Admittedly, I’m a few weeks late on this. In my defense, I needed to wait for a day when my son was in school but my wife and I both had off, a convergence of scheduling that happens with approximately the same frequency as the appearance of the 17-year cicada. But yesterday, while Eddie was at school, Erin and I took in Project Hail Mary, and it’s exactly the story we all need right this very minute. 

In “This is How We Do It,” I break down a piece of storytelling that I find to be exemplary with the intent of describing what it does so well and, more importantly, HOW it does it that well. As such, it’s almost impossible to do so without spoilers. So if you haven’t seen the movie Project Hail Mary or read the novel by Andy Weir and you want to remain spoiler-free, you should probably skip over this column. If you’re up to date, great. Let’s talk about just what makes this movie in particular exactly the sort of storytelling we need right now, and why the timing couldn’t have been more perfect.

Project Hail Mary – both the novel and the movie adaptation starring Ryan Gosling – tells the story of a desperate mission to save Earth’s sun from a microorganism called Astrophage that is causing it to dim. Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, is the only member of the mission to survive the trip to a neighboring star that seems resistant to the Astrophage. Once he arrives, he encounters an alien whose own world is also being impacted by the menace, and together with the alien he dubs “Rocky,” Grace begins the search for something that can save both planets.

To begin with, the film (with a screenplay by Drew Goddard and directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller) follows the novel very closely. Both the book and film utilize a dual timeline, with Grace and Rocky’s mission intercut with flashbacks to the events on Earth that led up to the mission. The in-story excuse for this is that the hibernation has diluted Grace’s memories and they’re slowly coming back to him. Functionally, however, this is a good excuse to avoid telling the story in strict chronological order, which would have the audience going through about a third of the book or movie on Earth TALKING about the mission before it actually begins. While the backstory is necessary and compelling, it wouldn’t really be the most exciting way to get the movie started, and ricocheting between the past and present is an excellent way to tell the audience what they need to know while still getting to the most exciting stuff right up front. 

The changes to the story are minimal, and most of them are done to soften Sandra Hüller’s character Eva Stratt, who is in charge of the project and in the novel comes across as slightly more willing to do underhanded stuff in pursuit of the survival of the human species. Most of those edges are sanded off for the movie, with one major exception that I’ll get to later. A few other sequences are left out, but nothing that damages the story. The other big change is a scene that’s added towards the end that returns to Earth to show the mission is successful – success that is more implied in the novel rather than shown outright.

Structure explains how the story is well-told, of course, but that doesn’t explain what makes the story itself good. The movie shares a lot of DNA with Andy Weir’s previous novel-to-film adaptation, The Martian, which is another favorite of mine. Both of these are outer space dramas with a healthy dose of comedy about a single human astronaut trying to survive in unprecedented conditions. Neither of the stories have what one would consider to be a traditional antagonist – there is no “bad guy” in either. Both of them presume a world in which a spirit of cooperation spreads amongst the human race in defiance of a problem caused by nature. The thing that differentiates the two stories most is the sheer SCALE of it all. The Martian is the survival story of a man who is accidentally left behind on the planet Mars when his space mission is forced to abandon the planet. The only person whose life is in jeopardy is Mark Watney, and the fact that virtually the entire world is willing to come together to get him home is wonderfully inspiring. In Project Hail Mary, though, the stakes are raised dramatically: rather than a single person, all life on TWO planets will be lost if Grace and Rocky can’t find the solution to the Astrophage catastrophe. 

Speaking of the solution, that’s another thing that Weir is exceptionally good at: he talks about several high concepts – both real science and science fiction – in a way that is accessible and understandable even to a bozo like me who still stares at the refrigerator wondering how it knows to turn the light off when I close the door. Sure, the movie doesn’t make me feel like a scientician, but it tells me what I need to know in a way that is mostly comprehensible. Some of the math, I admit, goes a little over my head, but in those cases I’m willing to just nod and accept that Weir’s calculator is accurate and whatever he says those numbers mean is, in fact, what those numbers mean. The point is, these are stories where the science is not an obstacle, and in a world where it seems like people want to abandon these kinds of concepts, that’s more important than ever.

I mentioned before how great the timing of the movie turned out to be. By that I’m referring to the fact that it was released just days before the Artemis II rocket was launched, sending human astronauts back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years. This is – I’m going to underplay it a little here – a big whoop. The fact that we’re finally going back to the moon, with plans to actually begin building a base there in less than three years – is magical. For folks my age (I identify as a Xennial, if you insist on putting a label on it), it’s as though at least ONE of the futures that we were promised during our youth is FINALLY starting to make a little bit of headway. But I’ve been completely dumbfounded by the sheer number of people coming out of the woodwork on social media decrying it as fake. 

I pride myself on being accepting of different ideas, and I do my best to respect other people’s points of view and differences of opinion. I like to think I’m mature enough to understand that the fact that someone can interpret the world and arrive at a different conclusion about certain things than me, and that does not make them stupid or brainwashed or a bad person. But this is one situation in which I simply…can’t. I cannot fathom how anybody can sincerely believe this kind of flat-Earth, moon-landing-denying nonsense. (I know it’s not all sincere – there are plenty of trolls out there – but there are ENOUGH people who really believe it to make my eyes burn.) I feel like so many of these people carry around a highly undeserved sense of superiority, as though their beliefs somehow make them better than other people. And y’know what – even if they WERE right about the moon, thinking that this is a sign of some sort of higher evolution on their part goes against everything that a real quest for knowledge is about. It shouldn’t be about division, but about finding that universal truth.

That’s one of the other truly magical things about Project Hail Mary. The core of the movie is the friendship between Grace and Rocky, each the only survivor of their respective missions, who come together for a common goal. And when you unravel the threads of the story and look at how it’s all woven together, it should be abundantly clear that neither of them would have had a chance at success without the other. It’s Rocky’s technology that allows them to gather and breed the samples of alien bacteria that prove to be the predator of the Astrophage, but it’s Grace who discovers that’s what they are and breeds them in such a way that they can be useful – and that’s just ONE example of their cooperation. Throughout the movie, from the first moment that Rocky attempts to communicate by literally throwing a message in a bottle across the gulf of space to Grace’s ship, the story becomes a celebration of the wonder of discovery and cooperation. It grows from there, first with the two explorers coming into contact with one another, then learning how to communicate, then actually getting down to the mission. The story is a sequence of small victories, each one something to be joyful about, that eventually lead to the final triumph that we’ve all been waiting for.

It is a testament to the joy of knowledge and the embrace of collaboration, even on a personal level. The one truly underhanded deed of Eva’s that remains in the movie is when she forces Grace, against his will, to join the space mission after an accident takes the lives of the original science team. It’s a bit worse in the novel, where it is revealed that Eva also deliberately causes his temporary amnesia, worried that if he has all his memories upon waking he may refuse to complete the mission. It should be stressed, by the way, that this is NOT done in such a way as to paint Eva as a villain – she clearly regrets the necessity of her actions, but truly believes that sending him on that ship is the only possible hope for the survival of the entire human race. 

The only reason she has to force him, though, is that when he is asked to do it willingly he is too consumed with self-doubt to accept the task. He sees himself as a coward. But the last thing he hears before being forced into his induced coma is Carl – an agent on the project that he has come to regard as a friend – telling him, “You know who you are.” It’s in space, in orbit around a distant planet, that Ryland Grace truly discovers who he is, and the depths of the courage he is capable of. 

That doesn’t happen for him on Earth. It doesn’t happen – sadly – if the other human astronauts had survived the journey. And it certainly doesn’t happen if there was no Rocky there for him to learn from. The film’s true climax comes after the solution to the Astrophage has been found, when Rocky and Grace have gone their separate ways, but Grace discovers that the bacteria they’ve found will destroy Rocky’s ship if he isn’t warned. The conclusion of his character arc comes when he decides to send his findings ahead to Earth, then gives up his only chance at going home in order to go back and save the alien. Grace proves, in the end, who he is, and we’re all the better for it. 

Project Hail Mary is a beautiful, uplifting, inspiring anthem to human courage and curiosity. It’s a story that puts the best of us on display, not by showing a clean-cut paragon who never makes a mistake, but by showing a relatable and flawed character overcoming those flaws for the greater good, for the sake of his planet, for the sake of an entire planet of other sentient aliens that he’s never even met…but most of all, for the sake of his friend. 

It’s beautiful. It’s art. It’s the kind of story we need so badly. 

So when you’re looking for a movie that makes you feel that there is good in this world, Project Hail Mary is where you should look. Because this is how you do it.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. He wants a life-size Rocky to sit in his classroom. Somebody make that happen.