Masters of the Universe: Reflections on Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary (2026)

The world is human and non-human, anthropocentric and non-anthropomorphic, sometimes even misanthropic. Arguably, one of the greatest challenges that philosophy faces today lies in comprehending the world in which we live as both a human and a non-human world – and of comprehending this politically.”1

* * *

Some of the best sci-fi humbles its human characters. Consider Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in which David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is less a living, breathing protagonist than a representative of the final evolutionary phase that humankind must transcend before becoming the Star Child. Or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), which ends with that heartbreaking shot of Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) being subsumed by the titular planet’s immense, sentient ocean. These films’ stunning tableaux and effects continue to inspire awe, wonder, and even fear, but they do so at the service of narratives that emphasize how forces beyond our control – much less our understanding – are at play in the universe. In such stories, we play but a small role on the cosmic stage.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary (2026) changes tack, inverting (and thus radically simplifying) this trope. Rather than being eclipsed by an unthinkably vast universe, we become the star of the show: the redemptive figure that catches the winning touchdown and restores (human) order to a capricious yet ultimately tamable cosmos. The opponent in this metaphorical football game is “astrophage,” a mysterious, single-cell organism that is slowly consuming the sun (its name translates as “star eater”). It’s up to middle-school teacher cum interstellar astronaut Ryland Grace (a reliably charming Ryan Gosling) to save the day. His mission: travel more than 11 light years to Tau Ceti, the only celestial body not adversely affected by the astrophage; discover the secret to the star’s unlikely survival; and send his findings home before our sun dies out. Along the way, he makes first contact with “Rocky” (voiced by James Ortiz), a cute, chittering, vaguely arachnid alien that has also parked its spaceship near Tau Ceti in hopes of saving its own planet, Erid.

The relationship between Grace and Rocky is quite effective: Against my better judgment, I grew to care about their intergalactic bromance. But beneath its buddy comedy surface, Project Hail Mary is also a rather awkward commentary on one of our greatest existential threats: climate change. The film’s failure as a global warming allegory, however, allows it to (unintentionally) become something else: an embodiment of our deluded yet inescapable anthropocentrism. Drew Goddard’s script – adapted from Andy Weir’s best-selling 2021 novel – assures us that humanity is not only capable of circumventing the will of an indifferent universe but also entitled to do so.

It’s Not Our Fault: Project Hail Mary’s Climate Change Revisionism

An early scene set in Grace’s classroom explicitly connects the astrophage – colloquially referred to as “space dots” – to global warming. Tellingly, it’s a child who first broaches the topic. When she asks if the space dots are really “eating the sun,” Grace’s response will elicit nods of recognition from teachers afraid to acknowledge basic facts lest they receive indignant emails from parents. (“Only 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing climate change. Can’t you show a little more balance? What about those other 3 percent?”) “I’d be curious what your parents think about that,” he deflects. “I’m not sure it should come from me.” The students persist, and he hesitantly acknowledges that “over the next 30 years, the Earth could cool maybe 10 to 15 degrees” while assuring them that it’s all a “small-to-medium whoop” (as opposed to a “big whoop”). The kids aren’t buying it: “I heard that all the crops will die, the economy will free fall, and half the Earth will die of starvation,” one intones.

Before we chalk such dialogue up to innocent schoolchildren being brainwashed by their woke, hacky-sack-kicking teacher, let’s keep in mind that Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) – the boss of the titular top secret program – echoes this pessimistic outlook herself. When Grace complains about the near impossibility of a successful mission, her response is sobering: “The alternative is to just do nothing, and to starve and to kill each other, and watch everything on this planet go extinct, including us.” Climate change is never mentioned by name, but it’s impossible to hear such dialogue – with its many references to spiking temperatures, agricultural and economic devastation, and mass casualties – without being reminded of it. Claiming the space dots are intended to represent anything else strikes me as deliberately obtuse.

Given this obvious correlation, it’s almost impressive how thoroughly the plot scrubs humanity of anything resembling responsibility for this impending cataclysm. First, the single-celled organisms are naturally occurring – that is, they’re not human-made. And second, no dialogue implies that human activity (pollution, say) has somehow accelerated the astrophage’s destructiveness. Instead, Earth is painted as a kind of innocent bystander (one of many, in fact; remember, Rocky’s home planet is also under threat).

The implications (and hypocrisies) are myriad. Whereas the film’s setup suggests that none of this is our fault and all of it can be fixed, reality indicates the exact opposite: Climate change is largely our doing, a lot of it can’t be fixed anymore, and it’s our fault that it can’t be fixed. This simplified worldview would be forgivable if Project Hail Mary were a children’s film (after all, it endorses laudable qualities like empathy, collaboration, and self-sacrifice), but – given its exorbitant runtime (nearly three hours), older cast (Gosling’s presence ensured a large Gen-Z and Millennial turnout), and faux-edgy humor (there’s a recurring joke about fisting) – it’s clearly geared toward adults. Like many mega-budget studio releases, it’s a kids’ movie for grownups.

In addition to this murky allegory, a condescending false progressivism belies the whole enterprise. Miller and Lord may give us a protagonist tailor-made for the female gaze (Gosling’s cardigan really set the internet on fire for a few weeks), but he’s still a white, American manchild: one whose memory, crucially, has been erased during a flight-induced coma, rendering him a past-less tabula rasa who can (and does) save an anonymous world he barely remembers.2 Grace and Rocky’s friendship gestures toward a sort of pacifist, interplanetary goodwill, but the end credits still feature a shout-out to U.S. Department of Defense (thanks, Secretary of War Hegseth, for letting us use your cool jets and aircraft carriers!). And all of this comes courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios, the same production company responsible for releasing Melania (2026) just two months before Project Hail Mary stormed the box office.

“Believe in the Hail Mary,” the film’s poster commands, in words that dwarf the actual title.3 The cynic in me can’t help but note how easily this tagline could double as a MAGA bumper sticker.

A Universe for Us: Project Hail Mary as Corrective to Cosmic Insignificance

Although the space dots not being human-made (or human-accelerated) can be seen as something of a cop-out, the plot device suggests a fascinating (and, it seems, wholly unintentional) counterinterpretation: that of the astrophage representing an unfeeling, indifferent universe whose cold calculations buck against our innate anthropocentrism.

The astrophage’s physical nature is crucial here. Like humans, it’s a naturally occurring life-form that eats, breeds, and dies. It’s even largely composed of water. Unlike humans, it displays no mental capacities or emotional will. It’s not eating the sun because it wants to kill us (again, it has targeted all stars) but because that’s simply what it does. Visually, it’s about as far from humans as you can get. When collected for observation, it looks like tar: a black, formless sludge.4 Its nature elicits some troubling questions. If it eats light, then doesn’t its survival paradoxically ensure its extinction? If it’s both of this universe and consuming this universe, then is it some sort of cosmic corrective: a natural evolutionary development that marks the end of existence as we know it?

Grace and company don’t hate the astrophage (that would be like hating gravity for causing you to fall and break a leg) as much as they want to stop it, and its “antidote” – the “taumoeba,” a predator organism from Tau Ceti’s neighboring planet that naturally consumes it – is in many ways its mirror image: also single-celled and non-sentient but glowing with a crystalline translucence. Symbolically, it is the salvatory light to the astrophage’s dark. Literally, it’s more cosmic goop fulfilling its biological function. It’s a tool to help humanity. Nothing more. No one “teams up” with the taumoeba.

Grace, however, does team up with Rocky, who in many ways represents a far more palatable (i.e., earthlike) version of an alien life-form. In this regard, Eugene Thacker’s philosophical treatise In the Dust of This Planet is crucial to my interpretation – namely, Thacker’s assertion that “when the non-human world manifests itself to us . . . more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time.”5 In other words, when confronted by the nonhuman, we inevitably find a way to make it seem like it comes from our world anyway. This approach, Thacker claims, is how “we make sense of the world.”6

Rocky may be an alien in name, but he resembles a spider (his legs are attached to a central, headlike appendage), behaves like a dog (his friendly, electronically modified human voice reminded me of Dug, the talking dog in Pixar’s Up7), and has many human characteristics. He uses fine motor skills to construct little figurines with his rock hands (Grace assumes he is some kind of engineer); flies a spacecraft that more or less resembles a human vehicle (Grace is able to tour it without being vaporized); and displays recognizable emotions (excitement, grief, fear, etc.), risking his life at one point to save his friend. He even has a girlfriend back home – nicknamed “Adrian,” of course. Most tellingly, Rocky and Grace learn to communicate with shocking ease; with the help of a translator program and voice modifier, the two are quickly roasting each other in English. Rocky’s language not only exists in the first place (he must have some kind of mouthlike orifice or organ that emits those squeaks and chitters) but also shares enough linguistic common ground with English that it may as well be Spanish.

I enumerate these example not to pointlessly complain about “realism” – Goddard’s script knows how silly this anthropomorphizing is and even includes a joke about how Eridian hardware goes “lefty tighty, righty loosey” rather than the other way around – but to illustrate how Rocky and his home planet are not really aliens as much as they are lightly modified riffs on Earth and its inhabitants. (The film’s saccharine final scene even shows Grace, who is briefly stranded on Erid, teaching cute little rock kids in a rock classroom.) Moreover, the central relationship is marked by ownership and dominance: Rocky learns Grace’s language, lives on Grace’s ship, and – most importantly – is named by Grace. The implication is clear: The truly alien is to be either destroyed (as with the astrophage) or deployed (as with the taumoeba), while the human/earthlike is to be properly taught, assimilated, and then loved – in that order.

Thacker refers to this “human-centric” mindset as “the world-for-us” (“this is the world that we, as human beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel alienated from”8), contrasting it with “the world-in-itself” (“this is the world in some inaccessible, already-given state, which we then turn into the world-for-us”9). Project Hail Mary does more than situate itself within the former camp; it aggressively denies the latter’s right to exist. If anything, it expands Thacker’s framework into something like “the universe-for-us,” assuring viewers that the universe isn’t some deep, dark place of unfathomable mystery but a mere reflection of ourselves. Things that destabilize this model (things like the astrophage) are temporary, solvable obstacles over which we shall inevitably triumph. And anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t believe in the Hail Mary.

 * * *

Note: All images are screenshots.