Project Hail Mary is one of the year’s biggest hits so far, and may turn into an Oscar contender by the end of the year. It’s gone on this impressive critical and audience run with a combination of straightforwardness and surprisingly knotty sci-fi procedure. The simplicity is part of the movie’s irresistible sell: Directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord tell a straightforward story of Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosing), a brilliant scientist turned middle-school teacher, who finds himself on a solo mission to investigate a distant star that may hold the key to preventing the Earth’s freezing over from a rapidly dimming sun. He meets an alien creature he nicknames “Rocky,” who is on a similar mission from his own planet. The two work together on research that they hope will save their respective home planets, even if they are unable to return to them safely.

On the other hand, the details of various research, space travel, and survival attempts are real-science-checks-out wonky, which is to say most viewers won’t actually know whether the science checks out, but scientists will assure you that, yes, the source material novel from Andy Weir — like Weir’s The Martian — mostly plays fair with the laws of physics and other guidelines frequently violated by science fiction. It is nonetheless composed mostly of made-up stuff, like “astrophage,” a substance detected in an infrared light beam between the Sun and Venus, which can both serve as a powerful propulsion agent (creating the ability to send a manned mission so far into space) and a danger to the Sun itself (as it absorbs its radiation, causing its dimming). This means the movie is about using astrophage to find something that will keep that same substance in check by consuming it, with lots of talk about breeding cells, fuel consumption, and the atmospheres of invented planets.

It’s a more fantastical pivot from the author of the source novel for The Martian, a movie with plenty of hard science but no adorable alien rock creatures whatsoever. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when it comes to the easy chemistry between Gosling and Rocky, created through a seamless combination of practical and digital effects. (Yes, in this movie Gosling shows that he could literally have chemistry with a rock.) But it does create both a runtime bloat and a narrative tangle that I was still sorting out after seeing the movie twice – not because it’s hard to understand on a basic level (science buddies on a mission to save the world!) but because some of the story’s complications and extensions are harder to track for thematic reasons. Let’s dig into the ending in an attempt to figure out what’s going on with Project Hail Mary. A warning, of course: Spoilers will be frequent and thorough!

How Did Schoolteacher Ryland Grace Wind Up in Space? Project Hail Mary Ending Explained:

To begin with: Which one? Project Hail Mary feels like it’s ending at least three times before the credits actually roll. There’s also a major and climactically revelation about Grace that is confusingly unrelated to these actual endings, and may even be unrelated to what the character is actually doing during the last chunk of the movie. So let’s start there: Throughout Project Mail Hary, the movie has cut between Grace alone on his ship, where he’s initially unsure about what is happening to him, and flashbacks to his recruitment into this mission. This allows Lord and Miller to use the grabby hook of a man waking up on a vast interstellar mission with amnesia, while gradually explaining to the audience the broader situation so that we’re aware of the full gravity, to so speak, of the situation.

The audience learns that Grace was brought into the project as a high-level researcher, studying astrophage and figuring out how it can be used as fuel. It’s never intended that Grace — not a trained astronaut — will actually go on the mission, in part because it’s a lot to ask. There isn’t enough fuel engineered to bring the small crew home, so it will be a one-way trip for those heroic, unlucky few. But then an accident kills intended crew members, and the project is in a bind: They need more people intimately familiar with this material to go up into the Hail Mary ship, and they need them fast to head off the sun’s rapid dimming. Towards the ends of the flashbacks, we learn that Grace refused to serve as a replacement, out of fear over the suicidal nature of the mission. So he’s actually on the mission by force. He was apprehended, drugged, and placed in the spaceship alongside two other crew members, who died in transit.  

The revelation that Grace was not a volunteer for the project comes in the final stretch of the film. It also seems to be the case that by the end of the movie, the “present” Grace (the one aboard the spaceship) has recovered his initially foggy memory of his life before the mission. What’s less clear is how quickly he recovers those memories. If the flashbacks are literally presented more or less as he remembers them, his memories are returning to him in neatly chronological and expositional order, which seems unlikely. Regardless, it’s hard to tell when Grace is fully aware of this information, as opposed to when the audience is made aware. Memory and expositional flashbacks don’t work the same way, and though they’re often treated as similar by movies, the visual language of Project Hail Mary doesn’t really suggest Grace himself having those flashbacks at such regular intervals.

You may ask: So what? To which I would add: Exactly! It’s unclear what Grace’s eventual memory of his understandable cowardice or its timing has to do with his character arc, given that he’s not aware enough of it for it to represent a real change to his character. It’s presented as a moving contrast between his triumph in space and his just-revealed reluctance. But wouldn’t it be more emotional the other way around? If he had assumed he was conscripted into this mission, then beat the odds to fulfill it, and then found out that he had a moment of bravery and self-belief that he had forgotten, and proceeded without, that would be heartwarming. Maybe that’s a little corny, but it’s not like Project Hail Mary is afraid of being corny. Moreover, realizing after the fact that he was scared of the mission feels like a foregone conclusion; well, yeah, he was scared. He was going on a suicide mission to space. There’s not much extra emotional lift in learning that he was actually a bit more scared than he originally assumed. This information is presented as a twist, but it doesn’t play like one, which creates unnecessary emotional confusion.

Anyway, that’s not the actual ending of Project Hail Mary.

Project Hail Mary Ending Explained: Does Ryan Gosling Return Home to Earth?

The actual ending(s) involve Rocky appearing to sacrifice himself to save Grace during their attempt to gather the anti-astrophage substance from the aforementioned planet, only to eventually recover, meaning that both scientists may even be able to return home. They say another emotional goodbye (following the goodbyes Grace has already said as he was sure Rocky was dead), and part ways, until Grace realizes that a fuel leak problem he’s able to fix on his ship will doom Rocky if he’s not warned about it. He turns around and rescues Rocky, saving Rocky’s planet while potentially scotching his own ability to get home.

This sort of connects to his Earthbound reluctance to go on the mission, because here he chooses the possibility of not returning home to save his friend. But given that he’s depicted as lacking any particular friends or family during the Earth scenes, it’s more of a copout by omission than substantial emotional growth. Rather than Grace maturing to accept a selfless mission, it just kinda seems like Grace likes Rocky more than any human he’s ever met. (Which, fair. Rocky is very charming.) Hence Grace’s seeming happiness in the movie’s final sequence, which reveals that he has relocated to Erid, Rocky’s home planet, where the Eridians have (conveniently) constructed a biodome allowing Grace to survive there. They’ve also repaired his ship in such a way that he may yet be able to return home, though he also seems perfectly happy working as a science teacher to a bunch of Eridian rock-children. Hey, he’s good either way!

It’s a sweet ending, delivering some of the emotional oomph that feel a little more strained in previous attempts at heart-tugging. Yet this mega-happy result, on top of the repeated instances of Grace and Rocky saving each other’s lives, feels a little like hopecore overkill. Project Hail Mary obviously speaks to a hunger for blockbuster rides that nonetheless feel grounded in human emotion and not like the zillionth carbon copy of a superhero’s journey that we’ve seen so many times in the past 20 years. The movie also feels like it’s getting high off its own supply of feel-good vibes. Lord and Miller want to deliver the perfect capstone to their epic adventure, and spend a lot of on-screen time trying out their options.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.

Stream Project Hail Mary on MGM+