SF's Way Home: Project Hail Mary and Nolan's The Odyssey
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Spoilers for the endings and central revelations of Project Hail Mary, Interstellar, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. This essay also discusses Oppenheimer, Homer's Odyssey, nuclear weapons, and the harm caused by war.
After watching Project Hail Mary, I felt that science fiction had come back to cinema. Rocky is the monolith. Except this monolith answers back.
Interstellar had taken SF about as far as it could go. Project Hail Mary works back through that achievement to the era of 2001: A Space Odyssey, bringing the genre home from its role as a forecast of scientific possibility. That feeling becomes clearer when I look at how each director approaches unfamiliar intelligence.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed Project Hail Mary, adapting Andy Weir's novel.1 Set beside Kubrick and Nolan, Lord and Miller offer a different way of getting close to unfamiliar intelligence. Rocky and Grace watch each other move, learn words, and sustain a conversation whose timing is always a little off. I want to place the time made for those exchanges alongside these directors' work.
That also brings me back to Nolan's decision to follow Oppenheimer with The Odyssey. Cinema reaches the edge of the future and turns back toward an ancient voyage. Somewhere along that return journey, there is also a way to think about AI development now.
Kubrick and the intelligence that does not answer
In Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, a bone thrown into the air becomes a spacecraft in a cut. A body learning to use a tool and humanity venturing into space are joined by a single edit. The rotating ships and the movements of people inside them seem to show us the routines of a life that has yet to arrive. For a film made in 1968, calling itself 2001 carried the force of giving the future a visible form.2
Yet the monolith offers no instructions for that future. Its black surface appears at moments when humanity moves into another stage, without explaining what is happening in human language. The precise depiction of space shares the film with an encounter that resists explanation. Its title was already A Space Odyssey. A mythical voyage was there inside the scientific vision from the start.
Nolan returns from the limits of the universe to a daughter's room
Christopher Nolan's Interstellar seems to push both impulses to their limits. The work of visualizing a black hole actually contributed to a research paper on gravitational lensing.3 Making space look plausible and investigating space came unusually close together.
Still, the film's climactic journey leads to a daughter's room and a bookshelf. A father who has traveled far away is trying, somehow, to get a message to her. After expanding space and time, the story folds back into one room.
By “as far as it could go,” I do not mean that science fiction was finished. I mean that it is hard to enlarge that particular combination: making the limits of the universe visible, then returning from those limits to a parent and child. A more distant star or a more complicated theory will not necessarily take a film further.
Lord and Miller's Project Hail Mary brings unfamiliar intelligence closer. Waiting for a reply from someone in the same space becomes enough to make the next moment matter.
Lord and Miller make the monolith a companion
The red spacecraft and the way the cuts connect made me feel that 2001 was very much on the filmmakers' minds. Cinematographer Greig Fraser has also named 2001 and Interstellar among the films whose elements informed the work.4 Rocky enters that visual memory.
His stony appearance is only part of why I want to call him the monolith. An encounter with intelligence beyond humanity changes what a human being does. Rocky occupies that place in the story.
Facing the monolith in 2001, humans seem to be touching something greater than themselves. Rocky, too, has abilities and knowledge that humans lack. But there are things he does not know, and he needs help. Grace cannot simply remain the one receiving knowledge.
They cannot even breathe the same air. Across a transparent partition, they connect sounds to meanings and read one another's gestures. Friendship grows through the work of handling their differences. The scenes in which they learn to understand an unfamiliar intelligence are also scenes about finding a way to live together.
Gosling's body and Rocky's movements give these exchanges their timing. Reach out, watch the reaction, get an answer slightly different from the one expected. The small mismatch becomes funny. Lord and Miller have said that Gosling needed an actual scene partner, and that Rocky was made through a combination of puppetry and CG.5 What sustains this performance between two characters is the way each response changes the next movement, more than the purity of any technique.
Inside images that recall 2001, the relationship with the unknown has changed. The time spent looking up at something that does not speak becomes time spent waiting for an answer. That is what I want to call a return to cinema. The Rocky–monolith comparison is my reading of what happens here, rather than an explanation supplied by the filmmakers.
Of course, Interstellar already had banter with TARS and an intimacy that exceeded its scientific explanations. The silence of 2001 was also time that only cinema could make. These three films do not form a ladder of progress. Lord and Miller shift the emphasis toward exchanges and gestures.
Some viewers may feel that turning the unknown into an amiable companion costs it some of its strangeness. In exchange, the film transforms the hope of being told the universe's secrets into the desire not to leave someone behind.
What Nolan looks at in Oppenheimer
Following Nolan from Interstellar to Oppenheimer, the focus moves from people trying to understand the universe to a person who has helped create the power to change the world.
In Oppenheimer, a gap opens between an experiment's success and what that success brings into the world. Nolan himself has identified the transition from Trinity to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as central to the film.6 Proving that something can be made does not leave the scientist in control of how it will be used, or settle responsibility for what follows.
If we try to fill that gap with the maker's anguish alone, the lives of those harmed recede into a backdrop for the maker's inner life. Deeper regret does not necessarily mean greater accountability. The tragedy of intelligence contains an unequal relationship between those who decide and those who live with the decision.
The book on which Oppenheimer is based is called American Prometheus.7 It uses the name of the figure who brings humanity fire to frame a scientist's work and its cost. Here, too, Nolan works where science and myth overlap.
Once the fire is ours, how do we live in a world that contains it?
Nolan's scientist and today's AI developers
Nuclear development and frontier AI development, which pushes the leading edge of AI capabilities, resemble each other in the organizations that produce their power. The Manhattan Project did not happen only inside scientists' heads. It brought the military, industry, enormous facilities, and a vast workforce into a secret undertaking.8 AI development, too, has become a physical enterprise that turns research ideas into computing infrastructure and infrastructure into capabilities. Anthropic's 2025 announcement of plans to invest $50 billion in American computing infrastructure offers one measure of the scale.9
Competition for resources and secrecy intended to keep results from rivals narrow who can judge the technology. Once the reasoning becomes “We must have it before they do,” awareness of danger can itself become an argument for pressing ahead. What makes sense for an organization racing to acquire capabilities begins to diverge from what makes sense for the society that must live with them.
That gap appears in the developers' own documents. Explaining its safety policy revision in February 2026, Anthropic described uncertainty in assessing whether models had crossed risk thresholds, and limits to the stronger safeguards a company could implement alone.10 This is the company's own account. Even so, it shows the distance between recognizing danger and being able to change the course of the competition.
The Manhattan Project was a wartime state weapons program. Frontier models are general-purpose technologies that private companies also sell commercially, with uses unlike those of nuclear weapons. Expecting a single moment equivalent to an explosion could obscure the way power spreads through everyday deployments and updates. To me, the resemblance lies more in the distance between those able to create a power and those affected by it than in the form a catastrophe might take.
Developers themselves now also assume the role of forecasting the future. Dario Amodei opened his January 2026 essay with the question posed in Contact: how did an alien civilization survive its technological adolescence without destroying itself?11 SF is also a language through which people inside technological development place their own work in a larger story.
That makes the story of a genius opening the future and then fearing their own creation insufficient. Enthusiasts and alarmed observers can share the premise that this person holds humanity's fate. There is no need to dismiss a developer's distress as false. But whether that person can sleep and whether others can challenge how the technology is used are separate questions.
People who did not create a technology also need ways to ask what has been checked, change the terms of its use, and stop or correct it when something goes wrong. In a 2023 interview, Nolan warned that treating AI as godlike could let humans evade responsibility for their actions.12 Good intentions and regret alone cannot close this distance.
Nor can friendship with Rocky become a simple argument for trusting AI. AI is technology designed by people and supplied by organizations, rather than a living visitor from a distant planet. Still, the film's movement from looking up at unfamiliar intelligence as a revelation to working out the terms of a relationship offers a way to think. Acquiring intelligence does not remove the need to wait for someone else's answer.
Then Nolan chooses The Odyssey
After Oppenheimer, Nolan chose The Odyssey. I want to hold off on judging the adaptation itself and consider Homer's poem and the decision to turn to it.13
Place the two stories side by side as accounts of men trying to return from the wounds of war, and PTSD provides one way to read them. Those wounds deserve attention. But that reading alone cannot account for the question of power between the films.
Odysseus does not stand only among those wounded by war. He also belongs among the minds that produced victory, having made the stratagem of the Trojan Horse succeed.13 The ingenuity that helps end a war does not necessarily bring its bearer back to ordinary life. His connection with Oppenheimer lies in more than suffering: each has helped make a means of changing the world work.
He loses his companions on the voyage, while time passes in his household. Penelope and Telemachus are not people suspended in place for a returning hero. Those who wait have lives that are being worn away.
Interstellar also contained this asymmetry of time. The traveler's journey and the years of those left behind do not match. Returning cannot simply restore the arrangement that existed at departure. Exchange the spaceship for a ship at sea and the age of the story becomes visible.
Homer's Odyssey does not end with a homecoming that heals everything either. In the poem, the killing of the suitors leads to another round of vengeance, and Athena finally stops the fighting.14 Bringing home the power that wins battles does not automatically bring peace.
Read together, the stories make homecoming look less like recovering an uninjured self than finding the conditions under which a person who possesses power can live among others. This is a question I take from the sequence of films, not an account of Nolan's motives.
From Prometheus to Odysseus: Nolan's move can be read as passing a question between myths, rather than leaving science for mythology. A story about someone coming home also contains those who waited and kept living through that person's absence. We can move our attention from the achievement and suffering of whoever acquired the fire to those who live in a world where the fire now exists.
Nolan returns to the word Kubrick placed in the title of 2001: odyssey. Follow the line that stretched into the future back to its source, and alongside “How far can we go?” there is another question: “Who can we live with when we return?”
Returning to myth does not mean giving up on science or abandoning technology. Nolan filmed this ancient voyage entirely with IMAX film cameras.13 The tools are still changing. An old story offers another way to ask what those tools are for. That seems close to the way Project Hail Mary turns scientific problems into exchanges between two characters.
In Lord and Miller's universe, a teacher again
Back to Lord and Miller's Project Hail Mary. Near the end, Grace turns around to help Rocky instead of continuing his own journey home. The film eventually leaves him teaching alien children.15
An abstract duty to humanity is not all that sustains this choice. Someone with whom he has shared all those exchanges is stranded out there. Going back for a friend is a familiar gesture in cinema. Here it carries the story across the distance between stars.
There is no need to declare the possibility of returning to Earth permanently closed. Yet the image of homecoming the film leaves is more than a restoration of the scenery before departure. In someone else's world, Grace has a place where he can teach and receive answers. Instead of transcending the universe, he is a teacher again.
When I previously wrote about the film's yellow coat, I was interested in memories of color and costume that escape explanations of the premise. This time, what remains is the time a film gives us to want a little more conversation with someone on the other side of a partition.
I think Rocky is the monolith. Contact with intelligence beyond humanity changes where a life is going. But what follows need not be only a leap into another species. From across the partition comes another answer.
Footnotes
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Project Hail Mary's official Japanese site, for director, author, and cast credits. ↩
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BFI's introduction to 2001, used to check the year and scenes. The Rocky–monolith comparison is this essay's interpretation. ↩
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Oliver James et al., Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar, 2015. A paper by participants in the production, not a guarantee that every depiction in the film is scientifically established. ↩
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ABC's interview with Greig Fraser, March 21, 2026. Fraser discusses drawing on both films. The connections between particular red images and cuts, and the Rocky–monolith comparison, remain the viewer's interpretation here. ↩
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Lord and Miller's DGA discussion, April 19, 2026. Their account of the need for a scene partner and the combination of puppetry and CG. ↩
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NPR / Fresh Air's Nolan interview, carried by GPB, August 15, 2023, on the turn from the successful experiment to the weapon's use. ↩
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Penguin Random House's listing for the book by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. ↩
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The US Department of Energy's history of the Manhattan Project, for its organization, facilities, and secrecy. ↩
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Anthropic's investment announcement, November 12, 2025. The amount describes an announced plan, not money already spent or facilities already completed. ↩
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Anthropic's explanation of Responsible Scaling Policy version 3, February 24, 2026, on uncertainty in capability assessment and the limits of unilateral measures. A company statement is not an independent safety assessment. ↩
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Dario Amodei, The Adolescence of Technology, January 2026. The reference here concerns its opening use of a film. Its projections of future capabilities and timelines are not treated as accomplished facts. ↩
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WIRED's interview with Nolan, June 20, 2023. ↩
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The Odyssey's official Japanese site and AP's interview with Nolan, July 9, 2026, for the adaptation and filming format. The argument about homecoming draws on the poem and the sequence of films. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Homer, Odyssey, Book XXIV, translated by Samuel Butler. This essay uses the Greek name Athena. It is describing the poem's ending, not the final scenes of Nolan's adaptation. ↩
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This is the film's ending. TechRadar's account was also used to check the return to rescue Rocky and the alien classroom. Details from the novel have not been transferred to the film. ↩