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Project Hail Mary (2025)
Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
The phrase 'throwing a Hail Mary' originated from American football to signify a desperate attempt to throw the ball forward, hoping against hope to score in a last-minute effort when it appears nearly impossible to do anything else. The word slowly came to be used in everyday conversation to signify the same thing: a risky last-minute effort to fix something.
This film is based on the storybook of the same name by Andy Weir. The movie is said to stay true to the book. Unlike most Hollywood sci-fi stories, this one does not propagate the idea that all our worldly problems can be resolved by blasting them away, as we saw in Independence Day and the Star Wars franchise.
Trouble starts when scientists discover that the suns in the Universe are slowly dying. Our Sun in the Solar System is slowly dying, too. As expected, this would lead to catastrophic effects on Earth. The scientists also discovered that the Sun is infected with an organism they call 'astrophage' for its ability to eat stars. The only star that is not infected by this astrophage is Tau Ceti. The researchers set up a team to look into this. This international team isolated the astrophage and discovered that it could power a spacecraft to Tau Ceti for investigation.
Many things happened, and a ragtag crew of three landed on this one-way suicide mission. The protagonist, a disgruntled school teacher, is the only surviving member of the crew and finds himself stranded on a spaceship in the middle of nowhere, amnesic. He digs deep into his memory bank (his organic one), only to encounter an alien lifeform. He builds communication with Rocky, the alien, through the computers at his disposal. Together, they finally send a probe to Earth so that the infection afflicting our Sun can be rectified.
A good one.
Farouk Gulsara (asokansham@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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