Spoilers for Project Hail Mary (2026)
Before I went to pee halfway through Project Hail Mary, I could say I was invested. but after a two-minute break away from the constant assault of flashy images and dialogue made to maximize audience engagement without allowing a single thought to pass, I felt the most excruciating boredom I had ever experienced in a movie theater. My boyfriend left with the same impression and I thought that guaranteed it was an undisputed flop. I had criticisms floating in my mind, but my assumption was that these were too obvious to be worth writing down anywhere, like criticizing Marvel after even the mainstream had largely abandoned it. I obviously underestimated how far we had moved past Marvel slop because I opened Letterboxd to an average of 4.3 stars -- and a minimum of 4.5 stars all across the popular, recent, and my friends' reviews.
I already wrote about Susan Sontag's "The Imagination of Disaster." And you've already had the "all art is political" take drilled into your head, that it is impossible for art to achieve pure fantasy severed from the material world. Sontag instead argues that it can really be the most politically-charged art that serves fantasy and escapism, despite appearing to engage with difficult issues; specifically, the genre of science-fiction. I didn't know how accurate this essay from the 60s truly was until the 2026 Project Hail Mary realized it in its entirety.
This film appears to hold no reserves against the political implications of its universe in its starting act. Grace's students try to provoke their teacher into discussing the issue of the dying sun, and he pretty explicitly says that he fears the backlash he could receive from parents. and when he finally gives in and provides the movie's exposition, it all seems to concern a "cooling" of the earth by however many degrees. Project Hail Mary is not afraid to evoke its parallel for climate change. But there is one point where we can begin to be suspicious here: the sun is not dying from any fault of humans but from an alien organism. A bacteria-like organism most far from humans, actually.
Sontag's voice first appeared in my head in that early scene where Grace is first quarantined in a lab with an astrophage cell. A group of people of different races watch from a window, dressed to imply that they are all some sorts of political leaders or diplomats. This is what Sontag calls the "UN fantasy." In real life, countries do not get along because of the contradictions inherit to the structures that organize them. Dynamics resulting from historical and current imperialism implicate race and class in ways that make it very difficult (impossible) for international law to work. If only there was a common enemy, a transcendent other that does not result from an issue within society but outside of it, that would allow for everyone to unite in harmony despite their differences: this is the alien in science-fiction.
Not only are the political leaders involved diverse but also the scientists employed to study the astrophages; all different countries are represented at the conference where Grace presents his findings on how these aliens breed. This is the liberal dream of meritocracy. The world would very logically seek out its most talented and motivated scientists in the case of impending disaster, again looking over superficial differences of skin colours, because science is objective and science can be done by anyone. This is not true in real life. Science cannot be done by anyone. Institutional funding is not distributed according to the holy principles of utilitarianism but by the flows of capital, which creates disproportionate opportunities for education and research between first and third-world countries. So much so that, in a phenomena called "brain drain," even if a third-world country does produce talented people, they will likely move where there are better opportunities, allowing the first-world to monopolize on Science without even spending its own resources on education.
Project Hail Mary cannot be taken seriously as a political work as long as it does not confront the real, material differences created between people that both the UN and science fail to resolve in real life. And its cowardice to do so became immediately obvious to me when I first noticed a NASA logo. Who else could this narrative serve, the narrative of overcoming differences for a higher goal, than the scientific organisation popularly known to have employed Nazis after World War Two?
Besides for this UN fantasy, Sontag makes important observations about anti-intellectualism in science-fiction. It may be thought to be the furthest thing from anti-intellectualism because of just how often scientists save the world in this genre. But think about the "mad scientist"; their non-utilitarian ends are a threat to everyone else. In Project Hail Mary, Grace was almost made a mad scientist. He risked and even lost his career in a stubborn attempt to prove that life does not require water. This appeared to me like a sort of Chekhov's gun -- I was sure that Rocky would prove his theory (unless I missed it when I went to pee). But I realized that the film's early blow to Grace's intelligence -- when the astrophages turned out to be made almost entirely of water -- was necessary for its fantasy. Science should not serve the egos of elitist academics, it should prioritize humanity's progression, defeating any suspicions people may have that scientists only want to condescend on their intelligence.
Maybe the most egregious realization of the liberal fantasy in Project Hail Mary is when Grace comes to know the alien Rocky. Liberalism loves its universals; human rights, international law, and the objectivity of science, all of which we saw is supposed to allow us social unity. And contact with Rocky confirmed all of that. Grace's very first common ground for communication with the alien were models of galaxies, and after that, a model of two "figure-eights" representing oxygen. Then, translating their spoken languages was as easy as translating between those on earth, because they both share the same awareness of universal signifieds and they only have to discover their respective signifiers. Any hope that Project Hail Mary would say anything interesting about anything at all was lost from me once Grace translated Rocky's word for "bad" without any difficulty. How would aliens from galaxies split apart by unfathomable distances in outer-space find so quickly what was commonly "bad"?
The most dangerous idea in Project Hail Mary is that what does not share our universals must be an undebatable target of war. We have two aliens in this movie, the astrophages and Rocky's species. The former must be eliminated because it is an other that resists our understanding, that lacks any understandable psychological motive or any senses comparable to ours of sight, sound, etcetera. The latter, on the other hand, deserves our friendship, because we know the sounds it makes as our language, we know the movements of its appendages as our arms and legs, and we know it's ultimate goal to preserve its species as our own, too. Rocky's indulgence of our intellect goes so far as to even confirm we are right about everything, that our science and our values would maintain its rule and its objectivity even in the other end of space. Empathy can be extended to the other as long as it does not disturb our cognitive faculty to understand.
Nothing about Rocky troubles the assumptions that we make about the "other." The only conflict between him and Grace is an interpersonal one, when the alien enters the protagonist's spaceship and encroaches on his personal space. But, I guess, in the mind of a liberal, the worst threat is someone that transgresses the space between individuals that allows them to observe each other from a safe distance, to mediate their relationship with their intellect and reason. If anything, Rocky conveniently provides Grace with enough socialization so to avoid the insanity that would result from his isolation and him having been sent to die -- because god forbid a movie is interesting.
The creators of Project Hail Mary seem to have read Sontag's criticism and took it as the perfect formula. Every single conflict in the movie that could lead to difficult questions about the real world are resolved by the most convenient plot points. Grace does not even have to confront the people that sent him to die in the end, because he is willfully exiled to another planet while humanity rejoices that their sacrifices were perfectly good and utilitarian (but when the Aztecs did it it was evil, right?). Project Hail Mary is facetious. It wants to be taken seriously, like a politically relevant movie that justifies a runtime of 2 hours and a half, but it also doesn't want to be taken seriously, barraging its audience with a script of endless unfunny one-liners so we're just emotionally distanced enough to swallow the images on the screen as mindlessly as possible. I would call it out of touch, but it looks like out-of-touch is what people want right now.