I Hated Black And White Movies Movie reviews from a film ignoramus turned fanatic.
Review June 22, 2026

Is not enough: Project Hail Mary

2026

My local theater has been under renovation for the past two years, and I don’t watch 200 movies per year anymore as a normal person should. However, recently I watched a film, then immediately went to the theater to watch it the way it should be done. I felt I owed it that. The film is, surprisingly, Project Hail Mary.

I am a tough crowd, but when the film credits rolled, I texted my friend and told her that she HAS TO watch it. It’s amazing that I’ve watched it three times so far, and even though human psychology should allow the novelty to wear off, I still cried at the very same moments every time. Somehow I’m grateful I discovered it only a couple of weeks ago; otherwise, I’d go bankrupt rewatching it. Why? It’s like a mug of hot cocoa with whipped cream, a snuggly blanket, and a great book, while it’s snowing outside. It hugs you, and, in the words of Ryland Grace, you just feel when it’s time to let go. I’d probably stick to it for a long time.

Grace holds both the knowledge and the astrophage, yet he is the one sealed behind glass while the government watches from the dark.

I love the phenomenon of pareidolia, or seeing faces everywhere. I have a collection of plushies, and I turn them over all the time so “they can all see in front of them without something in the way”. But I never expected I’d fall for a faceless pile of rocks. Enter Rocky, brilliantly maneuvered by James Ortiz and a team of puppeteers – the Rocketeers.

Before we meet Rocky, we need to tell how we met him. Project Hail Mary tells the story of the astrophage, a new life form dimming the Sun. Not only the Sun, but nearby stars as well. All but one: Tau Ceti. Earth decides to make a desperate move and send astronauts on a suicide mission, just to see what’s out there, why that star isn’t affected. There are, in the words of Stratt – the mission lead – millions of ways this could go wrong, but they still had to try.

This is the very reason for the name. For us non-native speakers (and American football ignoramuses), a Hail Mary is a long, desperate pass thrown at the end of a game in the hope of a miracle. Well, it’s the World Cup in soccer currently, so it’s quite fitting. And I loved that the film hit theaters right as Artemis II was about to fly, the first crewed Moon mission since 1972. The film opened on March 20, and the rocket went up on April 1. A nerdy little piece of timing, and we were here for it.

Grace stands on the ship’s nose, turned away from us, framed like Friedrich’s Wanderer before the infinite, but the planet nicknamed Adrian fills the sky instead, in the most beautiful shot of the film.
The Petrova line in false color: astrophage radiates in the infrared, invisible to Grace, so the red is the film translating an unseeable wavelength into one we can read.

In an ethically dubious plot, a molecular biologist ends up as the only surviving member of the ship. He arrives at Tau Ceti and finds another life form. That alien is a huge spider-like creature made of rocks, with no face, who sees through echolocation. They learn how to communicate, starting, of course, with numbers. When we tried to send a message to aliens in the Pioneer and Voyager records, we used the same universal language: math and the world around us. And we transmitted the Arecibo message using prime numbers, the atomic numbers of the elements in DNA, the double helix itself, a little stick figure of a human with our average height and our headcount, and a diagram of the very dish that sent it. We all share the same physical laws, so it was reasonable to suppose that the alien life form shares at least some concepts. Otherwise they wouldn’t be in space.

From the observation window to the airlock to the tunnels of the Hail Mary, the film keeps sealing its characters inside round apertures or the center of the frame.

I like that an alien finally isn’t humanoid. In my research, I deal with cognitive science and astrobiology, and I think about what kinds of minds could exist. In the world of AI, questions of AI consciousness are ubiquitous, but I got bored with that. We still have no idea how plants have memory, how fungi and slime mold remember and solve extremely difficult computational problems, what lies thousands of kilometers under the sea – and those are organisms we are surrounded by. It seems highly unlikely that we’d be that lucky to be able to communicate really fast, unless the other side were way more intelligent than us. This is, of course, exactly what happened to Grace. When Rocky signals to him the second time, the message comes in painfully slow, and Grace wonders aloud why it’s crawling compared to the last one he didn’t catch. They think I’m dumb, he realizes. Finally, the white saviors are the ones being saved. We’re the stupid ones.

The frame quietly puts the unknowable thing in crisp focus and the human in the blur, betting we’ll bridge it anyway.

Rocky is an Eridian. Eridians live in darkness and use echolocation to see. This reminds me of Nagel’s famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” His point is that a bat’s world, built out of echolocation, is so foreign to ours that no amount of physics or biology lets us climb inside it. You can know everything there is to know about the bat and still have no idea what being one feels like (except for being John Malkovich). Some minds simply stay shut to us.

The film’s most audacious formal experiment is its attempt to depict Rocky’s world. The absence of color reflects the fact that color is perceived through vision, which Rocky lacks, and forms emerge from pure blackness, as if shaped by sound.

Rocky is exactly that problem walking around on five legs, and the small miracle of the film is that he opens at all. When he communicates, he almost sings in various tones. It may seem weird, but we humans have developed whistling languages as well. On La Gomera in the Canary Islands, people still speak Silbo, a whistled Spanish that carries across ravines where a shout would die halfway. Shepherds in the Turkish village of Kuşköy do the same across their valleys. We already talk in tones over distances we cannot shout across, but Rocky just does it in a register we had to teach a machine to hear.

Rocky: Words of encouragement.

Ryland Grace: You can’t just say “words of encouragement!”

Rocky: Words of GREAT encouragement!

Ryland Grace: [reading from computer] Fist my bump? No. It’s fist bump.

Rocky: [on computer] Is same.

Ryland Grace: It’s not the same.

Fist (my) bump scenes or alien and human touching are common in the film, in the manner of The Creation of Adam. Even the creation of the tunnel between two ships follows the same pattern.

There’s a lovely gag where Grace builds his translation device and auditions computer voices for Rocky. One of them is Meryl Streep, voicing herself. Grace gushes that she can do absolutely anything, then keeps scrolling right past her. In the end, Rocky gets the voice of James Ortiz, the puppeteer himself, who sounds, in his own words, like a very anxious man in glasses. The most Oscar-nominated actress alive, passed over for an anxious dude. And it’s the right call.

Rocky: Rocky watch whole crew die. Could not fix. Grace say Grace will die. Rocky fix.

I won’t be talking about the plot or its twists, but this is basically an ’80s buddy comedy. Like Lethal Weapon, or any buddy-cop comedy in which two people highly unlikely to work together actually work together. Rocky can see through walls, but doesn’t understand radiation. Grace doesn’t live for hundreds of years, but understands relativity (not quantum mechanics – no one understands that).

A buddy-cop two-shot where the partners can never share the same air – a classical case of an unlikely friendship.

Rocky misses his mate, cleverly nicknamed Adrian. Grace asks how long they’ve been together. 186.3 years, Rocky says. That’s a long time, Grace offers. Not enough, Rocky answers. Everyone who has ever loved someone deeply knows how painfully correct this is, and how every waking moment doesn’t seem enough. It’s never enough.

Ryland Grace: You have a mate. How long you been together?

Rocky: 186.3 years.

Ryland Grace: It’s like, the honeymoon phase.

Rocky: No understand.

Ryland Grace: That’s a joke, Rock, it’s a long time.

You’ve been together a long time.

Rocky: Is not enough.

Our heroes need to work together against all odds. I read the book after watching the movie, and – I’m not afraid to say it – I prefer the film. I work as an engineer and a scientist; I get the science, but I missed the raw emotion the film gave me that the book didn’t. The book did a lot of things well, explaining everything, but at the cost of losing momentum at times. I still think it’s a great book, and I’d read it again. I loved the final line – that’s pure perfection. Like in Some Like It Hot, I won’t spoil it, to relieve you of the happiness of the moment.

I typed most of this review on my couch, ready to watch it again. Most people like the karaoke scene, in which Stratt, played by Sandra Hüller, sings Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times. Its lyrics are so fitting at that moment, a goodbye sung straight into a disaster, telling the people you love to survive and keep moving while the sky comes down. Turns out, Ryan Gosling heard the actress singing to herself and asked her to do it in the movie. She agreed on one condition: that Harry Styles song or nothing. And there it was. People are ready for a suicide mission, and other people are ready for a quarter of the world’s population to die, but they have an evening in which they can sing and pretend the outside isn’t a battlefield. That scene reminded me of the ending of Paths of Glory, where exhausted French soldiers jeer at a captured German girl forced to sing for them, then fall silent and hum along through their tears, just before they are marched back to the trenches to die. Colonel Dax watches from the doorway and lets them have a few more minutes. Death can wait a bit.

The whole power balance of the scene in two black-and-white silhouettes: one upright and certain, one cornered and asking.

I applaud the directors and producers for going with puppets instead of CGI. I miss the old animation and puppetry, true crafts. It’s amazing that James Ortiz got his five minutes of fame. I hope kids can, instead of saying I want to do AI, maybe say I want to do puppets. Few of them will ever get the chance. Still, a blockbuster this size betting on hands and rods over a render farm is exactly the kind of thing that puts the idea in a kid’s head in the first place.

The goodbye staged as a coronation.

The film should be viewed in IMAX. The view of Adrian, the planet ad hoc named after Rocky’s mate, is breathtaking, and reminded me of the olden days of handmade animated backgrounds. The soundtrack has the Beatles so fittingly. Carl Sagan wanted Here Comes the Sun on the Voyager Golden Record, and the Beatles were all for it, but EMI, the label that held the rights, refused over copyright. They never made it to space. At least they got this.

There’s a small thing Rocky and Grace do for each other. Eridians can’t sleep without someone keeping watch, so one of them says – you sleep, I watch. MGM understood exactly what they had on their hands, so they ran a TikTok live of Rocky sleeping and asked people to watch over him, then posted a two-hour video of him just lying there to Daniel Pemberton’s score. Thousands of strangers sat and kept watch over a sleeping puppet. Aren’t humans amazing?

The faceted glass splits the frame into cells even as they sit at their closest, closeness and separation in the same composition.

I also loved the thumbs-down gag. Rocky’s hand has three claws, and when he tries to copy a thumbs-up, one of them ends up pointing down while the rest curl, so his approval always comes out as a thumbs-down. James Gunn posted a lone thumbs-down emoji and briefly convinced people he was trashing the new Supergirl trailer, when it was the highest praise he could give. If old Ebert were still around, I’m pretty sure he’d give this one four thumbs down.

Thumbs up! The puppet makes the joke honest, when a real object meets a real mechanical limit.

In the book, we find out that Rocky was alone in space for 46 years.

Forty-six years, and not once did anyone watch him sleep.

You sleep, Rocky. We’ve got it from here.

Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!

References

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