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Project Hail Mary: a Review

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........

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