‘Project Hail Mary’ Knows Empathy Isn’t a Sin

During a global press conference for Project Hail Mary, director Chris Miller explained that when he and his co-director, Phil Lord, make films, they’re not “building Macs”—Apple’s slick, impenetrable white computers.—they’re making PCs: films where “you can see how it works, you can get into it, and you can see the wires.” This PC aesthetic is apparent in watching the film, a sumptuous visual feast with awe-inspiring cinematography and frenetic editing. But this exposed- wire philosophy also drives the plot and heart of Project Hail Mary—a story of duct tape, musical chords, and the hard, holy necessity of empathy. 

Based on the bestselling novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary introduces us to Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling, making a case for being the most capable physical comedian of his generation), a dorky middle school teacher drafted to save Earth from “astrophage,” a microscopic star-plague eating the sun. If Grace cannot find a cure, humanity will go extinct within a generation. Our only hope lies more than 11 light-years away, at the one star immune to the infection.

Grace is way out of his depth—he’s much more at home explaining photosynthesis than piloting a starship. But Grace is humanity’s only hope. And yes, his name matters: In a universe of cold physics, he must find the “grace” to navigate a connection he never planned to make.

Project Hail Mary truly ignites when Grace encounters Rocky, an alien whose own star suffers from the same infection. They are fellow travelers in a shared catastrophe, forced into the same desperate math of survival. Rocky is a five-legged rock creature who communicates through musical chords. During the press conference, author Andy Weir highlighted the challenge of this portrayal, noting that the movie’s success rested on “making a faceless, eyeless, seemingly emotionless rock into a character that you’re willing to die for.” 

The film tracks the painstaking process of these two beings learning to understand each other. They don’t just exchange data; they build a relational connection. Grace must imagine how a creature without eyes perceives a dying sun. This isn’t a magical translation; it is a grind of trial and error, a refusal to let the silence win. 

Grace’s radical empathy arrives on screen at a time when a specific corner of the American church begins to label empathy a “sin.” Theologian Joe Rigney set off a firestorm of controversy last year with his book, The Sin of Empathy. Rigney, a fellow at the far-right New Saint Andrews College (founded by Doug Wilson, who romanticizes American chattel slavery and pastors so-called Secretary of War Pete Hegseth), characterizes the act of entering another person’s emotional world as a dangerous compromise. Rigney believes empathy has value only to a point. In an interview with Al Mohler, he said, “The reason empathy in particular, I think is so dangerous is because it’s about the sharing of passions. You feel something and then I feel something and whatever you feel I need to feel and I get kind of sucked in and you lose a sense of boundaries, a sense of identity, a sense of what’s good and what’s bad, because the feelings and the emotions are now in charge and running the show.”

READ: No, Empathy Is Not a Sin

Rigney doesn’t offer any usable metric for measuring when emotions are running the show, save for his personal theological framework. He frames empathy as a danger that clouds objective footing, requiring a detached, clinical distance from the Other. His favorite metaphor for the danger of empathy is one cribbed from C. S. Lewis: A person who shows empathy dives into water to rescue a drowning person, rather than staying safely on the shore and offering a hand.  

Project Hail Mary illustrates the foolishness of this metaphor. Empathy isn’t a trap that leads to the loss of truth; empathy provides the only path toward truth. Without leaving Earth to risk the journey, Grace wouldn’t have encountered Rocky, a being whose complementary knowledge and abilities provide their only hope of success. Unless Grace can imagine himself into Rocky’s world, he remains a solitary man in a cold tube, waiting for the end. By choosing to feel with Rocky—a being whose home is freezing just as fast as Earth—Grace has a shot at saving the galaxy from becoming a silent graveyard. Neither of them can find the truth of the astrophage on their own. As Grace observes at one point, “Together, we’re pretty smart.” Grace doesn’t find truth in detached observation, but in the vulnerable architecture of kinship.

Unless Ryland Grace can imagine himself into Rocky’s world, he remains a solitary man in a cold tube, waiting for the end.

This kinship mirrors the model of Jesus. In his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul argues that we no longer regard anyone from a “human point of view” (2 Corinthians 5:16). Jesus didn’t maintain a clinical distance from our wreckage in the name of holiness; rather, he entered into our sin—Paul literally says that the one who knew no sin “became sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Jesus’ approach to empathy is decidedly more PC than Mac—guts on the outside, a God who allowed his own body to break so the signal of liberation could reach us.  

This degree of empathy requires a deep commitment to see the Other as a person. Project Hail Mary hinges on Grace’s believable camaraderie with Rocky. James Ortiz’s puppetry of Rocky achieves a profound physical presence that defies its own artifice. The connection between Gosling and the puppet generates what Lord and Miller call “craughing”—that moment when an audience laughs and cries simultaneously. We weep for the friendship of a rock creature and laugh at a dorky teacher’s vulnerability, realizing that our survival depends on our willingness to let someone we don’t understand move us. As Lord remarked, the film is fundamentally about “how much we need each other.” 

Ryland Grace proves that we aren’t just here to survive; we are here to listen to each other’s song. Ultimately, we don’t save the world through the safety of distance; we save the world through the incarnate work of grace.