Project Hail Mary Movie Reflection
- Dr. Heather Wellman
- Aug 5
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 11
Twenty-one years into a relationship, I did not expect a new discovery. But somewhere in the southwest Colorado desert, my partner and I found one. It started with a book. I first experienced Project Hail Mary flat on my back after eye surgery, isolated in a windowless basement with every light off. The story of an astronaut who wakes up alone, with no memory, tasked with saving humanity from extinction, felt less like sci-fi and more like a very personal study in isolation.
I loved the book enough to push my partner to experience it, too. He is do-er. A problem solver. He does not read fiction. Our children and I are avid readers who discuss books obsessively, and when a film adaptation comes out, we see the first showing. My partner has always been present for this, loving and engaged, but always sitting just outside of it.
Then on a camping trip, we got lost. We were left with a six hour drive home. It was already midnight, there was no moon, and we were driving through the desert. We were not having a good time, and needed a distraction. He relented and agreed to listen to the audiobook. He was hooked.
After we saw the film adaptation together, he turned to me and said, "Is this why you and the kids always have so much to talk about after a movie?" Yes. That is exactly why.
Later he said something that stopped me in my tracks: "I feel like I understood something about you and the kids that I have been missing for twenty-one years." He has always been around. Gone to all the movies. He was present for all the activities all these years, but he missed something essential because he didn’t see the value in the full scope of the activities, and he was unwilling to change his approach.
That is the ultimate life lesson.
In the story, Ryland Grace is so isolated he cannot remember his own identity. He reassembles himself through his relationship with Rocky, an alien he has no existing framework to understand. Grace isn’t passive in his rediscovering. He engages with himself through radical curiosity about someone completely unlike him. The breakthrough they eventually reach only happens because Rocky and Grace build trust and lean into their differences.
Diversity of thought is a requirement for solving complex problems. But the practice only works when leaders are genuinely curious about the people around them.
What I see most often in organizations are leaders who are well-intentioned, stretched thin, and quietly incurious. They aren’t hostile to difference, but they are too busy to pursue it. That incuriosity is invisible and exceptionally costly both the bottom line and to morale.
My partner was present for our whole lives and still discovered something entirely new when he changed his entry point. Your team members are present every single day, and you are too. The question is whether you are fully inside the experience with them or merely adjacent to it.
Discovery does not end with a degree, title, or familiarity. It is an active practice that requires a willingness to step into the dark to find a new way.
I hope you enjoy the reflection and it makes you think deeper about yourself!
Talk soon,
Heather
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