Doctor Ryland Grace, the 7th grade middle school science teacher who might have been a world-renowned xenobiologist if he hadn’t called his fellow scientists “stinky poopyheads” in his doctoral thesis, would have been a perfect role for Chris Pratt. In the book, Grace is kinda hunky, square jawed, super enthusiastic and maybe a little bit cowardly at times.
Pratt would have been perfect. But then again, when Pratt did this movie, it was called Passengers.
Both movies start the same: a hunky guy wakes from hibernation to find himself the only mobile person on a starship. The movies diverge from there, but it’s weird it happened twice. (There’s also Bruce Dern inhabiting the Chris Pratt role in Silent Running, another movie about a man alone on a spaceship).
A man wakes up from a medically-induced coma. An intrusive medical bot demands he answer simple questions such as “What is 2 + 2?” and “What is your name?”. Shrugging off these questions and the tubes attached to his various extremities, he soon discovers that he is in a starship, the starship is decelerating, and the sun he sees outside the window is not the sun of Earth.
His memory begins to return in flashes. He remembers he was a 7th grade science teacher, a cool teacher who loved science and loved passing that passion to his students.
Unfortunately for both him and his students, the sun is dying. It has started dimming, and the dimming is accelerating, and within fifteen years, half of humanity will be dead; and in thirty, all life on the planet will become extinct.
This becomes Grace’s problem when a stern Eva Stratt, onetime director of the European Space Agency, corners him after school with a copy of his doctoral thesis in her hand. His thesis on life that doesn’t require water to survive has just become surprisingly relevant. An ESA probe to the mysterious line of light connecting the Sun to Venus has brought back a sort of life that can live near the surface of the sun, far too hot for a water-based lifeform — exactly as Grace once predicted.
Both the book and the movie tell the story of Grace at Tau Ceti (the source of what became known as the “Astrophage”) and Grace and Stratt pulling together Project Hail Mary, an astrophage-fueled mission to a distant star to find out why it is the only star in the stellar neighborhood not to be affected by the astrophage. Accelerating constantly at 1.5g, it will make the trip in 13 years, but the crew will only experience four years of travel, and they will be in comas the entire way.
At Tau Ceti, Grace finds the other two crew members dead. He himself has no idea of what he’s supposed to be doing. His funk is interrupted when an alien starship pulls up beside the Hail Mary and he meets Rocky, a silicon-based, five-limbed, spider-like creature from a planet circling the star 40 Eridani, a star that is also infected by the Astrophage and will eventually kill all life on their planet, Erid. Rocky is likewise the only survivor of their crew.
Project Hail Mary is a movie that lives and dies on whether or not audiences can feel as if Rocky is a real person, even though their language and biology are so very different. And it does work. The friendship builds naturally as they learn each other’s language and history, and work together to discover the source of the Astrophage and how to combat it. Even as Grace’s returning memories make it clear that there is a secret about how he came to be on the mission that he won’t want to remember.
There’s certain key scenes in the book; all of these were brought to the screen beautifully. I might have some quibbles with the spacecraft design (very different from the book) or the whole way in which a microorganism can infect distant stars, but, it’s good. It’s a good movie. Book-Grace wasn’t a panicky coward like Gosling’s movie-Grace at the start; and this is my biggest problem with the movie. Book-Grace had used deduction and math to figure out where he was well before his returning memories informed him. Gosling’s Grace just goes quietly insane with despair before being forced into action by the arrival of Rocky’s ship.
It’s a good, fun movie. There’s an epilogue in the movie that didn’t appear in the book that explains, a little, what happened on Earth after the Project Hail Mary mission was sent off and that is probably reason enough for those who loved the book to watch the movie.
For those who haven’t read the book, you’re in luck. Gosling looks a lot like Chris Pratt, and you can watch Passengers right after for a double shot of hunky bearded men.
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