After a quick, funny nod to the five-note musical message of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, Grace and Rocky feel out their own first contact—first with taps and gestures; then with small physical models; then with numbers; then with a database of words they slowly build together like a real-time English-Eridian dictionary. Grace gives Rocky a name and a (non-Meryl Streep) digital voice, but it takes both of the scientists’ skillsets to truly create a shared lexicon. Like the best linguist sci-fi, Project Hail Mary realizes that language isn’t just literal, it’s cultural. A sentence can contain meaning beyond the individual words being said. Just the distinct ways their two species sleep gives Rocky and Grace entirely different understandings of what it means to look out for one another.
It’s an idea that’s at the heart of one of Star Trek‘s most beloved episodes, The Next Generation‘s “Darmok.” In it, Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard is beamed down to a planet with an alien captain, but while his universal translator can decipher the specific words being said, these particular aliens speak in metaphors and allusions in a way that makes their language difficult for outsiders to grasp. To actually communicate, Picard and the alien captain have to learn to appreciate each other’s cultures and histories—to understand that the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” evokes the mythic story of a friendship forged through adversity.
There’s a similar poeticism to the way Grace and Rocky come to understand what hugs and hand gestures and festive partywear mean in their respective cultures. Their communication isn’t just practical, it’s personal. Where sci-fi is often divided into “hard” and “soft” categories, the best hard sci-fi stories have a sense of heart too. Robert Zemeckis’ Contact slowly, meticulously depicts what a global first contact scenario might be like. Yet when Jodie Foster’s pragmatic scientist Dr. Ellie Arroway first travels across the galaxy and tries to report what she sees, all she can say is, “They should have sent a poet.”
That sort of earnest emotionality is at the center of a lot of the sci-fi buddy movies that Project Hail Mary mostly directly echoes, including E.T., The Iron Giant, and Starman. They’re also stories of likable, everyday people befriending powerful yet childlike alien beings; breaking through language barriers with the help of Sesame Street instructionals and old home movies while forging cultural and emotional bonds through cross-country road trips and Superman comics. Yet so many sci-fi stories about communication eventually circle around to the idea that these kinds of connections are fleeting. Elliott may love E.T. and Jenny may love Starman, but they belong to separate worlds; Dr. Arroway wants to stay in the stars, but the aliens want her back on Earth; Captain Picard only truly understands his new alien friend just as he’s about to lose him; the Arrival heptapods deliver a message and then take off for the next 3,000 years.
That’s where Project Hail Mary serves up its biggest surprise. Though it delivers the sort of poignant, even pat, goodbye we expect from a story like this, it doesn’t actually separate Grace and Rocky in the end. Grace saves Earth, but sacrifices his own chance to return home in order to double back and rescue Rocky from a ship malfunction. And where a lot of stories might present that as a bittersweet tragedy, Project Hail Mary chooses to see it as the ultimate act of thrilling cross-cultural exchange. Far from a space castaway, Grace winds up with the dream expat life, living in a sweet beach house, in his personal Eridian biodome, with a classroom full of rock students eager to learn from him.
This is what makes Project Hail Mary‘s relationship with these other sci-fi films so exciting: It isn’t just about temporary communication, but full-on cohabitation. By the epilogue, Grace and Rocky have become so fluent in each other’s languages they chat away without any external translator. And though the Eridians fix up his ship, Grace admits he might not even want to return home. While a lot of sci-fi stories suggest cultures can come together in times of crisis, Project Hail Mary throws out the delightful idea that they can simply come together to share a life too. For all the film’s nostalgia-fueled, crowdpleasing vibes, that’s a welcome new take—not to mention a timely, hopeful message in an era of increased and enforced cultural division. As the aliens in Contact tell Ellie, “In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.” Project Hail Mary argues part of fighting that emptiness means welcoming others across our borders.
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