SPOILER WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary.
It’s a tale as old as time — literally. Throughout the ages, storytelling has followed an archetypal pattern, chronicled by scholar Joseph Campbell in his Hero’s Journey pattern. But one of the oldest storytelling archetypes can still be used to make new myths.
“The Hero’s Journey” is a narrative structure that feels familiar to fairy tales and favorite books alike, with a hero being called to an unlikely adventure beyond his or her ordinary world, returning transformed, and delivering a gift or triumph for the greater good. Think of the trials of Hercules or Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, and you’ll have an innate feel for this age-old mythmaker.
This monomyth is often depicted as a circular journey, with 12 or 17 distinct storytelling beats, or stages of a character arc a hero must go through. And while readers are familiar with this journey from English class and childhood fables, it’s the basis for all modern mythmaking. Project Hail Mary is a masterclass in not only making the most of, but also reinvigorating the Hero’s Journey to incredible effect.
Project Hail Mary Understands Classical Story Structure Better Than You Realize
The first step is always the same: the call to adventure. No great story can start without the main character being pulled into a quest of supernatural, epic, or in some way cosmic proportions. It’s pretty obvious where that comes into play in Project Hail Mary. So far, so good, so far right on track, but it gets far more interesting the deeper you dive in. Ryland Grace, happy at his middle school science teacher job, is literally and physically called to work on the astrophage project by Eva Stratt — a literal call to action that speaks to Project Hail Mary‘s embrace of the classical story structure from a modern lens.
One of the earlier steps in the Hero’s Journey is the refusal of the call. Whether it’s because they don’t believe in it (or themselves), have something keeping them at home, or whatnot, the classic mythological hero will turn down the quest, only to be reintroduced to it with greater urgency. In The Odyssey, that can be seen when Odysseus fakes madness to avoid the Trojan War, or when Luke Skywalker declines to help Obi-Wan in his quest to save Princess Leia until his aunt and uncle are murdered.
The nonlinear structure of Project Hail Mary, with the beginning of the story unraveling through Grace’s flashbacks, has us believe that the refusal of the call happens when Grace protests that he’s just a science teacher and not an astrobiologist. So when the true refusal is revealed and is denied, it is an emotional twist of the knife. It hurts more because we see the hero genuinely try to refuse, only for the call to action to claim him anyway.
Coming to light at the end of the movie rather than the beginning is an inspired subversion of the Hero’s Journey, as is the resolution to the refusal: that Grace never made it to the next step on his own, and he never accepted the call of his own free will. He is a hero forced into a myth. The entire movie, subconsciously, the audience is waiting for the big reveal of Grace having stepped up and done the honorable thing. Whether viewers know it or not, that instinct to believe that Grace would make the choice himself is because the Hero’s Journey is baked into almost all our stories since birth. So subverting it makes the gut punch even stronger.
Project Hail Mary Understands Change In A Way Most Stories Don’t
Arguably, my personal least favorite part of the Hero’s Journey is the return. After all, you can never truly go home again, and there’s something bittersweet and sad in a hero returning changed to an unchanged land. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo returns to the Shire to find that the more things stay the same, the more he feels an outsider. He has completed his quest, he has delivered the boon of freedom from Sauron, yet he is no longer at home in the home he fought so hard to get back to. That is why he eventually sailed to the West, to the Undying Lands.
In Greek mythology, Persephone returns from the underworld, bringing spring and warmth back to the world through her mother’s happiness. However, she also cannot stay fully in the realm she once lived, and retreats back to Hades for half of the year. If Grace were to return to Earth, it would no longer be his home. As this story still has to abide by the rules of science, he would be unable to ever truly leave again. So when he makes the choice not to return at all, it feels like a weight is lifted from the soul. He sends back the “Beatles,” the probes with his and Rocky’s research on how to kill the astrophage, thus fulfilling the quest and the boon. Instead, he rescues Rocky and goes to live on Erid, changed and finally, truly at home.
It is incredible what Project Hail Mary has pulled off. What kind of sorcery and magic is in this movie that has made it capture just about everyone’s hearts and minds? It certainly is a perfect storm of timing (aligned amazingly with the Artemis II mission); it is a masterclass in adaptation, scoring, acting, effects, puppetry, character development, editing, cinematography, and the use of silence… But the truth is, there is something ancient and magical in it that it both celebrates and subverts: the oldest pattern of human mythology, taken to the cosmos. That’s why it is an instant classic and feels as beloved as if it had been in our hearts forever. Because, at the heart of it, it has.
Project Hail Mary is now available for digital purchase.
Follow Kelsey Yoor on Instagram at @itskelseyytime.
