When the sun is dying, memory is missing, and humanity’s last hope wakes up alone with an impossible mission, the result is Project Hail Mary.
Adapted from Andy Weir’s novel, Project Hail Mary, the movie leans hard on Ryan Gosling’s performance as Dr. Ryland Grace and on the strange, delightful bond that develops between Grace and Rocky. We had slightly different reactions to the movie’s science and pacing, and that tension gave us plenty to work through. The movie is earnest, funny, emotionally effective, and sometimes a little more confident in its speculative science than we were. This episode looks at bravery as something deeper than standard movie heroism, duty when we have been wronged, and the temptation to play God when the stakes feel too large for ordinary obedience.
First Impressions
Project Hail Mary hit Eve and me differently. Eve enjoyed the movie, and it definitely worked on the emotional level it was aiming for, but the science kept knocking her out of the story. I understood that reaction, especially with a movie this long. Once you add previews and the usual theater logistics, you have to want to be there. This is not a “let’s squeeze it in before dinner” kind of movie.
That said, there is a lot here to enjoy. Ryan Gosling does excellent work as Dr. Ryland Grace, and he has the unenviable job of carrying long stretches of the movie with only a computer voice, fragmented memories, and eventually Rocky to play against. The fact that Rocky was handled as a practical effect helped that relationship feel grounded. Gosling was not just reacting to a tennis ball on a stick, which probably helped both his performance and our ability to buy into it.
Eve’s favorite part of the movie may have been Daniel Pemberton’s score. The industrial rhythms, choral textures, and odd sound choices give the movie a very distinct feel. It supports the classroom scenes, the loneliness of space, and the alienness of Rocky without turning everything into generic science-fiction wallpaper.
I came into the movie with more affection already built in. I preordered the book back in 2020, read it shortly after release, and had enough distance from it to enjoy being surprised again. I also thought the adaptation choices were unusually strong. The movie moves the Grace and Rocky relationship closer to the center, and that was the right call. The science goes further afield than The Martian, but for me the friendship, communication, and sense of discovery carried the story.
Eve still prefers The Martian, and I get why. But Project Hail Mary worked for me because its best material is not really the astrophage. It is Grace and Rocky learning how not to be alone.
What Does It Mean To Be Brave?
Eve described Project Hail Mary as a $250 million definition of the word “brave,” and I think she’s right. The movie even has Grace define bravery for Rocky as “to risk self to save others,” but it works because it doesn’t stop there. It keeps showing it.
The original crew signs on knowing the trip is one-way. Rocky opens communication with a strange alien ship while alone and grieving his own crew. Grace answers that invitation and keeps stepping into situations he has neither the training nor any earthly business surviving. Then Rocky breaks his own safe environment to save Grace, and Grace turns away from home to save Rocky.
That gives the movie a different texture than the usual superhero story. Nobody is brave because they feel destined for greatness. They are brave because someone else’s life is in front of them, and they choose to act. C. S. Lewis said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.” G. K. Chesterton called courage “a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.” That gets close to what the movie is doing.
Scripture gives us many examples of bravery: Joshua and Caleb in Numbers 13:30 and 14:6–9, David in 1 Samuel 17:34–37, and Daniel and his friends in Daniel 1:8–17. But biblical bravery is never lonely bravery. It rests on confidence in God.
What, then, are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him grant us everything? Who can bring an accusation against God’s elect? God is the one who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is the one who died, but even more, has been raised; he also is at the right hand of God and intercedes for us. Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: Because of you we are being put to death all day long; we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 8:31–39)
That is why Yao’s line works so well: “You just need to find someone to be brave for.” Christian courage goes even further. We do not risk ourselves because we are invincible. We risk ourselves because Christ has already secured what fear threatens to take from us.
Duty Despite Injustice
Hollywood loves a revenge story. Give a man enough pain, enough betrayal, and enough ammunition, and the script almost writes itself. The John Wick movies work because they are stylish, tightly choreographed, and cathartic in that “I should probably not enjoy this quite so much” sort of way. But revenge stories can also train our instincts badly if we let them.
Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay, says the Lord. But If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will be heaping fiery coals on his head. Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good. (Romans 12:19–21)
That is part of what makes Grace’s situation so interesting. He is kidnapped, drugged, and sent on a suicide mission against his will. If anyone in this story has an excuse to stew in bitterness, it is Grace. But once the truth catches up with him, he does not let betrayal become the thing that defines him.
Joseph gives us a much clearer biblical picture. He had been betrayed by his own brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, imprisoned, and forgotten. When he finally had power over the people who wronged him, he did not pretend their sin was harmless. He simply refused to put himself in God’s place.
But Joseph said to them, “Don’t be afraid. Am I in the place of God? You planned evil against me; God planned it for good to bring about the present result—the survival of many people. Therefore don’t be afraid. I will take care of you and your children.” And he comforted them and spoke kindly to them. (Genesis 50:19–21)
Grace is not Joseph, and Project Hail Mary is not an astrophage-powered version of the Genesis account. But the moral shape is still worth noticing. Being wronged does not erase our responsibility to do what is right.
This is what the LORD of Armies, the God of Israel, says to all the exiles I deported from Jerusalem to Babylon: “Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat their produce. Find wives for yourselves, and have sons and daughters. Find wives for your sons and give your daughters to men in marriage so that they may bear sons and daughters. Multiply there; do not decrease. Pursue the well-being of the city I have deported you to. Pray to the LORD on its behalf, for when it thrives, you will thrive.”(Jeremiah 29:4–7)
That command to the exiles feels relevant here. Grace has been sent somewhere he did not choose, by people who used him as a tool. Still, he keeps doing the work in front of him. He studies Tau Ceti, reaches out to Rocky, and eventually risks everything for someone who cannot repay him.
For you were called to this, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. He did not commit sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth; when he was insulted, he did not insult in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten but entrusted himself to the one who judges justly. (1 Peter 2:21–23)
That is where Grace’s bravery turns into duty. He does not get justice from Earth. He does not get to confront the people who used him, demand an explanation, or make them feel the weight of what they did. All he can do is decide what kind of man he will be after the wrong has been done. And, thankfully, he chooses better than revenge.
Playing God
Eve’s last major theme centered on Stratt, and I think it may be the most morally uncomfortable part of Project Hail Mary. Grace asks her whether she believes in God, and her answer is basically that belief “beats the alternative.” That line is funny in the dry, almost evasive way Stratt handles everything, but it also exposes the tension in her character. She talks as if God may be worth acknowledging, but she acts as if the entire fate of mankind has been handed to her personally.
To be fair, Stratt is not a cartoon villain, if a villain at all. The sun is dimming. Crops will fail. Nations will panic. Millions, possibly billions, will die if no one acts. In that kind of crisis, someone has to make decisions that normal people would rather never touch. Soldiers, doctors, judges, and civil leaders all understand some version of that burden.
But the moral problem does not disappear, even though the stakes are enormous. Stratt manipulates Grace, withholds the truth from him, pressures him with the weight of the whole world, and finally sends him on the mission against his will. She may be trying to save humanity, but she begins treating human beings as tools. That is where authority starts to rot. A person can be doing necessary work and still cross a line.
Grace’s question about God also brought Pascal’s Wager to mind. Pascal’s argument is useful as far as it goes: if God is not, the loss is finite; if God is, the stakes are infinite. But Eve was right to push back on that as a foundation for faith. “It beats the alternative” may be a reason to take the question seriously, but it is not repentance, worship, or trust. A person can find the idea of God useful and still live as if control belongs to man.
That raises the harder question. If God is sovereign, do we act, or do we sit still and wait for Him to do everything? Scripture does not leave us sitting on our hands. We ask, seek, knock, pray, work, obey, and love our neighbors.
“Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door[a] will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Who among you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him. Therefore, whatever you want others to do for you, do also the same for them, for this is the Law and the Prophets. (Matthew 7:7–12)
That is the tension Stratt gets partly right and partly wrong. Doing nothing in the face of disaster is not faithfulness. But action without humility can become its own kind of unbelief. We are commanded to ask God for good things, but James reminds us that our asking can be warped by selfish desire and worldly friendship.
What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. (James 4:1–4)
That warning matters because Stratt’s motives are not simple. She really is trying to save lives. But noble ends do not make every method righteous. When people become instruments, authority has stopped serving and started devouring. This is one of the clearest Authority issues in the movie: who gets to decide when another person’s life belongs to the mission?
Isaiah’s word concerning Sennacherib gives us a stronger picture of sovereignty than Stratt’s clenched-fist version of control. Assyria acted, conquered, and boasted, but God was never reacting from the cheap seats. God used Sennacherib without surrendering rule to him, and then judged his arrogance.
Have you not heard? I designed it long ago; I planned it in days gone by. I have now brought it to pass, and you have crushed fortified cities into piles of rubble. Their inhabitants have become powerless, dismayed, and ashamed. They are plants of the field, tender grass, grass on the rooftops, blasted by the east wind. But I know your sitting down, your going out and your coming in, and your raging against me. Because your raging against me and your arrogance have reached my ears, I will put my hook in your nose and my bit in your mouth; I will make you go back the way you came. (Isaiah 37:26–29)
That is good medicine for Christians who are tempted toward despair over politics, culture, or whatever fresh catastrophe the internet is serving today. Human government matters. Leadership matters. Courageous action matters. But our hope cannot rest there. We work because God commands us to work. We pray because He commands us to pray. We seek justice, love our neighbors, and tell the truth because obedience still matters in a collapsing world.
Stratt’s error is not that she acts. In a crisis, refusing to act can be its own failure. The danger is acting as though urgency has promoted us from creature to Creator. Project Hail Mary gives us a useful warning: pressure can reveal courage, but it can also reveal who we think is really in charge.
Bonus Theme: The Implausible Premise
One of Eve’s themes in our outline did not make it into the recording, but it is worth at least a brief mention: the premise of Project Hail Mary asks a lot from the viewer.
That is not automatically a problem. Science fiction is allowed to speculate. If every sci-fi movie had to submit a peer-reviewed paper before the third act, the genre would die of boredom and committee review. But Project Hail Mary pushes much farther from known science than The Martian. The Martian asks us to accept a storm strong enough to create the opening crisis. Project Hail Mary asks us to accept a star-eating microbe spreading across the galaxy, surviving environments that should destroy it, and behaving in ways the movie treats as plausible because enough speculative science has been wrapped around it.
That is where Eve’s notes connect well with a presentation by Colonel Jeff Williams on the conflict between faith and science. The point is not that Christians are anti-science. Quite the opposite. A biblical worldview gives us reason to expect that creation is orderly, intelligible, and worth studying. But when speculative naturalism gets treated as an unquestioned authority, we should notice.
The movie still works as a story. We just do not have to check at least some of our discernment at the theater door.
Conclusion
Project Hail Mary is the kind of science fiction I’m glad still gets made: big, earnest, emotional, and willing to spend real time on friendship, sacrifice, and wonder. I may have an easier time buying into the speculative side of the story than Eve did, but even the implausible pieces gave us something useful to examine.
The movie works best when it moves away from the mechanics of astrophage and into the moral weight of Grace and Rocky’s friendship. Bravery is not treated as swagger. Duty is not erased by injustice. And Stratt’s desperate choices prompt us to ask what happens when human authority starts acting as if necessity can sanctify anything.
For Christians, that makes Project Hail Mary worth more than a casual watch. Enjoy the story, question the assumptions, test the worldview, and pay attention to the places where courage and love still point beyond themselves. And, of course…Don’t just watch.
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