I have finally seen the feel-good space alien buddy movie of the year, Project Hail Mary. A being from a race with the same skin condition as the FF’s Thing partners with a reluctant [American] astronaut to come up with a cure for a sun-killing cosmic virus.
I don’t have a crochet hacky sack of the Earth like Ryan/Ryland has, but I have one with a smiley face. I keep it seated on a plaster cast of my smiling upper teeth as they were 45 years ago. I call it “Smiley Smile”.
Towards the end of the slightly too long movie, the nod to John, Paul, George and Ringo was a nice touch. It will introduce the Beatles to youngsters in the audience.
When I recognized one of the Earthbound characters in Project Hail Mary, I had to stifle an impulse to blurt out, “Hey, it’s Lily, the AT&T girl!” Everybody loves Lily.
I see an obvious comparison to Interstellar. A voyage into deep space is taken in the hope of preventing total annihilation of the human race. The threat is external, like an asteroid would be, and not one of our own making.
Project Hail Mary borrows a bit from Breaking Bad, with a brilliant scientist whose career is derailed, so he finds refuge as a public school science teacher. Then, once he’s been pulled back out of that setting, he finds himself capable of remarkable achievements.
As popular as this movie is, I don’t know what the point of it is, other than to be entertaining. Maybe I’ll have a different view after reading the book, which is on my Kindle e-reader.


