Full spoilers below for Project Hail Mary, now in theaters.
Project Hail Mary opened last week, and it has a bit of everything that makes people love going to the movies: Ryan Gosling charming his way through outer space, an adorable alien sidekick, stunning visuals, and sci-fi spectacle galore. But the scene that struck me the most was one planted firmly on Earth: a lone woman standing in front of her peers, earnestly belting out the 2017 pop banger “Sign of the Times.”
The scene comes in the run-up to a planet-saving space mission in which a crew of astronauts is sent millions of miles away to find a cure for a dying Sun. It’s obviously a stressful endeavor, one that ensnares some of the most talented and intelligent minds in the entire world. Leading that effort is Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a pragmatic government bureaucrat tasked with putting a team together that will save humanity. There’s a lot of planning, impossible science to solve, and arms to twist to get that ship (literally) off the ground. Stratt has to be pragmatic, dogmatic, and unsparing in her pursuit, which is what makes the karaoke scene so jarring.
In a break from the strain of figuring out a way to prevent the Sun from going dark, Stratt and her colleagues take a brief moment to knock back a few beers and sing some tunes. Stratt, who thus far has been resolute with regard to the task at hand, stands before her colleagues and lets loose on Harry Styles’s pop anthem. The scene may seem a bit out of place at first but is actually perfect for the moment. And it shows why Hüller is the absolute MVP of the movie.
Perhaps known best for her double whammy performances in 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, Hüller is perfectly cast as Stratt. In scene after scene, she puts on a clinic in how to portray a character that’s at once abrasive and sympathetic. She plays Stratt as someone you absolutely want to hate but just can’t because deep-down you’re relieved she’s there, cracking skulls and making sure the mission stays on track.
As Stratt, Hüller often earns that sympathy with simply a look, often directed toward Gosling’s reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace. You sometimes disagree with the methods she uses to achieve her goal, but you can’t hate her. After all, the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. Never is this more evident than when, after a catastrophic accident that killed some of the Hail Mary team, Stratt attempts to dragoon Grace into leaving Earth and joining the crew. It’s a one-way mission and she’s basically asking him to sacrifice himself for the greater good. Grace demures with a mealy-mouthed excuse and, well, that’s where things get interesting.
In the movie’s big twist, we discover that Grace, who woke up at the beginning of the movie with a pretty bad case of amnesia and slowly regains his memories, was physically compelled (read: drugged) by Stratt and forced onto the mission against his will. She basically sent him to die, and yet we don’t hate her for it. Cut back to Hüller-as-Stratt performing “Sign of the Times.”
In our 8/10 review of Project Hail Mary, IGN’s Tom Jorgensen noted that he felt the movie didn’t invest quite enough in the Stratt character to make moments like the karaoke performance resonate, but I disagree. (Sorry, Tom!) We may not get a lot of Stratt’s back story or many big character moments in the first part of the movie, but the karaoke scene and Hüller’s performance are most valuable for what comes after, not before.
Without that scene, Stratt’s “betrayal” of Grace would seem infinitely more barbaric and simple. She’d just be a run-of-the-mill government baddie condemning our likeable hero to death. Instead, Hüller’s nuanced portrayal of Stratt makes her damn-the-torpedoes treatment of Grace more understandable and heartbreaking and supports the overarching hope and optimism of the movie.
