Project Hail Mary

The actual timeline of story events. Grace slowly remembering who and what and why he was up there in space to begin with. It was a slow crawl, but not so slow that you forgot his last memory recall after a coma sleep.

They did a fine job making sure those memories were coalescent to what was happening in real time, to help both the character and the audience understand what the fuck was happening, and to give a good detailed context.

It just did a five tones reference. Close Encounters, 1977, John Williams, who went through hundreds of combinations before he settled on those five notes. Putting them in a first contact scene in 2026 is a handshake between the two films and nobody stops to explain it.

The people who had to play with the little toys on the other side of the window in that initial first contact had to have had such a good time.

The initial interactions with the rock creature are so great and I love it to bits. It is funny, and they managed to fully convey the thing's frustration with an incredibly smart but still incredibly stupid human. Trying to find a voice to go with his translations has been really funny too.

And here is why that lands when a hundred CG aliens do not. Rocky is a build. Neal Scanlan's creature shop made him, James Ortiz led a team of five puppeteers who were on set for every scene Rocky is in, and Ortiz does the voice as well. Gosling is acting opposite an object that is physically in the room, operated by people who are also in the room. Miller has said the finished shots end up about half puppetry and half animation, but the performance is built in camera first and cleaned up after, not invented afterward.

The inside of the Hail Mary is a practical set at Shepperton. They avoided chroma keying. That is the difference between an actor reacting and an actor pretending, and it is all over his face.

The sound that Rocky makes when he thinks Grace is dying is fucking breaking my heart. And he basically kills himself to save Grace. This is so goddamn sad. And then Rocky gets to live. I am so happy for that.

I also really enjoy the humor of them putting Rocky in a hamster ball to get around the spaceship. Him getting his own bubble to go see Rocky's ship is really neat too.

The visuals on the inside of that ship are really really similar to the time travel portion of the wormhole in Interstellar, the one with all the bookshelves. The tesseract.

Holy shit, they forced him to go. He did not want to at all. They forced him into an induced coma and put his ass on the ship.

The parting of the ships, moving away from each other in opposite directions, was really poignant as well. And then he goes to save Rocky instead of going home, because of the xenonite ship. So all the stuff fixes the earth and blah blah, that is cool, yeah, sure. Have to have the happy ending.

I found it really sweet and funny that he named the main one Rocky and then Rocky's mate Adrian, and made references to the Rocky movies here and there throughout. The Rocky movie does not fit anything at all of what was happening in Hail Mary, but it is a nice salute.

And the timing of it. I said two hours before watching this, while watching Ali, that I do not give a shit about boxing or boxers or movies about them, and then this movie basically makes twenty references to one.

What I want next. I really hope they do a follow up movie about what happens to Grace and Rocky, because it looks like they created a bubble on Erid so he could survive and live there. The end has him teaching a class of little Eridians, and I think that would be such a fantastic movie.