Review: All in all, ‘Project Hail Mary’ rocks

First contact. Art by Basil Allen.

I never expected to feel maternal toward a rock, yet here we are. 

“Project Hail Mary” follows scientist and junior high teacher Ryland Grace through space as he searches for a solution to save Earth. It turns out, space isn’t devoid of life — Rocky exists. Rocky is an endearing rock-adjacent alien lifeform whom Grace teams up with to find the cure to star-eating astrophage and save both Earth and Rocky’s origin planet, Erid. 

Grace and Rocky were brought to theatres in March, roughly five years after being introduced on the page by Andy Weir. The duo is orbiting the internet as more and more people learn of their space escapades. Weir actually attended my town’s middle school in Milpitas, California, so I was always familiar with his work, and seeing “Project Hail Mary’s” successes has been all the more inspiring because of it. 

I was apprehensive of how the film would depict Rocky’s voice, but it was extremely well done. Rocky felt real from the moment he appeared on the screen.

The movie also managed to perfectly capture the essence of Grace himself; of course he would own multiple science pun-themed T-shirts. While the book could be considered too technical by some, I actually found myself missing some of Grace’s scientific tangents. But overall, the film adapts many other aspects quite well. 

The movie relied on Grace’s vlog-style narration to fill in for the book’s first-person inner dialogue. Not only was this convenient, but it also provided the viewer with more closure at the end of the film. In the novel, nobody on Earth knows that Grace was the only survivor of three people on the ship. Nobody knows that he worked with an alien (friend!) to save humanity and Erid. This lack of closure plagued me for days after finishing my read-through, and it also more firmly separated the book and movie in my mind. 

The film adaptation of “Project Hail Mary” utilizes incredible visuals to raise the stakes while leaving out some of the most critical details from the book. Grace having the 1 in 7000 coma-resistant gene is never mentioned, nor is the first taumoeba leak that results in Grace cleaning up taumoeba poop. There was also less discussion about climate change in the movie. In the book, the Project Hail Mary team works to simulate global warming, attempting to warm Earth up for a little longer as the sun continues to be consumed by astrophage. 

Speaking of visuals, “Project Hail Mary” did not use any green or blue screens. In fact, science goes beyond the fictional aspect of the film. The red Petrova line — a line of the antagonistic, star-eating astrophage going from the sun to Venus — was created by surrounding lead actor Ryan Gosling with IR LEDs and removing the IR filter from the camera lens, resulting in the deep-red glow audiences experienced on screen. Although the movie was so immersive that I wasn’t thinking about special effects as I watched it, it was great to see the high-quality efforts that went into creating those beautiful scenes.

I watched the last 40 minutes of the film with bated breath, ready to rage if the ending was changed. No matter how much Grace may have deserved to go back home to Earth and be regaled as a hero, it just wasn’t written in the stars. Luckily, while the film tightens events slightly, it preserves the most important choice: Grace turning around to save Rocky. 

“Project Hail Mary,” both the movie and the book, are not romantically centered. Yes, Rocky had his mate Adrian waiting for him at home, but this is not explored further than a sweet moment of renaming the planet “Tau Ceti e” to “Adrian.” While there may have been some romantic subtext between Grace and Eva Stratt, “whatever emotions [seen] on screen are up to personal interpretation,” Polygon’s Tasha Robinson said. The movie plot had the potential to get clouded by an added-on romance arc, but it stayed true to the energy of the book, which I found to be refreshing. This is a story that explores different kinds of relationships, ones not seen all that often. That is easy to say, considering a large portion of the story focuses on a human man and an alien, but nonetheless, romance just wasn’t a necessary theme in “Project Hail Mary,” book or movie adaptation. 

“Project Hail Mary” is a versatile story for the ages, one that will stick with both readers and audiences for a long time. At its core, “Project Hail Mary” is not about saving Earth — it’s about survival and answering the question, “Who would you die for?”