Project Hail Mary and AI

TLDR; PHM is either a highly anachronistic film, or it signals the beginning of a pro-AI attitude regarding the world's "biggest problems"

Recently, movies have had a critical atmosphere to them, they almost start from a premise that lacks faith in humanity. I think of Sinners, Eddington, One Battle After Another and I'm mostly exclusing sequels and cash grabs like the Minecraft movie. If we focus on sci-fi especially, you can see a shift from Interstellar (2012) and The Martian (2015) and their heroic scientists using tech and problem-solving to save the day, to stuff like Black Mirror and Mr. Robot from more recent years. I even see Arrival (2016) as a bit of a shifting point, it had the heroic element to it but it was tinged with darkness and had a sense of existential horror to it. by 2021, you had movies like Dont Look Up which were a parody of the heroic sci-fi movie, an ironic jab at the fact that we ever thought we could science our way out of problems. I'm sure people can point out exceptions, but this is my feeling of how the general attitude has shifted.

what's interesting is that Project Hail Mary goes back to that heroic brand of sci-fi, more in line with Interstellar and The Martian. Post-COVID there really hasn't been a place for art like that to succeed, hence why PHM feels anachronistic to me. It feels like something that would have come out early-mid 2010s.

It checks a lot of boxes that haven't been checked recently: it's an environmental in the sense that it has it's own global warming analogy (when's the last time we had a movie with that that wasn't a parody like Don't Look Up?), and a very positive and collectivist "if we work together we can solve anything" kind of mentality. Of course, there is that one twist regarding>! how Eva forcefully drugs Grace to participate in the project which darkens the characters a bit but its mostly used as a way to make Grace look more human/ relatable than it is to critique the government (I didn't read it like critique at all in fact, Eva's decisions were validated by the ending)!<

Ok so what if PHM is a break from the trend? These things are cylical and a feel-good sci-fi movie is something that maybe we've all been craving. It's simply a good adaptation of a book that comes at a time where we've all had enough of the capitalist-critiques and tech/climate doom movies.

This is a fine and honestly more defensible way to look at PHM, but I think it could signal something bigger Obviously not all movies are psychoanalyzable, i.e. not all movies are really representative of the current culture. But my take is that PHM is a signal of the beginning of a shift in how we view AI.

Much of the current AI discourse is reactionary (but still valid). they are taking jobs, they are bad for the environment, they are stealing artists work, etc. These things were all happening before of course but AI has made them far worse. And things do feel bleak these days, I think the current state of affairs -- climate change, the economy, geopolitics, wealth inequality, genocidal regimes -- create a heavy and constant anxiety that pushes more and more people into looking for an out, a hail mary, you could say.

I think over the next few years we will see the currently loud but unpopular group of people claiming AI will solve all our problems to grow. Perhaps people will even think AI possesses a kind of advanced reasoning and intelligence that exceeds our comprehension, and thus it is the only thing that can save us from ourselves.

In that sense, I almost see Rocky as a stand-in for AI, something that is technologically more advanced and smarter than us that still lacks some things that only humans have (I guess in this movie it was knowledge of radiation which is kind of random but alas lol). And Grace and Rocky working together is a bit like saying humans and AI will need to work together to tackle "the world's biggest problems." AI's/ Rocky might be really smart and technologically advanced and all, but they still need humans. This is palatable for movie-goers.

so then Project Hail Mary could be read with far more cultural significance than one might initially think. It would mark the end of the wave of tech-critical, pessimistic movies and move the pendulum back towards techno-optimist movies. It's still far too early to make that claim, but PHM toes that perfect line of not being directly about technology but more about scientific thinking and problem-solving, that unique feel-good feeling from a time when we were more optimistic about the potential of technology.

I liked the movie, it feels good to see a feel-good movie. But it's either highly anachronistic, or it's marking a really interesting shift. I guess time will tell.

To be clear, I don't think the directors necessarily set out to make an AI movie, I am more so describing that the way this movie is landing with us at these times signals: a) a desire for less depressing movies b) an underlying desire we all have for a hail mary that solves all the bad shit happening and perhaps even c) that this hail mary could be AI.

whatever the case, definitely an enjoyable movie, although it dragged on a bit long.