About an hour ago, I watched Project Hail Mary with my family, and wow — that was an incredibly beautiful movie.

I am in no way a movie buff, but I just wanted to write down some of my thoughts immediately after watching.

Project Hail Mary made me feel the exact same way as watching Interstellar for the first time. The sheer weight and uncertainty of being light-years away from home, shouldering a humanity-saving space mission, allowed both of these movies to keep me hooked from start to finish.

In short, Ryan Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, is a science teacher who finds himself awake in a spaceship with all his crewmates deceased and no recollection of the past (reminded me a lot of the 2016 film, Passengers). Grace had been sent on a mission to save Earth from becoming uninhabitably cold due to a sun-eating lifeform called “Astrophage.” Along the way, he comes across a five-legged alien creature that has set out on a mission to save its own planet from the same fate. Much of Project Hail Mary is spent with Grace and his alien companion — whom he names “Rocky” — as they learn how to communicate with one another and plan how to save their homes. Throughout the movie, viewers catch glimpses of the events leading up to this mission as Grace remembers more about his pre-astronaut self.

Don’t be fooled by this intense description of the film, though, because it is filled with so many hilarious moments from Grace’s sarcastic humor that he uses to cope with stress and his conflicting morals. This duality in Project Hail Mary is something that works super well and is done very tastefully. There’s a wonderful balance of high-stakes, gut-wrenching, and comedic scenes that give a lot of satisfaction.

Another thing: I think the scene where Grace envelops himself inside the Petrova Line is one of the most beautiful movie moments I’ve ever seen. So many of the space shots are awe-inspiring, vivid, and absolutely gorgeous.

I also think that the plot is very interesting and done well; Project Hail Mary has a lot of story to get through, and even though it exceeds two and a half hours in runtime, it feels very condensed. Condensed isn’t bad, though! The movie never felt slow, and every scene felt useful to the plot. But I do wish there were a greater focus on specific moments that made me think, “Hmm, I wonder how this came to be?”

The most glaring example of this to me is how Grace magically acquired computer software to translate Rocky’s alien language into real-time, audible human speech. I mean, seriously — this was a stretch. Grace went from learning Rocky’s word for the number ‘1’ in one scene to talking with Rocky conversationally using real-time translation in the next. It’s not just this, though. Grace is a leading scientist in his field. It’s maybe believable that he has the brains to build translation software and achieve this much vocabulary progression in a year’s time. What’s not believable is that the grammar of Rocky’s language and English has a 1:1 mapping. Every time Rocky comes across an English word it doesn’t know, there’s always a single Rocky word it maps to. Every time Rocky speaks, each of its utterances lines up with a single English word, and it just so happens that the time it takes Rocky to say a sentence in its language is the same as the time it takes to deliver the English translation. A little unrelated, but also: where was the computer and speaker setup for Rocky’s sentences to always be translated in studio quality no matter where Rocky was on the ship? I know it’s a bit nitpicky, but I found myself really paying attention to it.

Some other notable plot holes I noticed:

• the lack of explanation for how they extracted the Taumoeba from Adrian.
• how Rocky and its ship were totally fine when Grace went on a 53-day detour to save Rocky after the Taumoeba evolved to escape the Xenonite.
• how the Taumoeba did not evolve to escape the pods used to deliver the samples on the over-10-year trip back to Earth when it only took a couple months for it to evolve to escape the Xenonite.
• how Grace is fed in the biodome.

Regardless of my criticisms, I thought Project Hail Mary achieved what it set out to do and was a phenomenal movie. I think it probably has a good chance to be the winner for Best Picture this year.

I also shared a lot of my criticisms with my mom, who read the book, and she said that the book addresses many of these things. Maybe that means I’ll have to read the book and see for myself!

Overall, I would definitely place this movie in my top 10, and I would give it an amaze amaze amaze.

“You just need someone to be brave for”