‘Project Hail Mary’ is actually about male loneliness
The Ryan Gosling movie about a distant astronaut and a stony alien is an allegory for guys especially
GUYS ARE SO LONELY that it’s easier for them to imagine making friends with space aliens than it is to tell stories about forging deeply emotional bonds with other guys.
In Project Hail Mary Ryan Gosling and a crusty, faceless otherworldly creature he nicknames “Rocky” encounter each other in a distant solar system and combine their science knowledge to stop a star-devouring parasite from ending life in the known universe. It is science fiction, it’s a buddy comedy, and it’s also a kind of love story, arriving in theaters amid a bombardment of comparisons to another beloved movie about a human who makes an alien friend: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Miller and Phil Lord’s big-screen movie adaptation of the 2021 novel by Andy Weir, the author best known for The Martian – about a stranded astronaut who has no one, although many long-distance friends are working tirelessly to reach him. (That’s sort of like having “a girlfriend, but she lives in Canada” back when you’re in middle school.) But for all the parallels between Project Hail Mary and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, there is one big difference that makes the new movie especially relevant.
E.T. was about a lonely child who bonds with an unlikely friend, another outcast who feels abandoned and overlooked – rightfully so, since his own kind left him behind like the intergalactic version of Kevin McCallister. Spielberg’s movie was about how childhood can be magical, but also isolating. Project Hail Mary explores a different idea, one that is frequently mentioned in the zeitgeist and “the discourse,” although solutions to the problem remain elusive: How do you make friends as an adult?
It’s something everybody faces as they get older, and Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi story that uses its galaxy-saving premise as an allegory for this sad aspect of modern life. Work and family obligations become all-consuming, and opportunities to cut loose and just hang out dwindle down to nothing. We go it alone more, and rely on each other less. On the playground, friendships once sprung up like weeds, but as the decades pass you have to work harder to cultivate them.
Studies show the issue is especially acute among men. Maybe guys have a harder time expressing themselves, having been culturally conditioned to hold our thoughts and feelings inside. Or maybe we’re more naturally combative and reluctant to lean on others. We believe in that old maxim, “A friend in need is a friend indeed,” and we’re there for that 100 percent – as long as we’re not the one “in need.”
We cling tightly to old friendships, but sometimes weeks pass without contact, then months. Suddenly, it’s years. We often pick up easily where we left off, “like no time has gone by,” but the longer that pattern continues the less you naturally have in common. When all that two people share is the past, and don’t actually have a present together, the friendship becomes more like a relic than something that is living, breathing, and growing.
Gosling’s character, Dr. Ryland Grace, is a molecular biologist turned middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut. Some unusual cosmic force is consuming the energy of our sun, and the long-shot effort that gives the story its title is a deep-space mission to another far-off sun that seems to be regulating this cycle without being depleted. When he awakes from his cryo-sleep, Grace finds another starship already waiting at his destination, a spiky, shapeshifting vessel from a vastly different world that is also trying to identify and solve the same problem.
Aboard this ship is “Rocky,” an alien character who looks like a Thanksgiving turkey carved out of sandstone. It has no eyes or mouth (it eats through its … nevermind.) It wobbles around on five limbs, and has three-toed pinchers that look about as effective at grabbing things as a loosely-rigged arcade claw game that never pays off. Still, Rocky gets around. He’s just got zero in common with Grace, except a shared mission.
Consider this excerpt from Weir’s book, which puts into words what Gosling and Rocky puppeteer James Ortiz convey onscreen: “Speaking of loneliness, my thoughts turn back to Rocky. My only friend now. Seriously. He’s my only friend,” Grace says. “I didn’t have much of a social life back when things were normal. Sometimes I’d grab dinner with other faculty and staff at the school. I’d have the occasional Saturday-night beer with old college friends. But thanks to time dilation, when I get home all those folks will be a generation older than me.”
Grace was faraway from friendship even when it was right in front of him. A lot of guys will be able to relate.
That’s what makes Project Hail Mary so magical – and why grown men are going to cry while watching it (even if they deny it later.) The two central characters in this story are both compelled by duty, thinking of the folks and, um, other rocks, back home. That quest gives them purpose, and from that purpose a strange new friendship emerges.
This matches what the late journalist Jeffrey Zaslow expressed in his 2010 article in The Wall Street Journal that was headlined, “Friendship for Guys (No Tears!).” Zaslow had previously chronicled the four-decade-long relationship of a group of Iowa women in his 2009 book The Girls From Ames, but when he turned his eye toward male friendships he found that men forged their bonds not through expression but through action. One of the subjects in the story says: “Our conversations deal with the doing of things rather than the feeling of things.”
That’s exactly what Grace and Rocky discover. For those hoping to enrich their lives with more friends in adulthood, Project Hail Mary is a good reminder that you actually can’t go out and make new friends. You go out and do things – and the friends reveal themselves as you go.
For this very reason, Weir’s book has been beloved ever since it hit bookstores seven years ago because it’s about more than just space travel, aliens, and science-based problem-solving. What’s fun about these two is just how little they have in common, at least on the surface. Project Hail Mary shows what happens when you look past that.
The first step in their relationship is literally figuring out how to comprehend each other. Grace figures out a way to establish a shared language, starting with the one they already both know: math. Once they can each track each other’s numbers, they move on to letters and sounds, building on what they discover about each other until they form a rudimentary communication.
Kids do it this way. Adults just forget. “You like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles …? I like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” It’s why Star Wars, Marvel, Batman, Superman, football, basketball, baseball, and so on become the foundation of so many early friendships. Liking the same thing is the first step toward liking each other. Add up all those likes and you eventually arrive at, “I Love You, Man.”
When you grow up, you just get less opportunity to share these things. For men especially, lone wolf tendencies take over. Maybe it’s just human nature. Growing up is about accepting responsibility, and that often means putting aside your own needs for the sake of others. This is how a good guy becomes The Lonely Guy, immortalized by Steve Martin in the 1984 comedy about a man so introverted he fills his apartment with life-sized celebrity cut-outs for company.
Most people don’t get to quite so forlorn, but that 42-year-old comedy shows this isn’t just a phenomenon of the modern day. Gosling’s character feels this, although he is understandably constrained by an interstellar mission that takes him millions of miles from other humans. He didn’t start out alone; his fellow astronauts die in transit. Rocky has the same problem. It – or he, as we come to know him – lost the rest of his crew too.
I see these losses as a metaphor for all the long-ago friendships we have that similarly slipped away, without us realizing it was even happening. After achieving a particular “Eureka!” moment together, Rocky asks Grace (through the stilted language module they use): “This is happy! Your face opening is in sad mode. Why, question?”
Grace is happy. They have done something hard. They have done what they needed to do. But he knows this means that now they are getting closer to venturing far away from each other again.
“I’m going to miss you,” Grace says in Weir’s book, taking a slug of vodka. “You’re my friend. Heck, you’re my best friend. And pretty soon we’re going to say goodbye forever.”
There is something bittersweet but true in that. Elliott had to say goodbye to E.T., too. Their whole time together in Spielberg’s movie was spent trying to send the little alien home. The same is true of Lord and Miller’s film. These two friends are working tirelessly to solve a problem and get back. There is something tragic in their success. Something meaningful too. These two are putting the needs of others ahead of themselves. That’s what gradually and naturally dims a friendship, just like a galactic parasite wearing down a sun.
I can only think of my grandfather, who painted houses and hung wallpaper for a living. It was often lonely work, done quietly and by himself. Sometimes he had a helper, like me, but often not. The thing this solitary man looked forward to each year was his army reunion, when the men of the 135th Anti-Aircraft Battalion gathered with their wives to raucously relive old memories and make new ones. They had done something together. And the friendships made in those trenches, endlessly loading the big howitzer, and relentlessly surging forward across Europe when they were young men remained unbreakable until they were very old and none were left.
We don’t all get to do big, brave things, like win a war, or stop a galactic parasite. But we can do something if we try, no matter how serious or trivial. A bowling team, a movie club, model trains. Whatever. Project Hail Mary urges you to put yourself out of your comfort zone. Take a chance.
You might not expect to find someone else out there. They won’t be expecting it either.
This article originally appeared in Esquire US.
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