I loved about this film was the scenes. They were all so beautiful and there were many moments I couldn’t even believe that the movie was filmed on Earth because all scenes seemed so realistic. The shots of the stars and highly detailed ship made me feel like I was watching Star Wars for the first time again and being blown away.
The main reason I would love to show this movie to my future kids is because it is a story of friendship and love, but also slightly warns us how fragile the Earth is. I would recommend this movie to anyone interested in science fiction stories, aspiring astronomists, or to anyone who wants an easy watch that might make them cry.
