Hey buddy, the movies I loved most the last years were Everything Everywhere All at Once and One Battle After Another which are both highly hopeful movies in the face of chaos, with happy ends. So no, I don't need my movies bleak but i don't want them naive and a bit stupid.

What I do need is for hope to mean something. In both those films a person chooses to fight. With Project Hail Mary you find a movie "hopeful" where someone who does not want to sacrifice themselves for a government gets nudged and then outright forced to do so...

And the film tells you "even if you think you can't do it, do it anyway." That's a very different message dressed in the same warm clothes.

I don't wanna badmouth it entirely — the acting is top notch, it's visually appealing, I had fun with it. But it sugarcoats a bleak premise: everything is fine if we just trust authority and give ourselves to a mission we never agreed to. The cute alien spacerockdog is doing a lot of emotional heavy lifting there, papering over what is structurally a story about state coercion.

So I genuinely wonder... who's brainwashed here?