Project Hail Mary

From ET to Today

I had mixed feelings about the movie Hail Mary. Here are some thoughts I had, and hopefully, expand your horizons on how to think about filmmaking and what makes it art? Entertainment? Spotting trends?

For me, a successful adaptation does not need to preserve events. It does not need to preserve dialogue, or structure, or even character. What it must preserve is the intention of the conditions under which the original work produces meaning and esprit vital that made the director/producer want to translate the book onto the big screen.

By this standard, Project Hail Mary fails.

Not because it lacks respect for its source. It preserves the scientific framework, the central relationship, and the narrative arc. But it abandons what gave those elements weight:

The process by which the novel got you hooked.

Andy Weir’s novel is not, at its core, a story about discovery.

It is a story about the conditions under which discovery becomes possible.

A man wakes without knowledge. He must reconstruct everything, beginning not with equations, but with the most primitive act of cognition. What is two plus two? The drama is not what he knows. It is how he comes to know it.

The film removes this almost immediately.

It keeps the appearance of intelligence

the jargon,

the equations,

the conclusions

but discards the effort that gives them meaning. It shows answers instead of showing work. This is not an adaptation.

It is Candy Land instead of a full-course meal, which a 3-movie should be.

The clearest example is the alien. And how Gosling’s character begins to communicate with it.

The novel doesn’t initially have you meet Rocky. The relationship is inseparable from the labor that produced it.

The more effort, the more success.

For the film, it shifts from a survival film to basically an adult version of E.T.

The film now shows the immediacy that Gosling didn’t experience on Earth. Rocky becomes a companion almost at once, almost at once recognizable, accessible, and nearly warm. Closer to E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial than to the genuinely unknown.

Or Lassie.

Which is revealing, because E. T. was always a Spielberg film about childhood wish-fulfillment, the alien as the friend who finally understands you.

Weir wrote something harder: the alien as a problem you have to solve before you can love him.

When the film skips the solving, the love has no foundation.

The same thing with relying on computer systems, like the AI system on the ship. The ship’s AI was lousy; only Gosling’s manual effort got anything done (along with marker and whiteboard).

Another error runs through its treatment of the world. The novel presents authority as something contested, imposed, negotiated, and resisted.

The film collapses this into a single figure: a cold, unsmiling administrator who kidnaps scientists, commands outcomes, and meets no friction whatsoever.

An administrator who drably says that there will be food shortages and “we will have a war over this, I guess,” As if the world has overcome all conflicts and wars currently.

She tells our protagonist, “You’ll figure it out,” and that is the end of the argument. The world obeys. No borders. No politics. One unified, proportionate response to extinction.

And by “figuring it out,” she defeats her entire premise, as humanity itself will also figure it out. And shanghaiing Gosling is also something as old as war. And just as ethical.

The film asks us to accept one woman as the world's conscience, giving her no one to argue with.

Very tall order and suspension of disbelief.

This is not a political objection. It is a dramatic one. A world without resistance is a world without credibility. When she says “if you don’t save us, there will be war” and says it with such clinical remove that it lands as a bureaucratic line item, the stakes collapse. You cannot feel the weight of a world represented by a woman who seems unbothered by its loss.

Truffaut, both a film critic and director of legendary films that every filmmaker has ripped off once or twice, once argued against a certain tradition of filmmaking that imposed meaning from above, decided in advance what reality must be, and then arranged the world to confirm it.

The film commits exactly this error. It does not allow the world to reveal itself. It tells you what the world is, and asks you to accept it.

The result is two films that occupy the same runtime without fully merging. A survival story that demands isolation. A companion story that demands connection.

The novel reconciled them; the isolation became the precondition for the connection, each phase earning the next.

The film alternates between them. And so when the protagonist is finally required to make a decisive act, a genuine sacrifice, it arrives not as culmination but as script requirement. The structure has not carried him there. The film simply needed it to happen.

Ryan Gosling plays him as cool, adaptive, perpetually unshocked. Which works for most of the runtime, there is something honest about a passive man processing an impossible situation. But passivity requires preparation if it is to transform.

The book understood that he was a teacher, someone whose entire mode of being is to explain, to translate, to build understanding between unlike minds. That is why the alien relationship works in the novel at a level beyond charm. The film casts a movie star in a role that calls for an archetype, mistaking charisma for character.

And yet.

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge what survives its own simplification.

The science, when the film trusts it, retains force. The sequences on the planet’s surface, the extraction of resources, and the reconstruction of cellular structures have genuine procedural weight.

The alien, even in his abbreviated introduction, is not threatening. A friendly, itsy bitsy spider. I’m so thankful for a space movie without scary horror and evil predatory aliens.

This crew did not die at the hands of monsters (again, finally, no horror). They died from the journey. That choice, quiet as it is, carries real meaning: this is a film about the cost of being sent, not the drama of being hunted.

But then, cliché time, the death scenes and eventual resuscitation are the mirror opposite of ET, where ET dies and comes back to life. Gosling has it happen to him and is saved by Rocky. What ET started, this film is the ultimate generational conclusion of the alien hype.

And beneath everything, the film holds onto its central truth.

No man is sufficient alone.

Rocky is not an obstacle. He is a condition of resolution. The film knows this even when it does not trust itself enough to show the work behind it.

After I saw it, I said publicly that I did not enjoy the film, nor E. T., to the degree one is expected to. The response was immediate. A defense, certain and warm. I was wrong, or perhaps too demanding, or perhaps missing something.

But this exchange is more interesting than the film itself.

We had both paid for the same experience. We had both left with our own opinions. And now we were arguing.

This is the only condition under which cinema survives. No consensus. No approval. Opposition. A film that produces only agreement is already fading. A film that produces an argument is still alive.

Project Hail Mary fails in its fidelity to its own intelligence. It chooses convenience over process, clarity over contradiction, and result over effort.

But it provokes. That we are stronger together.

Aren’t we all, in some way, alien to our neighbor?