Project Hail Mary, Artemis II and My Introduction to Hopecore

I have been bordering on pushy, telling my friends and acquaintances to go see the movie Project Hail Mary. 

We watched it as a family the first Tuesday after release, and all four of us adored it. Any one of us would have happily turned around and walked right back in for a secodn showing, had that been an option. Fenya thought there was a chance of it ending up as her favourite science-fiction movie ever. For myself, I haven't been this evangelical about a movie in terms of bugging folks to see it in a theatre since Inception. I asked a friend who hadn't seen it if he wanted to go so I would have an excuse to watch it in IMAX.

And there are a lot of different reasons for this:

• a solid story, driven by science but wrapped in humanity
• a remarkable performance by Ryan Gosling (who also produced it), and almost half his screen time has no other humans to interact with
• a commitment to practical effects wherever possible, including puppetry and physical models of spaceships
• perhaps the best alien character since Mr. Spock, but far, far more alien

But that isn't the reason I am pushing folks so hard to not wait for this to stream, to see it in a darkened room with strangers.

The premise of the story revolves around the need to send a middle school science teacher 12 light years away in a last-ditch hope to save Earth's rapidly dimming star. Drew Goddard's screenplay (based on Andy Weir's (The Martian) novel) does not soft-peddle the horror of this, having the topic introduced in a classroom, resulting in 8th graders very quickly connecting the dots between a cooling planet, a global food crisis, and probable breakdown of society, and (understandably) getting quite upset.

But even with that grimness, underscored by the frank admission by the project's director (Sandra Huller) that the 30 year timeline they are working with assumes the world's governments working together to ration food (which they won't), hope permeates almost every scene. Sometimes desperately, sometimes whimsically, but very nearly omnipresently.

And that hope is closer to the reason for my zeal, but not the core of it.

Seeing a film that dramatizes so clearly and spectacularly the need for curiosity, openmindedness and friendship in desperate times, while we as a society and a species face a wholly different but still entirely fraught circumstance, was something I think I needed in my soul.

And experiencing it with a room full of people I don't know, and hearing sounds in the dark that made me realize they felt something similar as well? 

That was transcendent. 

I don't want to say much more about the movie itself because there are so many tiny discoveries to be made and I want you to have all of them, even if you do wait to see it at home (but please go if you can). And I really don't want to oversell it because a co-worker went to see it and disliked it so much she left before it finished, but I have to tellyou, that feeling it gave me felt awfully, awfully good, and I want more people to experience it. And I am sorry it didn't play out that way for my colleague, but hey, there is no accounting for taste, right?.

And looking on Threads (Meta/ Facebook's version of Twitter), it looks like a lot of folks share my sentiment about the flick, one of which introduced me to the term 'hopecore', which, please God, let this become a thing.

Hopecore, eh? You know, I am not entirely sure what that is....but I am pretty sure I want more of it.

Now, I fully realize that what I find touching you might find treacly or overly sentimental or whatever, so bear that in mind, but if these testimonials leave even the slightest bit curious, get our there before it leaves theatres. I've seen it twice already and will go again if it coerces someone else into seeing it in the wild.

Meanwhile, here in the real world, four genuine hero astronauts travelled further than any other humans ever last week, as the Intrepid spacecraft carried the Artemis II crew on a loop around the moon.

My sister and her husband (who is probably an even bigger NASA fan than me!) were up last week and we were able watch the launch together. I will admit, my heart was in my throat from liftoff to maybe the two minute mark, because Challenger's fate at 73 seconds into their flight abjectly refused my polite but firm requests to leave my mind, but it was honestly a beautiful thing to see and I am grateful we could all see it together.

But what was most surprising was how much interest was maintained throughout the mission - not just by my fellow space nerds, but the public in general seemed genuinely entranced by this mission. Maybe there was more interest up here in Canada because one of our own, Jeremy Hansen, was on a lunar mission for the very first time. Whatever the reason, hearing people in the grocery checkout line talk about the insertion burn or folks in church discussing the lunar slingshot was tremendously gratifying.

Similar to Project Hail Mary though, while the technology was amazing, the humanity was what a lot of us found most moving. 

First of all, one of the most diverse space crews ever, with a black pilot, female mission specialist, and a Canadian.

The emotion they shared went beyond mere excitement, such as when they shared the enormity of seeing a tiny Earth dwarfed by the Moon's proximity, and a giddy voice from mission control responded with a line from PHM:

Peak eye leakage for me came when they named a crater after the late wife of the mission commander, Reid Wiseman:

(Get effed, toxic masculinity!)

Anyways, the day after safely splashing down off the coast of San Diego, the Artemis II crew had a lot of great stuff to say, like Jeremy Hansen:

“What you saw was a group of people who loved contributing, having meaningful contribution and extracting joy out of that. And what we’ve been hearing is that was something special for you to witness. I would suggest to you that when you look up here, you’re not looking at us. We are a mirror reflecting you, and if you like what you see, then just look a little deeper. This is you.”

And Christina Koch:

“A crew is a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably beautifully, dutifully linked. I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me. But there’s one new thing I know, and that is planet Earth: You are a crew.”

The greatest delight for me, though, continues to be the positivity, the optimism, the sense of hope in a time where it feels like we could really use more of it.

I watched Project Hail Mary on an UltrAVX screen and then again in IMAX. Glory and I watched the recovery of the capsule on my iPad while we ate dinner.

Whatever screen I might be viewing, please Lord, let there be more hopecore for me to see.