Save Hollywood By Making More Movies Like Project Hail Mary

Believe it or not, this one is worth it.

I knew I had to get out of the house and find a way to snap out of the grief of losing my dog. I didn’t want to leave my dog Luna alone since she seemed as sad as I did since our pal Jack died. But I figured, why not take a chance?

I went to a 1 pm show on a Monday in the neighboring town, and I was surprised to see it was packed. It’s Spring break, so there were kids there, but all ages bought tickets purely on word of mouth and buzz. Haven’t seen that since Top Gun: Maverick, which brought people out because they remembered the original.

Project Hail Mary is based on Andy Weir’s bestselling novel but is not a sequel or a remake. People were just aching for something that might lift them up for once instead of dragging them down.

High praise from Critical Drinker:

Could this movie lift me out of my grief? Could any movie? At first, I was skeptical. Project Hail Mary follows the Hero’s Journey - a hero is taken from the ordinary world, sent on an extraordinary adventure, challenged, and then sent home with lessons learned and all the wiser.

Ryan Gosling plays a schoolteacher who stumbles upon a possible solution to a phenomenon unfolding in space that means in 30 years, much of the world’s population would be wiped out, among other horrors. The sun was getting darker because of a virus-like particle storm eating away at stars.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I thought okay, I’ve seen this movie before. I know what is going to happen. Everything kept making me think of my dog, and then I’d start crying. The people sitting next to me in the theater must have thought, come on, get it together, lady. But I couldn’t. I wasn’t even sure I’d stay.

Someone once said that great movies are what you expect to happen, just not in the way you expect them to happen. Even if you could predict the events that unfold, you might be surprised to find it so entertaining and charming that you forgot all about second-guessing the plot.

I grew up on movies like that, movies you could disappear into on a hot summer day and escape the realities of everyday life. So few of them do that now. We’ve been so demoralized by Hollywood going woke that it’s hard to remember what it feels like to enter a movie theater watching a movie that gives back more than it takes.

I got an email from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that announced the five winners of the Nicholl Fellowship, an annual screenwriting contest that sifts through thousands of screenplays to find the best. Here are two of the winners:

Project Hail Mary isn’t an art film or a political film. It’s not about identity or mass migration. It doesn’t try to infuse the film with a message about climate change. There isn’t a buried message about Trump anywhere. It’s just an entertaining, charming, moving adventure story with a heartwarming message about bravery and sacrifice.

Social media and the internet feel like a dystopian hellscape every day. Project Hail Mary is like being transported out of that dark and depressing world and dropped into a dreamscape. It did lift me out of my grief by telling a story so compelling it snapped me out of my funk. I became invested in the characters on screen. Their story had to have a happy ending because mine didn’t.

It’s true that it’s inconvenient to go to the movies. Previews last a full 30 minutes. There is noise all around you, with people eating, talking, and looking at their phones. But it is also a way for all of us to sit under one roof and share a story at a time when we are more isolated than we’ve ever been before.

We might be a deeply divided country, but if everything goes right, if the star isn’t a political loudmouth and the story isn’t agonizingly woke, we can, as the Talking Heads would say, share the same space for a minute or two. That’s what we need the most.

Go see it. It’s well worth the money and the time.