Project Hail Mary Is The Perfect ‘Memento Mori’ For The Year Of The Fire Horse

In Project Hail MaryRyan Gosling plays a middle school science teacher who is sent into space on a suicidal mission against his will. He meets an alien he nicknames ‘Rocky’, and the two learn to communicate, discover that they are both the only survivors of their missions, and join forces to save their sun-eating life form, the “astrophage”.

When they find the only star that doesn’t block the astrophage is near the planet that contains its natural invader, Rocky repeatedly exclaims, “Life is a reason!”. The biological discovery is the reason they will save their people, the reason to return home, the reason for everyone to live. But in reality death is the reason. It’s the only catalyst that holds the line of each character’s plot, motivations, and way of growing together.

The movie is perfect memento moria reminder that we must also die, that the temporary and illusory nature of life is its basis, and our main reason for living, and it is this concept, that, like an astrophage, is the fuel of the plane that will propel you into the Year of the Fire Horse.

2025 was the Year of the Snake. A year when everything that no longer serves you must be shed like a snake’s skin. The thing about things that no longer work for us, is that they are still familiar, and sometimes familiarity is easier than unfamiliarity. The devil you know, right?

Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, knows that the world is going to die, he knows that humanity is going to be destroyed, he knows that working on this problem with a secret permit has become his life’s purpose, but he refuses to leave everything he knows to join a suicide mission. The intoxicating energy sent him into space anyway.

The Year of the Snake does not ask for our permission. It doesn’t matter if we are ready to leave life as we know it behind yet or not. It snaps us out of our routine, whether we’re middle school teachers or not, and puts us on Spaceship 2026, the Year of the Fire Horse, a combination of Chinese astrology that comes to an end every 60 years to propel us into wild, dynamic growth and change.

When Grace wakes up from her coma in space and discovers that her colleagues are dead, she becomes depressed. Grief has clouded his memory, and he doesn’t fully know what happened to him, or why he’s there. It’s a perfect analogy for the whiplash of emotions and grief that people experience after a major change or loss.

Grace mourns her life on earth and her fate of dying alone in space at the same time, while immersing herself in the vodka bags her Russian colleague has placed on the ship. But he this is not the case you actually die alone. Meeting Rocky changes his entire path.

We, too, must take responsibility for the roads we leave behind in the Year of the Snake. The skins we thought we would live in forever, be it a mindset, a value system, a relationship, or an identity. They represent versions of ourselves that we are emotionally invested in that no longer exist in our reality. And when we lose the part of us that is deeply connected to our identity, we too can jump to our worst conclusions. We don’t know who we are and how we can live without them. We lie on our deathbeds full of fear, regret, shame, and guilt, crippled by our inability to connect with our new reality.

Until we meet our Rocks.

Sometimes it takes meeting someone who has gone through their own painful transition to get us out of our sad rut. Someone who acts as a mirror, reflecting our grief back to us in a way that allows us to finally see it clearly. Rocky does that for Grace, the same way the movie did for me.

The Year of the Snake made me realize my whole life frame and decision making was one villain memento mori. When I examined my relationships, my work, my “purpose” in life (if I had one), I always found myself wondering what I would regret on my deathbed, and I lived my life trying, like the leader of the working group Eva Stratt, to anticipate negative consequences in advance to avoid them. I told people how I really felt, followed my heart, gave second chances more times than I could count, and processed the pain of those future regrets. nowthere is still time to do something about it.

But the world is full of such people only stay now. Who, like Grace at the beginning of the film, prioritizes short-term comfort regardless of long-term costs. People who choose to run or hide from every problem or bad decision until the clock has literally run out, until the relationship or opportunity or power is now on its inevitable deathbed.

My grief was that of inadequacy, it was knowing that not only was I going to die, but I was now living with the kind of irreversible regret I had devoted my life to avoiding. Or so I thought, until Grace and Rocky’s adventure brought about my movie epiphany.

Realizing that the other is in imminent danger, they each risk their lives to save the other. Rocky exposes himself to Grace’s atmospheric oxygen, and Grace throws away her one chance to get home to Earth when she realizes that Rocky’s fuel tanks are infected and will leave her stranded in space, doomed to a slow and painful death.

We don’t need a galactic apocalypse to learn the real lesson memento mori. Accepting our mortality is not about avoiding regrets or negative consequences. Both are guaranteed to land us in a world where we only have control over our actions. But the inevitability of our death is also ours best the reason for living.

Grace didn’t know Rocky was there, but she wouldn’t have found him if she hadn’t been forced to look. If only life hadn’t put him in that rocket ship and sent him into outer space. When life takes us out of our comfort zone, when other people let go of the clock, when the life we ​​thought we were living comes to an irreversible end, we cannot stay in that regret and sorrow forever, because we will die.

The speed, power, and ferocity of the Year of the Fire Horse represent the urgency of that reality. We must go looking for the answers we need, now. For our Rockys, for people who will repay our short-term risks and sacrifices in the pursuit of long-term shared benefits. Even if we don’t know if they exist, or where we can find them. We only have it this health, this time, no matter how long it may be left on the clock, to try.

Life is not a matter of warning when death is an obstacle. Death is an obligation, it is an obligation. We be to live our life in a way that we will be proud of, a way that we can make peace, a way that makes every possibility for us to find happiness. And getting there requires us to leave behind all the ways that don’t do that.

Memento mori ours Project Hail Mary. We be taking a long shot for our health it depends in it.