Full of Grace

DR. LUIS DIAS

Three years ago, I wrote a column titled ‘Noman Mariê’. In it, I mentioned how, after taking a family from the U.S. on a walk through Old Goa’s holy shrines, the conversation turned to the ‘Ave Maria’ or ‘Hail Mary.’

The older child, a teenager, was familiar with the ‘Hail Mary’ not as a prayer but as a sports term.

A Hail Mary pass is a very long forward pass in American football, typically made in desperation, with a very small chance of success. Due to the difficulty of a completion with this pass, it refers to the “Hail Mary” prayer for strength and help.

I was in Mumbai the week after and including Easter Sunday, as we were accompanying two Goan cellists (our son Manuel Dias, and Alisha Almeida) who had been selected to play in the annual concert of the SOI (Symphony Orchestra of India) Music Academy featuring challenging works by Saint-Saens, Shostakovich, Karl Jenkins, and others.

As our hotel was located near Eros cinema and I hadn’t been there in several decades, I decided to take in a movie if there was one worth watching.

I chose the matinee show of ‘Project Hail Mary’, the 2026 sci-fi film based on the eponymous 2021 novel by Andy Weir. The title also refers to the ‘Hail Mary’ pass.

‘Astrophages’ (literally ‘eaters of stars’), fictional single-celled organisms impenetrable to electromagnetic radiation have been found to be proliferating on the sun’s surface, triggering concerns that its dimming will cause catastrophic global cooling within 30 years unless evasive action is taken. Other stars in the Earth’s solar neighbourhood have also been infected by astrophages. The nearest uninfected star is Tau Ceti.

The astrophage breed on Venus, feeding on the planet’s carbon-dioxide atmosphere and energy from the sun. They emit propulsive emissions as they migrate between the sun and Venus (the ‘Petrova line’). These emissions are harnessed by the international response team to the crisis to create an efficient but hazardous spacecraft engine.

Project Hail Mary is an international effort to send a crew on this spacecraft to Tau Ceti to investigate it. But it is a suicide mission: the Hail Mary spacecraft can carry only enough astrophage fuel for a one-way trip, but the crew’s research will be sent back to Earth via probes, mini-ships called ‘beetles’.

I won’t spoil it for you by revealing more in case you haven’t seen it yet. Suffice it to say that Ryan Gosling (who also co-produced the film with many others including Weir, author of the novel) dominates almost the entire 156-minute runtime of ‘Project Hail Mary’ as Ryland Grace, a junior high school teacher with a PhD in molecular biology. It is he who identifies the astrophage organisms.

The two science experts selected for the ‘Project Hail Mary’ mission die in an accident shortly before launch. With no time to train a comparably skilled replacement, Grace is forcibly
recruited instead.

NASA provided support through both the input of scientific experts and astronaut Kjell Lindgren visiting Gosling during filming to share insights on human spaceflight.

The special effects and cinematography are quite breath-taking, but the film does seem to drag on with all the twists and turns in this space odyssey adventure.

I didn’t know it while watching the film, but the book is peppered with Beatles references, including probes (‘beetles’) named John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The Beatles song ‘Two of Us’ plays during an emotional moment in the film, mirroring the friendship between Grace and ‘Rocky’, the alien he encounters while approaching Tau Ceti.

The titles of all 13 non-compilation Beatles albums are hidden within the text of the novel, not necessarily spelled out, but phonetically referenced.

The karaoke scene where Eva Stratt (Sandra Huller), the hard-as-nails head of the international task force behind Project Hail Mary briefly drops her mask to sing the 2017 Harry Styles ballad ‘Sign of the Times’ was initially objected to by Weir, but audiences (myself included) have loved it. Its theme, about avoiding emotion and reality during times of grief and hardship fit the film well. Styles explained in a ‘Rolling Stone’ interview: “The song is written from a point of view as if a mother was giving birth to a child and there’s a complication. The mother is told, ‘The child is fine, but you’re not going to make it.’ The mother has five minutes to tell the child, ‘Go forth and conquer’.”

The reason so many feel so deeply moved by the film is precisely this larger message: As we approach our apocalypse, it may be too late for those of us still living, but there should still be hope for future generations. “We gotta get away from here”, not from Earth but from our state quo of inertia despite all the alarm bells of
climate change.

In an interview with his editor Julian Pavia, Weir acknowledged that while casting about for an appropriate book title (other contenders were ‘Astrophage’ and ‘Eater of Stars’) he was initially hesitant about ‘Project Hail Mary’. “Doesn’t it sound like a bad reality show?” he wrote to Pavia. He also worried that people might read it as a religious reference, instead of the football play. It didn’t translate well, so in other languages, for example Spanish, the title reads differently, as ‘Devourer of Stars.’

Was it only me, or did others also feel that the choice of surname ‘Grace’ was dictated by the ‘Hail Mary’ name of the project?

The Catholic press worldwide has generally praised the film. Senior editor and director of communications at The Gospel Coalition Brett McCracken in his review (“‘Project Hail Mary’ Offers the Good, Clean, Fun Moviegoers Have Missed”) wrote: “The film draws from Christian virtues and ideas like sacrifice, selfless love, and—you guessed it—grace.”

He continued: “But Grace is also flawed—a reluctant hero who must be (literally) dragged into the mission. He doesn’t volunteer to lay down his life. But that makes his arc in the movie all the more beautiful. He has room to grow, to overcome fear, to become more selfless as the story progresses. And he does. It’s inspiring.”

“‘Project Hail Mary’ doesn’t preach the gospel. But it makes virtue look good. It makes selflessness, sacrifice, and duty attractive. If the movie is a huge hit—and I expect it will be—perhaps Hollywood will take the hint. We’re not in postmodernism anymore. Goodness, truth, and beauty are attributes we want in art again. Really, they’re what we’ve always wanted.”

I return again to the lyrics of ‘Sign of the Times’: “We never learn, we’ve been here before. Why are we always stuck and running from the bullets, the bullets?”

The other film running at Eros that day was the three and a half hour long violence-packed ‘Dhurandhar’ that Sakhi Thirani of ‘Common Sense Media’ described as “more concerned with romanticising torture, aggression, and machismo without examining the consequences of such violence.”

We have enough hatred, violence, war-mongering and bloodshed in the real world without it having to spill into cinemas as well. I vote for Love, Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and yes, Grace. On and off screen.