Project Hail Mary

My quick review of the movie “Project Hail Mary”.

Spoilers below, probably, so beware. And disclaimer: I haven’t yet read the book, but spoke with some folks afterwards who had.¹

I overall enjoyed the experience of the movie, as I do for almost all movies.

Bad things

That said, I didn’t enjoy how much comedy there was. I felt like it should have been a more serious movie—it should have taken itself more seriously. Maybe it was more like the presentation of the comedy. Some comedic relief is fine in these kinds of films with a dramatic premise, but it felt like almost entirely a comedy film with some drama sprinkled in rather than a dramatic film with comedy sprinkled in, which I don’t think was fitting for the topic. Some discourse on Twitter attributed this to “what the market demands”, but I don’t buy it. Especially given the premise of “the world is in danger,” much of the comedy seemed out of place.

After the movie, I spoke with some folks who had read the book back in the day. To my surprise, the book still had a decent bit of this comedy, but also went into detail on the process of discovery and scientific detail. I’d have loved to see more of that. Also, apparently the movie left out huge bits of the story, e.g. glossing over the fact that Rocky didn’t know about relativity when this has a massive impact on the urgency with which he needs to get back home. If I recall correctly, the movie spent all of 30 seconds on the relativity thing.

Good things

The ending was really, really good. The drama of the ending, where Rocky saves Grace and soon after, Grace makes a decision to save Rocky, was great.

Then, I also really, really enjoyed the other part of the ending, where Grace is living on Rocky’s planet, Erid, I think the name is, and has his own oxygen-filled like corner of the world, has his own beach, has his own air, has its own Earth-like atmosphere, his own house, Rocky is able to come into this air with a specially-made suit. If a single individual has as much counterfactual impact on saving your world as Grace had, that is how you should treat them. You should build an entire atmosphere for them, you should build an entire ocean for them, you should fine-tune the temperature of the ocean to their desire. And it’s not just the grandiose things! You should create a new class to help them achieve fulfillment, and you should ensure they are valued and feel valued. That is how you treat somebody who has just saved your planet. That is the correct civilizational response. And I thought Project Hail Mary’s depiction of this was beautiful, and I really, really enjoyed seeing that in film.²

Grace on the beach made just for him.

Footnotes

1. Aside: I realized that I had read the Wikipedia page for the book while I was watching the movie, which was sort of fun because I had a growing sense of déjà vu as the story unfolded. ↩

2. To be clear, this shouldn’t be confused or conflated with some sort of legacy—as I’ve written before, legacy is not, in my opinion, the best thing to optimize for. Rather, my take is that the movie depicted something much more like retroactive compensation . ↩