MY sisters insisted I watch Project Hail Mary. It was, they said, exactly the right film for dispiriting times. I finally watched it on the long flight home and they were right.

The title refers to the Hail Mary pass, the desperate last throw in American football when nothing else is left. The phrase itself comes from a prayer to Mary, or Maryam as we refer to her here, a plea to be rescued from above.

The film’s hero is a schoolteacher who wakes up alone in space, with no memory of how he got there and no great enthusiasm for dying to save the planet. He is not a soldier, a politician or a billionaire. He is frightened. He makes mistakes. He improvises. He does what ordinary people do when faced with an extraordinary problem: he deals with whatever is in front of him and hopes the next thing will be manageable.

Then he meets Rocky, an alien. At first they cannot even communicate. They have a different biology, different languages and different reasons for being where they are. Yet the heart of the film is not the rescue of Earth. It is two very different beings learning to trust each other. The world is not saved by one exceptional person. It is saved by........

© Dawn