Guys are so lonely that it's easier for them to imagine making friends with space aliens than it is to tell stories about forging deeply emotional bonds with other guys.
In Project Hail Mary Ryan Gosling and a crusty, faceless otherworldly creature he nicknames "Rocky" encounter each other in a distant solar system and combine their science knowledge to stop a star-devouring parasite from ending life in the known universe. It is science fiction, it's a buddy comedy, and it's also a kind of love story, arriving in theaters amid a bombardment of comparisons to another beloved movie about a human who makes an alien friend: E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
I also thought of Steven Spielberg's 1982 classic when I saw directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord's big-screen movie adaptation of the 2021 novel by Andy Weir, the author best known for The Martian—about a stranded astronaut who has no one, although many long-distance friends are working tirelessly to reach him. (That's sort of like having "a girlfriend, but she lives in Canada" back when you're in middle school.) But for all the parallels between Project Hail Mary and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, there is one big difference that makes the new movie especially relevant.
E.T. was about a lonely child who bonds with an unlikely friend, another outcast who feels abandoned and overlooked—rightfully so, since his own kind left him behind like the intergalactic version of Kevin McCallister. Spielberg's movie was about how childhood can be magical, but also isolating. Project Hail Mary explores a different idea, one that is frequently mentioned in the zeitgeist and "the discourse," although solutions to the problem remain elusive: How do you make friends as an adult?
It's something everybody faces as they get older, and Project Hail Mary is a sci-fi story that uses its galaxy-saving premise as an allegory for this sad aspect of modern life. Work and family obligations become all-consuming, and opportunities to cut loose and just hang out dwindle down to nothing. We go it alone more, and rely on each other less. On the playground, friendships once sprung up like weeds, but as the decades pass you have to work harder to cultivate them.
Studies show the issue is especially acute among men. Maybe guys have a harder time expressing themselves, having been culturally conditioned to hold our thoughts and feelings inside. Or maybe we're more naturally combative and reluctant to lean on others. We believe in that old maxim, "A friend in need is a friend indeed," and we're there for that 100 percent—as long as we're not the one "in need."
We cling tightly to old friendships, but sometimes weeks pass without contact, then months. Suddenly, it's years. We often pick up easily where we left off, "like no time has gone by," but the longer that pattern continues the less you naturally have in common. When all that two people share is the past, and don't actually have a present together, the friendship becomes more like a relic than something that is living, breathing, and growing.
Gosling's character, Dr. Ryland Grace, is a molecular biologist turned middle-school science teacher turned reluctant astronaut. Some unusual cosmic force is consuming the energy of our sun, and the long-shot effort that gives the story its title is a deep-space mission to another far-off sun that seems to be regulating this cycle without being depleted. When he awakes from his cryo-sleep, Grace finds another starship already waiting at his destination, a spiky, shapeshifting vessel from a vastly different world that is also trying to identify and solve the same problem.
Aboard this ship is "Rocky," an alien character who looks like a Thanksgiving turkey carved out of sandstone. It has no eyes or mouth (it eats through its … nevermind.) It wobbles around on five limbs, and has three-toed pinchers that look about as effective at grabbing things as a loosely-rigged arcade claw game that never pays off. Still, Rocky gets around. He's just got zero in common with Grace, except a shared mission.
Consider this excerpt from Weir's book, which puts into words what Gosling and Rocky puppeteer James Ortiz convey onscreen: "Speaking of loneliness, my thoughts turn back to Rocky. My only friend now. Seriously. He's my only friend," Grace says. "I didn't have much of a social life back when things were normal.
Sometimes I'd grab dinner with other faculty and staff at the school. I'd have the occasional Saturday-night beer with old college friends. But thanks to time dilation, when I get home all those folks will be a generation older than me."
Grace was far away from friendship even when it was right in front of him. A lot of guys will be able to relate.
By Anthony Breznican
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