Manisha Ail (Twitter | Instagram)
If I was a book-noob who saw the trailer for Project Hail Mary, I would presume it is a cookie-cutter formulaic story about the unlikely American hero (insert teacher/drunk pilot/deep sea oil-driller/the United States President etc.) who rises to the challenge of saving humanity from certain destruction, a story we have seen too many times to count. It would be easy to find the premise trite and tiresome, considering what is happening in the real world right now. I would have been dismissive of its triumphant predictability before the trailer even ended. And that is my major gripe with Project Hail Mary. If I had not read the book, I probably would not have watched the movie after seeing its trailer. And what a loss that would have been!
Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is a failed scientist-turned-school teacher waking up in a spaceship afloat in space, light-years away from earth, with no memory of how or why he got there. The crew that piloted him there are dead and while he has the knowledge and skills to figure out his environment, he has no idea of his purpose in doing so. We, the audience, are like his co-amnesiac invisible shipmates who embark on his journey of discovery with him. And Project Hail Mary is a journey worth the price of an IMAX movie ticket, if one is accessible to you.
A movie connoisseur would find plenty of material online on why the technical Project Hail Mary experience is so much more vivid than the plain CGI slop we are served these days, à la Marvel. You will find articles and videos expounding how the movie created and used real sets, how the filming of stunts impacted the action sequences, how the alien in the movie was a specially created puppet, etc. All valid points, but the movie GRAVITY was way more visually stunning and it left me boringly unmoved. The visual beauty and realism of Project Hail Mary only enhanced what moved me to laughter and tears alternately through its 2.5-hour runtime- a successfully adapted story.
The doomsday premise is simple. Our sun is being destroyed by an extraterrestrial microbe named ‘astrophage’; life on earth would follow in its footsteps within a few decades. A distant sun, Tau Ceti, is seen to be unaffected by the astrophage. The project is a literal Hail Mary pass to send a crew on a one-way trip to the immune star to figure out why and send back data.
It is rare when a movie tells a story better than the book did. Hardcore sci-fi fans may differ in this opinion and rightfully so. But I remember being a bit bogged down by the science of it while reading the book. A commercial movie adaptation does not have the luxury to meander to prove a point, so I would doff my cap to screenwriter Drew Goddard who distilled an original science fiction tome down to its perfect components for mass consumption, without compromising on the story it tries to tell. Beyond the grandiose, breathtaking imagery of dying suns, alien planets, first contacts, and spacewalks, it is the heart of the tale that stays with the viewer long after they have walked out of the movie theatre.
The Project Hail Mary movie experience is poignant because it is a paean to the most common of human conditions- loneliness. We meet Grace as a solitary human being set adrift both mentally and physically in the unending vastness of outer space. But we learn as the story progresses that it is not the light-years of space that define his isolation. “You don’t even have a dog,” Sandra Hüller’s character Eva Stratt, the director in charge of the project, informs Grace stoically, when he protests her pushing him into a suicidal one-way mission to save earth. Grace is an educated, erudite man with an engaging and curious personality, but he is alone by choice, even more so on earth while surrounded by his students, soldiers, or peers, than when he is completely lost, afloat in the darkness of space.
But in the orbit around Tau Ceti, Grace encounters and befriends an extraterrestrial entity, one that does not even have a discernable face. Human propensity leads him to name the stony space-spider with five limbs ‘Rocky’ and develop a genuine human connection with a being that is also trying to save its species from extinction due to the sun-eater. The two struggle to communicate, collaborate, teach each other, and learn each other’s strengths, and weaknesses, a journey that is believably soul-warming to witness. In the process, they form a rare true bond based on a foundation of common purpose and experience growth because of it. Grace goes from being a selfish, lonely coward on earth to understanding what it is like to have someone worth dying for. The heartstrings-twanging surprise ending was what had made the book unforgettable to me, and I am glad that it was kept mostly unchanged in the movie.
On a side-note, Disney needs to take notes on how a rock with five stone arms was able to be more lifelike and encourage greater emotional response from viewers than all its live-action adaptation characters put together.
Science without curiosity is pointless. Science without empathy explains the current state of the world. Science tempered with curiosity and empathy, as we see in Project Hail Mary, is a thing to behold. So do not miss the experience even as it gets more relegated to the realms of fiction than fact.
The movie PROJECT HAIL MARY is screening in theatres right now.
Review by Manisha Ail
A doctor by profession and a writer by choice. Manisha was published as one of the winners of Write India season 1 and holds a secret love for poetry too. She can be reached at missilemyra@gmail.com
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