not sure how well i'm going to articulate this but something i really appreciate about project hail mary is that it takes what's a fairly common scifi trope of presenting you with a body that has been deemed "expendable" and asks you, as an audience, to get to know it better; engage with it, and determine whether it has a claim to personhood and the rights and free will to make its own choices that come with that. except, most of the time, the body in question belongs to an android, or a clone, or some other kind of synthetic being that resembles a human, or at least shares a number of traits we consider definitive of "humanity", and the role (well, one of many) of the audience is to assess its capacity for humanity and award or deny it personhood accordingly. can we relate to this being enough to humanise it? can we resist the external and internal influences that encourage us to objectify? what is it that makes us "human" and therefore worthy of dignity and respect?
project hail mary, on the other hand, presents you with someone who has been reduced to an object; had their rights violated and their memories and life experiences - the formative parts of what many people would agree make us who we are - stripped from them, voided of context, and asks you to consider the much harder question: is this still a person? because, in the world that we live in, governed by the interests and value systems we frequently take for granted as necessary, many people in the world endure experiences not dissimilar to what grace did on a daily basis. are they human enough for you to care? what would it take to make them worthy of that compassion, that attachment, that dignity? if you got to know them even a little; if you spent enough time with them - let's say a couple of hours, or about the average length of a film - could you still justify letting it happen to yourself? could you still bear to look away?
it doesn't do a perfect job, of course. no work of art will ever be the answer to all of our social problems, much less a hollywood blockbuster. but it's still a valuable idea to be confronting people with. it still matters that the question was asked.
