Project Hail Mary is the blockbuster hit of the year, a rare fresh IP that’s shattered box-office records and given moviegoers hope that Hollywood may not be dead (quite) yet. Like The Martian, it builds on the smash hit-making talent of novelist Andy Weir. Weir spent most of his working life as a computer programmer who “wrote stuff” around his day job, but he’s now living the dream as a full-time author. He collaborated with screenwriter Drew Goddard to bring Project Hail Mary to the screen. The movie grounds its success in smart practical effects, Ryan Gosling’s star power, and some stellar puppeteering by James Ortiz behind our hero’s adorable alien sidekick, Rocky.
The novel originally earned a massive fanbase in part by refusing to dumb down the “science” in science fiction, playing directly to the nerds in the audience. By necessity, the adaptation process cut or compressed much of that detail. Naturally, when those details involve the origins and biology of alien life-forms, they rely on the assumptions of evolutionary science. But they are design-haunted. Or, as the forthcoming film The Story of Everything (out April 30) would argue, they are God-haunted.
Anything But God
After waking up with amnesia on a spaceship lightyears away from Earth, Dr. Ryland Grace gradually remembers that he was working as an overqualified middle-school teacher when he was tapped to help save the world from an icy apocalypse. Why did they specifically call him? Because, explains the ruthlessly pragmatic Eva Stratt, he once wrote a paper questioning the “Goldilocks zone” theory of life’s origins — specifically, the necessity for liquid water. Stratt had a hunch that whatever was eating the sun, it was a microscopic life-form that wasn’t water-based. She was half right. “Astrophage” is indeed a remarkable microscopic life-form, but it’s water-based, which left Grace thoroughly deflated. Indeed, it’s amazingly similar to the microscopic life we find on Earth. It uses ATP and RNA transcription, it has organelles like mitochondria, and more. How could something with a structure this complicated have evolved twice? Grace thinks it couldn’t have. His money is on panspermia.
The panspermia hypothesis is an oldie but a goodie: the theory that life in fact exists all over the cosmos and is “seeded” around by space debris or alien spacecraft. It’s a favorite alternative for skeptics like Richard Dawkins who would say any naturalistic hypothesis, however fringe, beats the God hypothesis. Of course, it only pushes back the question of ultimate origins, offering no real explanatory power.
Meanwhile, a more thrilling extraterrestrial discovery is waiting to vindicate Dr. Grace in the lovably wacky form of Rocky, who happens to be trying to save his own planet from the same star-eating parasite. And that planet is waterless. Rocky’s people, Eridians, are “in effect, biological smelters.” His blitzing-hot rock carapace is made of oxidized minerals, his bones made of metallic alloys. His brain and stomach are among the few soft organs safely tucked away inside this fortress. Single-celled organisms travel through liquid mercury blood to build up and repair his body. He has no eyes, but his whole body functions like a microphone, allowing him to “see” by hearing, like sonar. He communicates in a series of musical trills resembling whale song.
Unanswered Questions
It sure seems like an amazing design, but of course Grace assumes that like humans, Eridians are also “a mess of random mutations.” His own brain is just “a collection of software hacks” that somehow managed to cohere into a functional unit, after all. Presumably, so is Rocky’s.
Once Grace and Rocky start learning each other’s languages, they spend hours in fascinated conversation about each other’s biology, which turns philosophical as they speculate together about their origins. Rocky spontaneously suggests “you, me, related.” Of course, Grace thinks. Panspermia strikes again! They spin out more theories about why they both evolved to hear the same sounds, or why their intelligence seems about evenly matched, all relying on the usual Darwinian conjectures about survival of the fittest.
But then Rocky asks a really tough question. “You and me both willing to die for our people. Why, question?” (Rocky always spells out the word “question.”) “Evolution hate death,” he observes. Grace offers the stock answer that a self-sacrificial instinct perpetuates the survival of a whole species. “Not all Eridians willing to die for others,” Rocky points out. Grace has to admit that’s not true of all humans either. Rocky concludes, “You and me are good people.” Yet his question remains intriguingly unanswered.
A Divine Invitation
One irrepressible God-believer does pop up among the skeptics to play a critical role in the novel. Without enough fuel for a return trip, the ship’s crew will need to send back any discoveries in four space pods nicknamed “The Beatles.” These are the brainchildren of an annoyingly cheerful Canadian inventor named Steve. As he’s explaining how the pods will only experience a few years of travel thanks to time dilation, he pauses to ask Grace, “Do you believe in God? I know it’s a personal question. I do. And I think He was pretty awesome to make relativity a thing, don’t you? The faster you go, the less time you experience. It’s like He’s inviting us to explore the universe, you know?”
Steve didn’t make it into the movie, but there is a new scene where Grace asks a much-softened Stratt if she believes in God, and she answers with a little smile, “It beats the alternative.” She remembers how she sang in a church choir as a child. Choir music wafts in and out of Daniel Pemberton’s soundtrack, and as the credits roll, a full-on gospel celebration breaks out.
Meanwhile, the stunning visuals — from galactic vistas to microscopic breakthroughs — are our invitation to “explore,” to marvel. As I watched, I thought of the old ’70s project Powers of Ten, which took viewers on an epic journey from the wonders under a microscope to the wonders of the stars, pausing in between at the intimate level of a man’s hand.
Or a friendly alien’s claw.