So the way that I got first introduced to Hail Mary was through my brothers who trade books, mostly “hard sci-fi” back and forth with each other in a cool, loving brotherly way which was so wholesome it was contagious and now my entire family is on an unofficial rotating reading list based on their mutual interests and taste, except me because my brain is broken and the number one best way to get me to dig in my heels and turn up my nose (is that a mixed metaphor?) is through a heartfelt recommendation of one’s personal favorite anything. So anyway, when I found out that Andy Weir’s Hail Mary was my older brother’s favorite book of all time, I must have instantly filed it away as something I would never read and then moved on with my horrible, useless existence being a shambling husk of a person with real emotions and interest in others. My second introduction to Hail Mary was through Wife’s mom while summering with in-laws: during a two week vacation with the gremlins, I came in medias res into some early chapter of Hail Mary on audiobook, one of the great non consensual crimes of our era. Then, over the course of the next couple days I would drift in and out of earshot of the book while leaving for the mall or returning from a park outing, to catch the amusing parlance of the alien Rocky. Finally, the whole thing culminated with MIL leaving her phone with the audiobook on after she went to sleep one night, and later when I asked about it, she said “because you were always so intently listening when you were in the same room, so I knew you’d want to hear how it finished instead of waiting til the morning.” So, I often tell people who ask me (not super many) about my opinions about Hail Mary that I was subjected to a particular kind of torture for literate booknerds, to consume it sort of secondhand at unexpected time intervals.
Part of the reason that I was so opposed to Hail Mary is because I really do not understand the general appeal of a book or really any kind of media where the major discourse around it is “wow that’s such accurate science”. It’s what I remember people talking about when they talked about The Martian, even though in retrospect, The Martian was much more a rollicking romp coupled with survivalist inspo porn vibes than a scientifically precise description of extraplanetary colonization. One of the things that I have always brought up when watching campy sci fi or–worse–Serious Scifi (Star Wars) that takes itself way too Seriously, because I am obnoxious, is the “Twin Paradox” in relativity, which effectively reduces all FTL missions to be one way (Interstellar) suicide runs, a narrative dead-end. So watching this movie trailer where some dude travels to a distant sun to transmit information back to Earth in time for it to be useful just completely baffled me, especially as a plot point in “accurate Sci fi” genre movie.
Also, PB and I have been resolute in our disinterest in space movies in the past as a modern form of gladiatorial game for young, up and coming actors in which they humiliate themselves in front of a green screen for our enjoyment. She over the years has fused the concept of space movies and man vs nature movies in her head, because space is usually so desolate and lifeless that it might as well take place in a snowstorm or 19th c Japan or the “New World” or whatever.
Actually, as I collect examples of metaphorically “survivalist” movies that don’t follow the same topographic tropes but do give off the same vibe, I’m reminded by how many of them jumpscared me in the year or two leading up to me starting this site in the first place, but also how I ended up seeing Jessie Buckley in I’m Thinking of Ending Things online during the pandemic, but liked it so little that I didn’t even bother to review it here, which probably says something about my taste for Charlie Kaufman movies, I guess, since this is the only one I’ve ever seen.
Anyway, this is all to say that there were overlapping psychoses for why I was an unlikely candidate for this movie. If I’m being honest for why I showed up on the Thursday of opening weekend, it’s mostly that I was scouting it for my uppercase gremlin who had just started to show interest in astronomy at the time (now is on their third planetarium of 2026 and several books deep into her fact-finding obsession). The animatronic puppet rock thing that was so wildly revealed in the trailers for this movie seemed like a dead ringer for convincing transitional object for her to hold onto in any film that is not animated but still oriented to a family audience. The entirety of the Alamo preshow, entitled “Ryan Gosling, Scream Queen,” was a supercut of all the times that Ryan Gosling screams in a movie, which was probably dozens of different movies (the link is for a supercut from almost ten YEARS ago when it was already apparent that this was a thing).
Friend’s mom came as unexpected treat. We got ginger beers and school lunched themed snacks for the movie. The rest is really history if you’re reading this from the future. The film was a huge box office success–the blockbuster of 2026 up until the following month. Some things I learned after seeing the movie: when Ryan was getting into a rut, his daughter would come on set and read Rocky’s lines for him in real time, which is adorable.
In terms of the movie’s working mechanics, it finds a way to make space less claustrophobic, less surival-y and more buddy roadtrip. There are still some baldly earnest Golly Gee Science Isn’t It Grand? moments but more often than not the premise hinges on the assumption that humanity will not get its act together for the polycrisis (which might be the cleanest way to make a “This is What America Needs Right Now” inspo movie without the cringe since whoever greenlit Life of Chuck tried to actually market it in the hellscape that is this political moment we’re living in).
Friend will not let me hit publish on this until I address my “Arrival Gripes,” which I guess is his way of saying that he feels that I need to explain why I didn’t like the 2016 blockbuster adaptation of “hard sci fi” writer Ted Chiang, to which I continue to respond, “Where do I start?” And I’ll just spare you the back and forth beyond the fact that the way in which the linguist discovers a skeleton key to untangling a complex and alien language in such a definitive manner that it can be simply displayed visually in the movie as a subtitle is so demoralizing to watch as a person who translates for a living. I really like the way that China Mieville depicts translating in his book Embassytown. (Btw, if you’re looking for a hard science fiction book fuck you, first of all, but secondly this probably isn’t worth it, but if you’re looking for a book that doesn’t treat reduce translating a time traveling fourth dimensional creature into a child’s arithmetic problem, maybe this works.) There, Mieville images a race of creatures who exist as individual beings but require a partner in order to speak by blending their two voices into one.
Here, I think Friend imagines that because alien + translation I may have issues, but actually I feel like the methodology is pretty sound. He acknowledges the process is messy and the gaps between his mastery or fluency and the subtitle are often exploited for humor and poignancy (which is the first and last time I’m going to use that word all year). He’s constantly updating his glossary and taking notes as things change and the awkwardness of Rocky’s speech, the untranslability of certain words and phrases, it all alludes to intricacies of parsing language. More interesting to me is how a race of rocks can invent a near FTL space ship without understanding anything about relativity–like how do they experience time and have working clocks without the interest or curiosity to notice that when they have built space ships and sent crew out and then had them return that they didn’t experience time dilation. Like, wouldn’t that come up literally all the time when your satellites kept crashing into each other or when you got off your train in a different time zone? Do they use planetary time exclusively and if so how did that even happen? Like is there a hive mind situation happening? Can anyone explain this to me like I’m five please?
Four Babadooks, really pleased with this not space space movie.
