Ryan Gosling's flight of fancy
The ways of connecting with nature that come to mind most easily include smelling a wild flower, walking through a sun speckled woodland, or eating organic herbs.But cosmology is as much an appreciation of nature as any contact with earthly flora or fauna, even where for most of us this remains in the domain of the imagination.The film Project Hail Mary is an attempt to share a reverence for nature at its most dramatic scale, within view but entirely out of reach. It is a science fiction where the natural science on display is as awe inspiring as any part of the fiction.ThreatRyan Gosling’s passion project is driven by a simple conceit. It asks, what would happen if the first alien we came into contact with wanted to collaborate rather than annihilate. What if the cause of our meeting was an existential threat to both our species, and the only solution was to come together?This is the antinomy of Ridley Scott's Alien. It is a radical hypothesis, especially for our times and especially for Hollywood as it is currently constituted. The social context is obvious, especially for filmgoers in the United States. Armed ICE agents are currently kidnapping “alien” children and disappearing them into modern day concentration camps. The illegal and unnecessary war with Iran is based on the fiction that other cultures are always an existential threat. The rise of AI is sold to us as revolutionary by evoking a fear that a home-grown alien is about to take over. InfluencersGosling does hear what he always does best. He models a kind of masculinity that is kind, intelligent, compassionate and funny. This alone is also something of a radical act. In the moment of "looksmaxxing" and "incel" culture, spending some time watching a man use empathy rather than violence to greet novelty and strangeness does seem like a significant departure.The film has also been a huge hit with the scientific community - or at least science minded online influencers. The science itself is taken seriously, even where it is not taken literally. The fact the film was not eclipsed by Artemis II and the simultaneous real world NASA flight around the moon is testament to its popularity.MythsBut with all this said, Project Hail Mary is not nearly as courageous and awe inspiring as it thinks it is - or that it needs to be. It is not, itself, a project hail Mary. This is, after all, yet another story about a white man using technology to achieve the impossible against all the odds. A white man who just about succeeds in overcoming his own failings, his own fragile ego, in time to save the entire human species. Interstellar meets ET. The film follows Joseph Campbell’s hero's journey faithfully. But in doing so, we are given a plot is as cliched and predictable as any Star Wars movie. There is no real jeopardy because of course the hero is going to succeed in his mission: of course we are all going to be saved.In this way, Project Hail Mary reinforces the foundational myths about manhood and missions, about the relationship between the public and science, and indeed about the relation between society and nature that each support the Hobbesian worldview that the film shallowly challenges. This AuthorBrendan Montague is an editor of The Ecologist.
