Today I want to step away from systems architecture and transformation and write about something that has been a personal interest of mine for as long as I can remember.
Cinema.
I love films. I have spent years watching my way through decades of filmmaking, including works going back to the middle of the twentieth century. I have less time for it now, but time is not the only problem.
The other problem is that I am increasingly rarely surprised.
I often come away from contemporary spectacle feeling that a great deal of effort has gone into producing an experience and much less into finding something worth saying.
That is why Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, felt like such a welcome exception.
A hero whose strength is not a superpower
What I enjoyed most was not the scale of the story. It was the kind of person at its center.
Here is a protagonist whose defining quality is not invulnerability, destiny, or some supernatural gift. He is a scientifically minded person confronted with a situation far larger than himself.
He thinks. He improvises. He becomes frightened. He makes mistakes. He feels things. His intelligence does not eliminate his vulnerability; it exists alongside it.
That combination matters to me.
Popular culture is full of characters who solve problems through force, exceptional status, or an almost magical certainty about what they should do next. There is something refreshing about a story in which curiosity, reasoning, and ordinary human decency are allowed to carry real dramatic weight.
And the character is not presented as a remote genius who has somehow evolved beyond ordinary emotion. He remains recognizably human.
Craft without constant self-advertisement
The film also understands something I value in cinema: visual and musical choices should serve a moment rather than demand applause for themselves.
Some of its strongest sequences are carefully synchronized combinations of movement, sound, silence, and composition. I was particularly struck by the use of instrumental music and the way physical motion becomes part of a scene’s emotional rhythm.
There are moments when you stop noticing the production decisions because you are simply inside the experience.
That is what good direction does.
Humor and drama work together without constantly undermining one another. The larger science-fiction premise makes room for tenderness and uncertainty. Spectacle becomes the environment in which a human story unfolds, not a substitute for the story.
What I miss in much contemporary science fiction
My frustration with some recent big-budget films is not that they are commercially ambitious. Cinema has always been both art and industry.
It is that scale sometimes seems to become the entire proposition.
I felt that particularly strongly with the later Avatar films. Their technical achievement is obvious, but the experience left me asking what, beyond the impressive construction, I was meant to discover.
That is a subjective reaction, not a universal judgment. Many people will find more in those films than I did.
But Project Hail Mary reminded me that large-scale entertainment can still be driven by ideas, emotional intelligence, and characters worth caring about.
Cinema teaches us what to admire
Stories do more than occupy our attention.
They quietly shape our sense of which qualities deserve admiration: power, courage, loyalty, intelligence, cruelty, tenderness, ambition, sacrifice.
Films help establish the characters we imagine becoming, and the kinds of people we learn to recognize as heroes.
That is why I find the positive representation of a thoughtful, scientifically capable, imperfect person valuable in itself.
I am pleased when a popular film suggests that thinking is not an obstacle to being interesting.
It can be the very thing that makes a person worth watching.
I recommend Project Hail Mary. Not merely because it entertained me, but because it reminded me of what science fiction can do when it takes both intelligence and humanity seriously.
Filed underCulture & Worldviews
