**The brushstrokes on the portrait are faint, barely noticeable in the grand scheme of things, but together they form a gorgeous painting of the night sky, with stars dotting the canvas. I take it in for a long while and make my way through the museum to stare at each piece. I stare at each painting and each marble statue as I loop my way around. Once I finish inside, I walk around the grounds, gazing at the flowers and lush gardens until the sky starts to darken and I can stare up at the sky and see the stars for myself back home.**

Okay, so I just watched Project Hail Mary this month. I mainly had interest because it was adapted from a book, so even though I haven’t read the book, it was on my radar, especially when I heard that it was good. Like, I haven’t heard a single bad thing about it, which is kind of crazy. Anyway, so I finally sat down to watch it and I have a TON of thoughts. Please keep in mind there will be SPOILERS, so if you haven’t watched it, you have been warned.

Project Hail Mary follows our main character Ryland Grace who wakes up in space with no memory of how he got there. We find out that something is affecting the sun and all the stars and it means the end of earth in about three decades. So Grace, a science teacher, is recruited based on a paper he published which demoted him to his teaching position. He is sent to a lab to figure out how to stop the sun from dying which eventually leads to him waking up in the spaceship with no memory.

I know a ton of people loved the movie, but I wasn’t sure what to expect going in since I didn’t know too much. When it first started, the movie definitely felt a bit slow. Nothing was really happening and Grace is just trying to figure out what happened and is keeping himself occupied as the only person on the ship. I like that we had a past/present timeline to show the current situation and the backstory for his research and his journey. I think this makes it better than having the beginning all the background. However, I did feel like the flashbacks felt weird to me. For a while when I was watching, it just didn’t have a movie feel to it. I can’t fully put my finger on this and why I felt that, but it did not feel like a movie. It was definitely slow in the beginning as well. Grace is mainly focused on remembering what’s going on and we see the flashbacks that lead up to this. But once we got farther in, I was so much more invested. And this is mainly due to Rocky.

Rocky is the rock-like alien that Grace meets during his journey. I like the apprehension they both seem to have for each other at first and how that grows into them being more comfortable with each other and then the friendship that develops. One of my favorite parts is when Rocky first goes on Grace’s spaceship. I love how he just makes himself at home and just points out the mess that Grace made of the ship. I think the comedy was pretty well done and felt mostly natural and not out of place. These two just have such great chemistry and the friendship really grows and they are always there for each other.

The thing that really got me though was the emotional reactions. I kept thinking the movie was just okay, nothing special. But I think the farther we got in, it was more the emotional aspects of the movie. We watch as the stakes get higher and Rocky and Grace have to save each other and risk their lives doing so, creating that sense of urgency and fear in the viewers who don’t know what will happen next. I love the scene where they are collecting the bacteria from the one place not affected by the astrophage killing the sun and every other star. The pink glow that was emitted was so pretty and I loved how it looked in the movie. I just think there were so many things to feel when watching and it hit me in a way that a movie never has before. It reminds me of when I read Firefly Lane by Kristen Hannah. There were so many emotions that it just made me feel so much in a way I hadn’t felt when reading a book before. I would love to find more stories like these where you feel like you just lived decades with the characters and went through an emotional roller coaster.

So yes, I did really enjoy this movie. Even though there didn’t seem to much involved other than a space mission to save the sun, especially since this is meant to fill the entirety of a three hour movie, I think that the connection between Grace and Rocky and all the feelings the scenes provoke is the real reason to watch the movie. It’s definitely one of my favorite new-to-me movies I’ve seen this year and I kind of want to read the book now. I will definitely be adding it to my TBR soon.

xoxo,

Just another reader