MY sisters insisted I watch Project Hail Mary. It was, they said, exactly the right film for dispiriting times. I finally watched it on the long flight home and they were right.
The title refers to the Hail Mary pass, the desperate last throw in American football when nothing else is left. The phrase itself comes from a prayer to Mary, or Maryam as we refer to her here, a plea to be rescued from above.
The film’s hero is a schoolteacher who wakes up alone in space, with no memory of how he got there and no great enthusiasm for dying to save the planet. He is not a soldier, a politician or a billionaire. He is frightened. He makes mistakes. He improvises. He does what ordinary people do when faced with an extraordinary problem: he deals with whatever is in front of him and hopes the next thing will be manageable.
Then he meets Rocky, an alien. At first they cannot even communicate. They have a different biology, different languages and different reasons for being where they are. Yet the heart of the film is not the rescue of Earth. It is two very different beings learning to trust each other. The world is not saved by one exceptional person. It is saved by cooperation.
Pakistan can feel like a place designed to exhaust hope.
I landed to find another flight was still dominating the news. Punjab’s chief minister, Maryam Nawaz, had used the provincial government’s aircraft to attend her daughter’s graduation in London. Faced with criticism, she said she had paid Rs27.5 million for the trip from her own pocket, that the plane belonged to the Chief Minister Office rather than to her, and that all four provincial chief ministers had one. She was not accountable, she said, to vloggers and YouTubers, but to God and the people.
She may well have paid. That is not really the point. What struck me was how she defended it. The plane, she said, belongs to the office, not to her. A chief minister’s time is valuable. Her critics are not really upset about the plane but about her work. All these arguments come down to the same idea: that she matters so much that making her journey easier is somehow a favour to the rest of us.
I suppose we too are meant to pray for a miracle. Many of us do, for someone else. At the moment, probably Imran Khan. His time in government was hardly a lesson in how to run a country. Yet even in custody he carries the hopes of millions who believe that, given one more chance, he alone could set everything right.
We are practised at this kind of hope. We look upward: to the prime minister, the chief minister, the general, the billionaire, the technocrat, the great leader who will finally arrive and sort everything out. The supporters of each believe their saviour is different. The critics of each are already waiting for the next one.
It is not hard to see why. Pakistan can feel like a place designed to exhaust hope.
There is always another political quarrel, economic worry or institutional failure waiting to consume the day. We watch the powerful fight over who controls the machinery while the rest of us wonder whether the machinery works at all.
Project Hail Mary offers a different fantasy. Not that a great person will save us, but that people will help one another. Its act of faith is not in human exceptionalism but in human usefulness. You don’t have to be extraordinary to matter. You don’t have to have the answers. You don’t even have to understand the person beside you. You only have to keep working on the problem together.
We have seen this at home. When a cable car snapped over a ravine in Battagram in 2023, leaving eight people hanging for 14 hours, it was local men who understood those wires, rigging a line in the dark, who brought them back. Nobody waited for a saviour. There wasn’t time. They worked with the police and the military.
None of this means leaders don’t matter. Governments, institutions and competence matter, and people with power carry responsibilities that ordinary citizens do not. That is precisely why it matters how they travel, and whom they believe they are serving. But no chief minister, prime minister or political dynasty can substitute for the millions of small acts of competence, decency and courage that keep a society running.
Ryland Grace does not save the world by becoming a messiah. He saves it by becoming useful. Perhaps that is the hope we could use here. Not that a hero is coming, on a government jet or otherwise, but that there are still people willing to look at the next impossible problem and say: all right, let’s figure this out.
The writer is a journalist and conducts writing workshops in Karachi.
X: @LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2026
