Project Hail Mary: A Tale about loneliness, Friendship and Perseverance.

Project Hail Mary is one of the most hopefully and thought provoking exploration of the Ideas behind the question: are we alone in this universe?

It has a very unique way of introducing us to the plot, most movies would probably take their time to establish the characters and expand on them before dropping us in the middle of nowhere on a spaceship near the sun, but not our sun, because reasons I guess.

And more importantly once it drops you in the middle of nowhere, the P.O.V. Character has no bloody idea who he is or why he ended up here or what the hell is happening here.

And while it is unique af, it is also a very good way to have the backstory run parallel and be revealed as and when it is relevant to the story.

Even more unique is the inciting incident.

It's not believable in all the ways it is believable.

Life that eats the sun is quite strange, but at the same time, given everything that happens in the movie, is it really that far fetched?

At the same time the way that this life form is introduced is very believable and realistic.

Google showed me this image from Tik Tok, I dunno whom to credit as Tik Tok is unavailable in India.

Its a bunch of Micro-Organisms that reproduce on Venus, let out infrared frequencies to move forwards which also happen to be their excretion from eating the sun, and of course they just happen to eat the sun.

The Main Character: Ryland Grace is chosen for this project because he wrote a paper on life that apparently did not need water to form.

He researches on it and after on of the most Hilarious lines in Cinema history, he figures out that he is indeed wrong.

This was supposed to be his chance to prove he was correct and hence fired wrongly.

Although he was actually fired for name-calling someone.

But one way or the other this was the big break he needed because he was left with three dots after killing one of them and he somehow found a way to reproduce them.

Which surprisingly is what they wanted.

It was a strange choice for me to make Astrophage the fuel of choice for the mission taking the protagonist to the one star that currently shows no signs of infection in spite of being right in the middle of the infected masses.

Reaching there however, it appears there is a surprise waiting for Grace.

Apart from the fact that his entire crew is dead, meaning him the least capable for this mission of all, is now the only man for this mission.

A mission that was a one way trip anyways, since there is not enough Astrophage to get back.

But the other surprise is that there is another ship present before Grace.

That's right guys!!!

It's an Alien.

Whose ship is apparently made from Metallic Xenon called Xenonite.

The movie then has a frankly quite believable depiction of how two different intelligent species with different languages and cultures might go about communicating with each other, at first by making models to explain things, then meet halfway in a tube through a glass to separate their air from each other so they don't die of poisoning.

And then Rocky the alien comes in in a ball of glass.

He's a friend, he's a cute dog he has it all.

But in terms of the story, Rocky plays a more important role, his design is very deliberate.

On the 4th of June 2015, Adrian Tchaikovsky decided to release a book called children of time, which shows spiders evolving due to time dilation and gives an alternate perspective on the whole aliens from outer space thing.

The thing is they don't even communicate using sound like we do, it's a horror book but its heavily implied that the spiders don't really mean it that way, they just don't understand.

Rocky is a Rock spider, and he has no face, he also gives thumbs down on thumbs up, but the movie builds up in a believable way how these two can come to communicate with each other.

And the movie emphasizes that it was very much necessary that these two work together since it takes both their knowledge to get to the goal, both of them have small but fundamental gaps in their knowledge that would have meant failure were it not for the fact that the other was present to correct them.

What is more is that given the conditions, Rocky is able to give grace some of his Astrophage in order to be able to return to his home-planet, while rocky returns maybe 6 months late.

It is at this point that you are able to realize why exactly the Fuel is the Astrophage itself.

The reason Tau Ceti is uninfected because the nearby breeding grounds house a natural predator for the Astrophage that Grace Names Taumeba mixing Tau and Amoeba.

The process to collect them almost costs both Rocky and Grace their lives as Rocky is forced to come out of his protective ball to save grace as he is knocked unconscious by tremendous g forces while escaping the planet.

Some of the Astrophage leaks out of the the Fuel tank causing a near catastrophic failure.

Somehow they are able to save themselves and go their separate ways but on the way the Taumeba leaks out from the Xenonite canisters since it was mutated in them.

It gets into the fuel tank and starts eating the fuel.

Grace has a choice, return home or go save Rocky from a similar fate, while sending his research back via probes.

He wont be able to detect the leak since his whole ship is the leak.

It was always a one way trip...

And even though the ending is initially somewhat bitter sweet, we see Grace at the alien planet getting ready to teach a class on radiation and other things.

We get some dialogue about the ship being ready for a return to Earth.

So ultimately the Hail Mary worked and Grace did get to go home.

Hail Mary is a Tale about trying in the face of insurmountable odds and how unlikely friendships blossom in such conditions.

Like I said the aliens design is very deliberate.

Given another circumstance and we would have started on the wrong foot.

Grace was previously shunned for standing by his opinions and yet that is the only reason he is later able to become the leading scientist in Astrophage research.

And in his absence Humanity would probably have died long ago.

The movie has one message: be true to yourself even in the face of certain death, always finish your job.

Cause you never know when a way out might appear.

If grace jad given up when he woke up with no memory he would have surely died alone in space in fact he had a way to end his life on his own terms. And then the mission would have been a failure.

At least this way even if he dies, everyone back home gets to live...

Probably.

If he had left Rocky to die planet Eridia would have died, and he would live with the regret of it for all of eternity.

This way, they both survived and he still gets to go home, just a little late....

Its one hail mary after another with a simple question, Instead of what if it all goes wrong? What if it all goes right?