Project Hail Mary is a stunning masterpiece of visual storytelling based on the equally stunning book by Andy Weir. Starring Ryan Gosling as the sarcastic, reluctant hero Ryland Grace, the film tells the story of a desperate, last-ditch attempt to save planet Earth from a sun-eating organism that threatens to extinguish all light and life. Scientists have discovered that the organism is not just consuming the Sun, but all stars—except one. Earth prepares a hail Mary mission to the star to try to discern why and whether or not a solution can be brought back to Earth.
When Grace arrives at his destination and awakens from stasis, he’s lost, alone, and disoriented. His crewmates are dead. He’s suffering from amnesia. He doesn’t believe there is any chance of returning to earth. But, perhaps worse, he discovers that he isn’t alone after all. An alien vessel from another planet has come for exactly the same reason. Their sun is dying and learning what makes this star special is their only hope of survival. Two beings, lightyears from home, find one another and forge an unlikely bond with the hope of shared survival.
This relationship between Grace and Rocky—Grace’s name for the rock-like, spideresque alien being—is the core of Project Hail Mary. All of the scientific intrigue, apocalyptic drama, and space adventuring is wrapped around these two beings and the story of their friendship. And in this, Project Hail Mary offers viewers a powerful message about love, acceptance, and inclusion of the Other.
Science fiction doesn’t always portray aliens in the most positive of lights. The majority posit them as hostile invaders—either mindless monsters like the Xenomorph in the Alien franchise or advanced conquerors like in Independence Day or War of the Worlds. Aliens are meant to be feared and will probably kill you and destroy your civilization. Sure, you have films that are the exception such as E.T. or My Favorite Martian—or even Superman—but these exceptions prove the rule while showing us something interesting to note.
Humanoid aliens are way more likely to be friendly. Star Trek’s Spock is maybe the quintessential example of this. His pointed ears and arched eyebrows clearly identify him visually as something Other, but his Vulcan race is portrayed as almost an idealized humanity driven by logic, nonviolence, and mutuality. E.T. may be a gray, wrinkly mass, but he has a clear face, massive forward-facing eyes, a bipedal stance, and human-like expressions and emotions. Superman is so human that all he needs is glasses to pass as journalist Clark Kent.
Meanwhile, alien villains are completely Other. John Carpenter’s The Thing defies description, having no true shape as its own. The Xenomorph of Alien is an insectoid creature with a long tail and a jaw that unhinges to reveal another jaw. In Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds adaptation, his aliens are spindly-limbed creatures with unblinking eyes and massive triangular-shaped heads. The visual filmmaking shorthand for determining whether an alien is a cosmic neighbor or an existential threat is usually how human their bodies are.
That’s why it is surprising that, in Project Hail Mary, Rocky is completely unhuman. He’s profoundly alien to the point of looking like something humans would not consider to be alive. He has no facial features, no eyes, no sense of sight. He communicates in musical tones and chords rather than words. He can’t even survive on Grace’s ship without being encased in a protective bubble. Rocky experiences reality much differently than Grace. It would have been easy to write Rocky as a monster, a threat, or a rival species competing for survival.
The viewer’s journey to perceiving Rocky as a friend comes slowly, accelerating only once Grace is able to decode Rocky’s language and build a translator. Once Rocky has a human voice, we understand him much better—not just his words but his being. Belonging and friendship is established when Grace and Rocky do the hard work of crossing the barriers of language, culture, embodiment, and fear in order to work together for their salvation.
Rocky is the embodiment of radical difference, a clear example of the alien Other. And the same is true of Grace through the lens of Rocky. Rocky never becomes less alien, other than in our ability to understand him. They remain profoundly different beings with different needs, different instincts, and different ways of experiencing reality. The two discover that mutual understanding and belonging do not require sameness. They require curiosity, humility, and the willingness to recognize personhood in someone who initially appears incomprehensible.
Rocky and Grace’s relationship is an embodied model for the type of relationships we need right now. We live in a cultural and political climate that is increasingly centered on fear of the Other. Immigrants are feared as invaders. Religious minorities are treated as threats to traditional values. LGBTQ folks are considered a danger to the social order. Our algorithms and institutions reward our suspicion, justify our fears, and amplify our hatred.
Increasingly, our faith—so vibrant and diverse—is divided into smaller and smaller sections as Christians retreat into sameness, surrounding ourselves only with people who look like us, think like us, worship like us, and make us feel comfortable and powerful. Difference becomes something to fight against, rather than embrace. We divide racially, politically, socially, and denominationally. We’ve become known for who we exclude rather than who we include. It becomes more important who we condemn to hell than who we redeem into heaven.
In Acts 2, Luke is telling the story of the early church. After the Holy Spirit descends at Pentecost, Luke writes “All the believers were together and had everything in common” (Acts 2:44). There is a kinship connection amongst all these gathered believers comprised of “God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven” (Acts 2:5). They have different languages, backgrounds, and cultures, but they join together in Christ.
From here the circle of kinship only continues to widen. Jesus had prophesied that the disciples would be his witnesses in Jerusalem to Judea to Samaria to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). By Acts 6, the early church is already dealing learning how to include those once considered outside the covenant community as the disciples solve a dispute where Greek Jews were being othered and treated unfairly by anointing leaders of the Greek Jews to positions of leadership.
Then, in Acts 8, Philip preaches in Samaria to bring Samaritans into God’s family. Along the way, he meets an Ethiopian eunuch—a gender-nonconforming figure who would have been disallowed from the Temple and brings them into God’s family. In Acts 10, Peter is led by God to preach the Gospel to Cornelius the centurion and introduce Gentiles into God’s family. It’s an ever-widening, continually-expanding Gospel of radical love and inclusivity.
This does create problems. There are disagreements and difficulties. Most of Paul’s epistles are addressing cultural and relational issues stemming from the diverse nature of the early church. But that is the way the church advanced and grew, no longer defined by their differences—no longer Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female, but all one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:28)—but defined by their shared love and commitment toward each other despite those differences.
The Gospel advances when we love each other despite our differences and when we love each other because of our differences, when we view the alien Other not as something to be feared but as someone to be loved. Grace and Rocky’s relationship saved their respective worlds. They could not have accomplished that without the other, and they could not have accomplished it had the Other been the same.
The same is true in our faith communities and in the world at large. Our differences are our strength. Finding mutuality and community within our differences is what will sustain us, grow us, and keep us alive. The challenge that Project Hail Mary poses to Christians is whether we can recognize the image of God in people whose lives, experiences, cultures, and identities feel utterly unlike our own—and whether we can admit that our survival may depend on them.
