With Artemis 11 venturing deeper into space than ever before, I was inspired. The closest thing I could do to feel part of the action was to go see the new Ryan Gosling movie, Project Hail Mary. As I sat in the dark theatre with my popcorn I observed the trajectory of the film’s protagonist, Rylan Grace, who awakens on an interstellar spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. He was clearly on a hero’s journey.
When I work with clients to assist them in developing personal stories that will captivate their audience’s attention, we often discuss mythologist Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he identified a universal narrative pattern – departure, initiation, and return – shared by myths worldwide that heavily influence modern storytelling – with George Lucas’s Star Wars as a primary example.
And now we have Project Hail Mary as another clear example. (Warning, spoiler alert, for those of you who have not seen it). Here’s how the Rylan Grace’s journey unfolds:
Ordinary world: Before the mission, he is a junior high science teacher and former biologist, living a small, grounded life.
Call to adventure: The “Petrova problem” and the discovery of Astrophage threaten Earth with a potential ice age, prompting the desperate interstellar mission.
Refusal of the call: Grace explicitly does not want a suicide mission; he tries to back out and is only sent after being effectively coerced and drugged by Stratt.
Crossing the threshold / belly of the whale: He wakes from a coma with amnesia aboard the Hail Mary, isolated in deep space with two dead crewmates, literally sealed inside the “world of adventure.”
Once he’s “inside” the adventure, the initiation phase is classic road-of-trials:
Road of trials: He survives alone, solves one scientific puzzle after another about Astrophage, the ship, and the Tau Ceti system.
Allies and helpers: The key ally is Rocky, the Eridian engineer whose own star is threatened by the same organism; their collaboration becomes the emotional core of the story.
Apotheosis / ultimate boon: Together they discover a workable solution that can save both Earth and Erid, achieving the “boon” of knowledge essential to their worlds’ survival.
The return portion is where the director plays most with expectations:
Initially, the mission is designed as a one‑way trip, so the classic “refusal to return” is baked in: there is no return.
After Rocky’s extra fuel makes a trip home possible, Grace gains a path back to Earth with the data—the standard hero’s return with the elixir.
Then he chooses to turn around again and sacrifice his own chance at going home to save Rocky and Erid, embracing self‑sacrifice in a way that echoes the “ultimate sacrifice/apotheosis” beat more than a neat homecoming.
In many hero’s‑journey stories, “master of two worlds” means the hero returns home transformed. Here, Grace ends up living among the Eridians after saving them, having fully crossed into the “other world” and gained a kind of new, adopted home instead of returning to his original one. That’s a twist, but thematically it still reflects transformation, service to others, and a new equilibrium.
It is sometimes hard to imagine ourselves as a “hero” but keep in mind that the hero is not defined by physical strength or fame but rather by a specific psychological and spiritual transformation. And what I love about this storytelling methodology is that every one of us has experienced our own version of the hero’s journey. We all have had moment where we are moving through our lives when we suddenly hear the “call” – we face a challenge and we need to decide if we will confront it or run away from it.
Think about a moment in your life when you heard the call and faced the challenge. What did you learn – about yourself, others, or the world at large. Those are the life lessons worth sharing.
