SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
A big part of what makes Project Hail Mary (both the movie and Andy Weir's superb novel) such a satisfying story is seeing characters confronted with conflicts and work methodically and intelligently to solve them. Alien microbe eating the sun? Figure out what it is and why it's doing what it's doing. Find a distant sun that's unaffected by said microbe? Find a way to travel there. Find the microbe's predator but need to adjust its atmospheric tolerances? Perform selective breeding experiments. Like The Martian (also sourced to Weir), it makes hard science compelling, cool… and sometimes a bit weird.
