So I saw Project Hail Mary. It’s a good movie—not perfect, but good, and worth your time. It’s directed by Lord and Miller (of LEGO Movie and Spider-Verse fame) from a novel by Andy Weir (the mind that brought us The Martian) about a science teacher (played by Ryan Gosling) who is sent on an interstellar space mission in order to hopefully find a solution to the problem that is currently destroying the Sun. I’m going to reflect on it for a moment, so spoilers ahead.
The movie has a few things on its mind, but I think chief among those is the concept of bravery. One of the more affecting scenes of the movie involves Gosling’s alien friend, Rocky, potentially sacrificing himself in order to save his companion. The heroic deed involves Rocky breaking out of the enclosure they had constructed to keep him safe from space radiation, and we watch as his (rock) skin sizzles and burns as he drags Gosling’s character to safety. It is bravery in the face of physical adversity—not just risk or the threat of danger, but real and actualized pain. (Rocky is, after all, named after Rocky Balboa—the cinematic emblem of enduring punishment without surrender.)
More importantly, the main character Ryan Gosling—or in the movie, Dr. Ryland Grace—exemplifies a dramatic conversion. We learn that Grace was never meant to be the hero of the mission at all. After the original crew dies in an accident shortly before launch, he is asked to take their place on what is effectively a one-way suicide mission. He refuses, unable to bear the weight of that task. And so he is drugged, placed aboard against his will, and sent into space with no memory of the decision. In the present timeline, we are shown this as Grace remembers it—that he is a coward. Yet, we begin to see change in our protagonist. Perhaps it is because his life is already forfeit, with no hope of getting home; perhaps it is because he eventually finds himself in a situation with few other options; but in a key moment, Grace risks his own life outside the spacecraft in order to recover a crucial object for saving Earth. Even more impressive, later in the movie, when Grace and Rocky have found out how to save their respective planets as well as a way for both of them to travel home on their own ships, Grace realizes that Rocky’s ship is in danger (and there is no way for Rocky to know this). Grace faces a genuine choice: stay the course and return to Earth, or use his fuel to intercept and save Rocky. Without coercion, without incentive, he again surrenders his own life in order to save his friend.
I also recently watched the Oscar-winning short film Two People Exchanging Saliva. Filmed in black and white, the movie is set in a dystopian society in which kissing is punishable by death. Social life has reorganized itself around this prohibition, in which people deliberately avoid brushing their teeth and even the suspicion of intimacy is enough to provoke state intervention. Additionally, all financial transactions are completed by receiving slaps, and a sign of wealth is the bruise on the side of your face. (Don’t think too hard about the economics of this world—it’s more impressionistic than anything.) The story follows Malaise, a young saleswoman at a luxury department store, and Angine, a wealthy customer who becomes increasingly drawn to her. Over the course of several days, the two develop a mutual attraction as Angine repeatedly returns to the store to be slapped by Malaise.
The short is clearly meant to be about forbidden love and the necessity of feeling something in a world that often anesthetizes. But at a dramatic level, I believe it too is centrally about bravery. The courage required of either character is to act on their affection even though they know the capital consequences and, inversely, they do not know how the other feels. That is in fact the greater risk—the risk that leaves Angine in a dark apartment hallway, unable to confront Malaise at her door, and the risk that ultimately leads to the tragic ending of one of their deaths despite them never confessing love to each other.
In this way, what the short film does is recognize that bravery is not the sole province of battlefields or burning spacecraft and rather dramatizes the more common theater of courage, which is the internal and the interpersonal. To Project Hail Mary’s credit, it too gestures at this reality. In a bittersweet scene on Earth, the night before the launch, the usually-stoic program director chooses to step in front of everyone and sing karaoke as the crew spiritually prepares for their suicide mission. Neither movie supposes (and nor do I) that the difference between saving a friend in the vacuum of space and performing in front of a group is negligible (that would be preposterous), but what they both recognize is that courage is just as relevant in our ordinary lives with each other.
More specifically, what Two People Exchanging Saliva recognizes is the unique kind of bravery required for confessing love—or, more accurately, it recognizes the virtue required for the uniquely daunting work of telling someone, “I love you.” Those words, normally held close to our chest, when extended outward, not only reveal something shockingly intimate, a deep alcove of our soul and desires, but they are only ever extended along with the hope that those same words will be returned. And if they are not, we are defeated. More than made a fool, we are in fact struck—told we are not worthy of the same depth of affection we just moments ago were feeling for the one in front of us. And so to avoid such a fate, we proceed with caution, doing our best to determine what the answer will be before we even ask. But such is the tragedy! For we can never know what the answer will be. The answer is locked inside of their brain, ever out of reach until we put our own soul on the table.
Much the same can be said regarding the admittedly milder words, “Would you wanna go out sometime?”† Though it does not scrape the same depths, such a question does pull back the curtain on our heart, a curtain that cannot be closed until the thing exposed is either affirmed or dashed. We wonder why the current generation has such a hard time pursuing romance, but rather, the question should be how a miracle occurred that boys have chased girls and vice versa for as long as they have.
I suppose what this leaves us with is that bravery requires something more than what we can muster on our own. What it requires is faith. It requires not only the faith that things will work out; it requires faith that you can operate by something other than your own strength. I suspect both films are also aware of this: their main characters are named Grace and Angine after all. And even the title, Project Hail Mary, is meant to direct our thoughts to the Hail Mary prayer, both the petition spoken during a last-ditch effort (particularly relevant for the movie) and the prayer of those in need of divine intervention to be a little better than they are, to be brave in the most dire circumstances—“pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”
† For yet another movie, one that deftly depicts the bravery involved in such a question, see the opening of The Drama.
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