A Dictionary Without a Last Page — Project Hail Mary

※ This essay discusses the key elements of the film Project Hail Mary’s story, including the ending.

Some stories keep us following them to the end, even when we have a vague sense of where they are headed.

Two characters who seem an unlikely match at first, clashing and misunderstanding one another as they slowly learn to understand each other. Buddy movies usually begin with this familiar pattern, and Project Hail Mary follows it too.

Yet if the film lingers so strongly afterwards, it is perhaps because it does not brush aside the faint sounds of friction along the way to a familiar ending.

How many failed attempts must two beings make before they can share a single thought, when their languages, bodies, senses, and even ways of seeing the world are different? Project Hail Mary stays with that long, difficult process.

A Man Wakes, and the Truth Arrives Later

Ryland Grace wakes in the middle of space, cut off from everything. Unable even to remember who he is, he is left alone beside the cold bodies of his crewmates.

His past has been wiped blank, but the knowledge ingrained in him has not disappeared. He identifies what the equipment is for as easily as he breathes, breaks the silence with odd jokes, and explores every corner of the empty ship. Whenever his hand reaches for a familiar device before he can think, another fragment of his lost memory follows.

The film does not explain its world all at once. As Grace pieces his memories together, we come to understand his situation alongside him.

As the blanks in his memory fill in, our first picture of Grace gradually changes. His claim that life did not necessarily require water met with a backlash from academia. He eventually left research and became an ordinary school science teacher.

What called him back from that life at a distance from research was Astrophage. After the discovery of this unknown single-celled life form, which absorbs the sun’s energy to reproduce, the sun grew steadily dimmer and humanity faced extinction. The unusual theory that had once pushed Grace out of academia unexpectedly proved necessary for studying Astrophage, and he was all but forced into the project to save humanity.

Other nearby stars were dimming in much the same way, but Tau Ceti alone remained unaffected. To find out why, humanity built Hail Mary, a spacecraft bound for Tau Ceti on a one-way journey. Before he knew it, Grace had been pushed to the very center of the mission.

When the science specialists originally assigned to the mission died in an accident before departure, project head Eva Stratt named Grace, who knew Astrophage better than anyone, as their replacement.

For Grace, though, there was nothing romantic about space. He was terrified of dying and knew better than anyone what a one-way journey meant. So from beginning to end, going into space was the one thing he stubbornly refused.

Even so, Stratt’s decision was ruthless. Concluding that humanity’s chances of survival would be slim without Grace, she disregarded his fear, had him sedated against his will, and sent him off aboard Hail Mary.

The film keeps this fact hidden at first. Our assumption that he had volunteered for the mission is overturned as Grace’s memory returns. In the name of saving humanity, he was treated as a component for repairing a broken world.

Grace, left alone in space, encounters a being he can scarcely believe is there. An unknown spacecraft appearing in the darkness, and inside it Rocky, an intelligent life form who, like him, is the sole survivor.

A human conscripted by humanity, and an alien who has crossed the far reaches of space to save his home planet from the same threat. Two beings who set out from entirely different worlds have found each other in the middle of space.

Relationships Mean Translating Without End

When Grace and Rocky first met, they were simply strangers to each other. To solve the problems before them, they had to begin by understanding the other’s language and anatomy. There was still too much they did not know to trust each other.

Rocky has no organs of sight. He senses his surroundings through echoes and vibrations, and communicates in sounds close to musical chords. Even seeing, which Grace takes entirely for granted, is an experience Rocky does not have. Unable to share even what each of them takes for granted, they must begin their conversation again, building language from the bottom up.

First they give one chord the meaning of ‘one,’ then count seconds with a clock between them to agree on units of time. Once they share numbers, they name the elements. Only after those names have accumulated do they ask about each other’s circumstances. Their private dictionary, begun where there had been nothing, grows thicker one page at a time.

As Grace builds a translation device and they choose a synthetic voice together, the sounds that were once incomprehensible chords begin, almost imperceptibly, to sound like ‘Rocky’s voice’ to us as well.

Filling the gaps left by misunderstanding, carefully setting the next word on meanings that are still precarious. There are no magical leaps in deciphering an unknown language. Still, the hard labor of translation does not make the process joyless.

With Daniel Pemberton’s music playing, Grace and Rocky bang on the bulkhead, cheer, and dance awkwardly whenever they solve a difficult equation. Touching fists, they even invent a greeting of their own. For them, translation is also a game, a pleasure in making signs and rules together.

The film’s soundtrack is laid out like a hidden table of contents for the story. Simply placing the track titles in sequence reveals the whole process of Grace and Rocky growing closer.

Score

• 〈Barrier Language〉 — The language barrier
• 〈Connection〉 — Connection
• 〈Clock Numbers〉 — Clock numbers
• 〈Learning to Communicate〉 — Learning to communicate
• 〈Finding Rocky Voice〉 — Finding Rocky’s voice

Featured Songs

• Mercedes Sosa, 〈Gracias a la Vida〉 — Thanks to life
• The Beatles, 〈Two of Us〉 — The two of us

Even after they have grown so close, their conversations are often bumpy. Explaining a single concept they have yet to share requires a long detour. Each time, they tune their frequencies again, tap the translator, and listen to each other.

As they exchange words, it is not only the other’s language that grows familiar. They also grow used to each other’s way of asking what was meant when words go astray, and continuing to try until they understand.

Perhaps whenever we enter someone’s orbit, we become clumsy translators.

The other’s unfamiliar expressions and silences, even the fears that might lie behind them: we can only leaf through our own worn dictionaries and guess at their meaning.

The moments when words cannot fully carry what someone feels are not limited to the two of them.

At the farewell gathering for Hail Mary’s crew, Stratt stands on the deck of an aircraft carrier and sings Harry Styles’s 〈Sign of the Times〉.

Stratt, who always led with orders and judgments, chooses a song instead of an explanation for once. It seems that even someone who had made so many decisions while setting others’ fears aside had feelings she could not easily put into words.

A Weight Taken On by Choice

When Rocky learns that Grace sleeps alone, he insists on watching over him. He had lost his crewmates while he himself was asleep. Watching over each other’s sleep and worrying about each other’s safety gradually become natural. Care for each other finds its way, little by little, into a conversation that began as a means of surviving together.

When Grace admits that he has no fuel to return and will die in space once the mission is over, Rocky offers to share the fuel he needs, even at the cost of delaying his own return. Grace, who has been trying hard to act as though he is fine, only then admits that he did not want to die either, and embraces Rocky.

They have begun to understand not only each other’s words, but the weight those words carry.

Rocky was also the first to break through the wall and cross over. While they are collecting samples from a planet in the Tau Ceti system, an unexpected accident violently jolts the ship and a compartment begins to collapse. Without hesitation, he breaks through the wall. With his own hands, he shatters the transparent window between them, where they had exchanged chords and samples and cheered together: the boundary they had to maintain to keep from killing each other.

Leaving an environment in which he can live and leaping into another’s world comes at a cost: life-threatening burns across Rocky’s body.

While Rocky recovers, Grace finds a microorganism that preys on Astrophage in the samples they collected. Combining Tau Ceti and amoeba, he names it ‘Taumoeba.’

Astrophage, the life form that consumed starlight and put both planets in danger, was also the fuel that powered Hail Mary and Rocky’s ship. If they could send Taumoeba to their respective planets to keep Astrophage in check, they could save both Earth and Erid.

They guide Taumoeba’s evolution so that it can survive in the environments of their respective planets, and at last finish preparing to go home. Thanks to the fuel Rocky has given him, Grace too has one chance to set foot on Earth’s soil again, alive.

But on the way home, something goes wrong.

Taumoeba has evolved to pass through even the material that contained it. Contamination is barely stopped aboard Hail Mary, but Rocky’s ship has a hull made of that very material. If Taumoeba escaped and consumed the Astrophage fuel, Rocky would be stranded in the middle of space.

Yet if Grace turns back to save him, this time he is the one who cannot return to Earth.

Grace sends the Taumoeba that will save humanity, along with his research data, to Earth by unmanned probe.

Then he turns back.

Rocky, who had broken through the boundary and crossed over for him, was now alone in space. So Grace’s decision to abandon his way back to Earth was perhaps an answer to the care Rocky had offered first.

Here, the score’s table of contents, which has followed the story, reaches its final chapter too.

• 〈Rocky Sacrifice〉 — Rocky’s sacrifice
• 〈Wake Up Buddy〉 — Wake up, friend
• 〈Goodbye My Friend〉 — Goodbye, my friend
• 〈Amaze Amaze Amaze (Life on Erid)〉 — Amazing, amazing, amazing: life on Erid

Grace, who had refused to the very end to go into space when responsibility was forced upon him, willingly gives up even his way back to Earth when the responsibility is one he has chosen himself.

On the small stretch of coast the Eridians have made for Grace, the two sit side by side again. Rocky says that Erid’s scientists can have Hail Mary ready to take him back to Earth. Grace says he will think about it, then heads for the classroom where the children of Erid are waiting.

The two who once had to take responsibility for each other’s survival now spend an uneventful day together.

This ordinary day was possible because they did not leave each other’s problems outside their own lives.

Sometimes I want to believe that a good relationship should not wear us out. A relationship that does not use me up, one I can step away from whenever I need to. But once someone becomes precious to me, their problems rarely oblige by staying outside my life.

Salvation Does Not Come in the Singular

‘Hail Mary’ was originally a prayer, but in American football it means a final long pass thrown near the end of a game, with little chance of success. True to its name, the Hail Mary that humanity launched into space was also something close to a desperate prayer.

A recklessly thrown pass crossing the long dark to reach someone, and an unexpected someone catching it and sending it back. The Hail Mary this film tells of is a story of two different beings who manage, at last, to reach each other.

Making room for someone beside us did not mean reading each other perfectly. Even when faced with sentences we could never bring to an end, it meant opening the dictionary again tomorrow and greeting each other. Perhaps that is what a greeting that does not wither means.