Not to mention that there truly is a lot of different real-world locations in the movie. Tau Ceti is an actual star, and Adrian is a confirmed exoplanet orbiting there.
I wouldn’t give the Last Hail Mary even a barely passing grade. Wooden characters, flat dialogue and as you point out questionable relation to reality as science knows it.
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Okay, glad I’m not the only one! I heard “Better than Santa Claus.” I wouldn’t mind if theaters started using subtitles, but then all the kids would complain.
Yeah, that bothered me a bit too at first, but I did enjoy the humor in it. Given the subject matter, it needed some levity around that middle stretch.
This movie was definitely a switch from The Martian, which was more like “hard” sci-fi, basically posing a question and asking “could this actually be accomplished scientifically based on today’s technology?” Project Hail Mary leans more toward “soft” sci-fi, so if someone went in expecting the same level of believability, they’d probably be disappointed. But honestly, with all the things we have to worry about in the world today, I don’t mind that sun-eating bacteria are not high on the list!
One part that really got me was the part where Grace tells Rocky he has made peace with dying and understands he’ll never go home. But when Rocky offers him a way to potentially make it home again, he gets choked up about it. Rocky is confused because Grace had claimed to be at peace about it, and Grace says something like, “I didn’t mean any of that – that’s just stuff you say to make yourself feel better.” It affected me because of how much of my religious upbringing seemed to revolve around death (or rather, “knowing where you’re going” afterwards so you don’t have to think about it). Even if we didn’t talk about it often, our beliefs were a way to “make peace with it.” And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that idea in general, but there’s also something to be said for NOT being entirely at peace with it and admitting it every now and then. It’s been good for my soul. I don’t think it reveals a lack of faith, but rather a growing understanding for why faith is important in the first place. My own deconstruction has involved levels of existential crises that I might have “peacefully” avoided if things had just stayed the way they were. But I think it partially just comes with the territory of asking questions… sometimes the answers we most want are the ones we can’t get. Anyway, that part made me feel seen.
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“Man, I can’t wait to watch Project Hail Mary!”
Wakes up hours later in an entirely different movie
“W-where am I?”
(If you know, you know)
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I like this interpretation a lot. From my unrelated interpretation of the movie, I think that Grace much prefers Rocky to Eva. There was a very direct parallel made between the two, because when Eva asks Grace to give up his life and Roxy asks Grace when he plans to leave Rocky’s planet, he tells both of them for time to think about it. Eva tells him he has but an hour to make perhaps the most important decision of his life, and ends up betraying him despite his decision. Rocky, on the other hand, passionately tells him to take all the time he needs to think it over.
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To be clear, I really did enjoy the movie. But if I could mention one other point where it didn’t make scientific sense is that the ship had to burn fuel the whole trip. But all it needed was to get up to travel velocity and then coast inertial, without any friction. Likewise when Grace was maneuvering the ship and cut power, it came to a standstill. I wondered why those aspects of space travel couldn’t be more realistic.
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Good points! Probably things they hoped most people wouldn’t notice.
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My thought is that the period of coasting would be fairly short, perhaps while Grace was asleep, as an equal amount of time would be needed to decelerate. But you are right, you have to ignore some stuff.
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I havent seen the film, I find 3 hrs in the cinema too long, but im very surprised that it ignores even basic Newtonian physics. It seems Gravity was much more realistic.
Gravity was amazingly realistic about gravity and inertia (and the lack of sound in a vacuum)!
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2001 was the first sci-fi film I remember that got that part right. No “pew-pew” for lasers or roaring engines on spaceships.
Interesting thread. Haven’t seen Hail Mary yet, but I’m one of those who doesn’t care about spoilers. My wife Googles the ending of movies before we even watch them.
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My son and I finally made it in and saw “Hail Mary” last night.
Yeah - fun flick! We enjoyed it, and the story line engaged us in satisfying ways. And like pretty much all other good cinema, one doesn’t go there expecting to find nothing but scientific rigor and plausibility. For the sake of the story, it’s going to have to push against and even step over a lot of those lines. Maybe a more important feature that I expect / hope entertainment can “get right” lest it detract from my enjoyment is the human interaction and psychology. How real / plausible do the main characters seem? And is the plot line / dialogue true to them?
The movie kind of reminded me of a cross between “Space Odyssey 2001” (the extended, disorienting, flashing light experiences) and “Gravity” (the recognizable, and relatively successful attempts to be more attentive to the actual science of space travel.)
Oh - and the soundtracks were awesome!
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What???!!! No xenomorphs?
Had to look that up! But … no, I guess not!
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“Like wasps or termites”. Me too.
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