WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

 

I first got wind of the hype for the Project Hail Mary (PHM) movie in January of this year, two months before its scheduled release date. The buzz was so promising that I bumped the novel to the top of my lengthy reading list so I could finish it in time for the movie premiere. I became even more excited when I saw press screening reviews gushing about the movie’s heartwarming depiction of humanity, hope, and scientific discovery. Movies with a capital M were back, so it seemed. But when my viewing finally rolled around, I walked out of the theater feeling like I missed something. 

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed Project Hail Mary at its surface level: I was endeared by Rocky and Ryland Grace’s friendship and teared up at the designated emotional beats. However, I didn’t feel any of the sense of wonder that a movie about space and interspecies connection should evoke. Project Hail Mary is a hard sci-fi movie, so where did the science go?

I’m obviously a biased reviewer: I work in a lab and I enjoy getting into the weeds of scientific speculation. I knew there would be some inaccuracies in the movie, but I thought they’d be small enough that I could suspend my disbelief and brush them off. Instead, I ended up complaining to my roommate the entire subway ride home.

My first assumption was that writers cut down on the science to appeal to a wider audience. After a little digging, I found that this was actually not the creators’ intention. In Project Hail Mary’s production notes, writer Drew Goddard, who previously adapted the sci-fi blockbuster The Martian, acknowledges the public’s interest in science. “One of the things we learned on The Martian was that we don’t have to simplify the science,” he wrote. “The audience loved that the science was complicated and challenging.” 

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller decided the best strategy to depict Grace’s scientific process was through “action rather than explanation . . . If Grace is figuring something out, the audience would have to watch him figure it out. They would watch him fail, watch him test. Discovery had to be active.” 

With that in mind, I reviewed what I had seen. Did Grace actually partake in the process of trial-and-error the directors claimed to show? Sort of. In one scene, Grace performs a flight of procedures on an Astrophage—an alien microbe that is “eating” our sun’s energy—a sequence that feels mostly played for laughs as he fumbles around in an anti-contamination suit. He certainly experiences failure when he kills a precious sample.

Then there is the segment where Grace and his security detail Carl construct a lightproof box to see if Astrophages are attracted to the spectral frequency of carbon dioxide. I enjoyed this scene because it showed the DIY side of experimentation. It was clear what Grace intended to test with this box, and I got to watch the entire building and observation process unfold. Consequently, I shared Grace’s surprise and eventual excitement when he discovered that Astrophages need carbon dioxide to breed. I felt this scene best achieved Lord and Miller’s objective of presenting active discovery. 

The final significant “scientific” scene happens after Rocky risks his life by exiting his climate-controlled enclosure to save Grace when he gets pinned to the control panel. While Rocky recovers, Grace successfully breeds enough Taumoeba, a newly discovered Astrophage predator, to save Earth and Rocky’s home planet. Even though this was arguably the most critical accomplishment of the mission, we barely got to see how Grace did it. All I registered was a lot of tape-ripping, then Grace breaking the happy news to Rocky.

The majority of the science scenes pass in this manner: Grace states each important reveal in an offhand manner before the camera quickly ushers us to the next scene. Despite the creative team’s claims, it felt like there wasn’t even an attempt to include the majority of the experiments Grace and Rocky performed to complete their mission. (There is a four-hour cut of PHM out there that was edited down to the movie’s run time of two hours and thirty-seven minutes. Maybe all the experiments lived and died in that footage.) In the official cut, there is no substantial inquiry, no explanation for anything.

I understand why the screenwriters would trim down Grace’s long stretches of thinking to keep the film moving, but I don’t think they had to throw out the context entirely. Back to Grace’s Taumoeba breeding: we see Grace in action as he tinkers around with his breeding cages. Yet showing pure action with no explanation for the steps he takes feels like lazy storytelling. The details? Don’t worry about it! Grace might as well have been banging on the spaceship walls with a wrench—it would’ve registered as the same vaguely “scientific” pantomime.

After Grace and Rocky part ways to bring the Taumoeba back to their respective stars, Grace’s Taumoeba eat through their xenonite enclosures and begin consuming the Astrophage fuel on his ship. Xenonite is a strong and flexible building material, composed mainly of xenon gas, that is unique to Rocky’s planet. Up until this point in the movie, xenonite has been understood to be nearly indestructible. Grace is able to get the Taumoeba under control by switching out the tank material, but this spells disaster for Rocky, whose entire ship is made of xenonite. In the movie, the Taumoeba’s appetite for xenonite is presented as an unfortunate surprise. However, book readers will know that Grace’s Taumoeba colony developed the ability to move through xenonite because they were all bred in xenonite containers. 

Maybe the xenonite breeding enclosures seem like a superfluous detail, but I prefer a plot twist preceded by a hint over a reveal that comes out of nowhere. The book version of events demonstrates the unpredictable nature of science: sometimes small experimental choices can have huge consequences, and often we discover things we never even considered at the beginning. Leaving out this element takes away the full emotional gut punch of the plot twist. The knowledge that Grace inadvertently jeopardized his friend’s life makes the story far juicier, and I think it would’ve been fun to sit a little longer with Grace’s guilt and panic. After all, Project Hail Mary is a life-or-death mission for humanity—the movie could’ve done more to make us really feel the stakes.

That being said, Project Hail Mary’s length already falls on the longer side of movie run times. Even so, I think there were small changes that could’ve been made to fit more scientific context into the final product. The banter-heavy scenes in the first act dragged down the movie’s pacing—for example, the montage of Carl and Grace’s field trip to Home Depot. The writers could’ve sacrificed some of this scene (sorry Carl) to include more experimenting. They also could’ve used Grace’s canonical teaching experience to talk about the unique biology of Astrophages. It would’ve been quite straightforward for Grace to put his teaching hat on and give everyone a crash course on how Astrophage “eat” sunlight or detect specific frequencies—anything.

It’s clear that the movie wanted to emphasize Grace and Rocky’s friendship and how they learn to work together. But even so, the writers neglected to show Grace trying to heal Rocky after he leaves his hamster ball, like he does in the book. In fact, it’s never explicitly explained why a human atmosphere is so bad for Rocky. Grace attempting to help his friend would have demonstrated the strength of their bond and been a chance to introduce the audience to some of the unique parts of Rocky’s biology. I think the majority of viewers are at least a little curious about how an alien body works.

Overall, it felt like the movie creators underestimated the level at which people are willing to engage with science beyond passively watching it happen. I would argue that the average American is even more interested in science and space than the directors expected, given the public response to the recent Artemis II mission. Twenty-seven million people watched the Artemis II re-entry, a jump from the eighteen million viewers who tuned in for launch. Many teachers incorporated the mission into their lesson plans, and planetariums received an influx of visitors hoping to learn more. Space gets people excited! If anything, Project Hail Mary was a missed opportunity to introduce people to more science. In today’s increasingly anti-science political climate, we should be doing as much as we can to encourage curiosity and critical thinking. 

It’s not easy to present complex topics to a general audience without confusing them or bashing them over the head with unnecessary information. Perhaps I only have so many grievances because I read Project Hail Mary (the book) first and saw all that was lost in translation from page to screen. Unfortunately, I don’t think the movie made enough of an effort to depict the challenging nature of science. The writers would’ve benefited from having more confidence in their audience: trusting that people are capable of being exposed to scientific concepts at the same time as watching a feel-good movie. We might not all be rocket scientists (or molecular biologists), but just like Grace and Rocky, we can still figure it out together along the way.