What does courage mean in your own life if heroism does not arrive as a choice but as a crisis that drags you forward before you feel ready?

That is the question that stayed with me after Project Hail Mary. Okay, okay. I am know I am late to the review, but they just released the film on streaming last week.

The movie’s plot is not only about saving humanity from impending disaster. It is about a person who had to be forced into heroism before he could recognize the hero still living inside him. That idea feels relevant because many of us do not step into courage willingly at first. We are often pulled into the moment by fear or duty or love or responsibility.

Ryland Grace, played by Ryan Gosling, is not introduced as the kind of hero we usually expect in a Hollywood blockbuster. He is not fearless. He is not eager to carry the fate of the world on his shoulders. He is brilliant but wounded. He is funny but unsure. He is capable but reluctant. That reluctance makes him more interesting character in the film because he does not seem to believe he belongs in the center of a situation this large and important. He feels like someone who may have once imagined a bigger life for himself. Now he seems to be living with the quiet suspicion that his greatest contribution may already be behind him.

Maybe his “I had potential” shirt that he wore towards the middle of the film, also shown in the main photo for this post, captures the character perfectly. On one level, it is a science joke about potential energy. A joke that my Stanford roommate from the College of Engineering explained to me when I asked. On another level, it is a quiet confession about disappointment.

Grace seems like someone who once had promise and may believe he missed his moment. The shirt is funny because it is self-deprecating. It is also sad because so many people understand what it means to wonder whether their best chance has already passed. That is why the shirt lands as more than a clever bit of costuming. It tells us something about the wounded human underneath his humor.

A Hero Dragged into Courage

What makes Project Hail Mary powerful is that it challenges the idea that potential belongs only to the ready or chosen or the confident or the already successful. Sometimes potential waits under regret and it survives beneath ordinary routines. Sometimes it hides inside people who have stopped expecting life to ask something meaningful of them. Sometimes it does not appear until life gives you a situation you would never have chosen. Dr. Grace becomes heroic in the film not because he wanted the mission. He becomes heroic because the mission finds him and gives him no easy way out.

That is a different kind of heroism than the one we usually celebrate. It is not the heroism of Indiana Jones swagger or certainty. It is not the heroism of a Kennedy who always knew they were destined for greatness. It is the heroism of someone who rises slowly. It is the courage of a person who keeps going even while fear is present.

Grace wakes up confused and afraid and then the circumstances that got him there slowly come back to him. Then he begins to think. He observes. He tests. He fails. He tries again because that is what the moment requires. The emotional power of the movie for our everyday lives comes from that tension. Grace had to be dragged into being a savior. That may be one of the most honest versions of courage because often people do not feel ready when life asks something enormous of them. Most people are not waiting around hoping for a crisis. Many people would rather avoid the burden of the moment if they could. But sometimes the measure of a life is not whether we wanted the mission. It is whether we responded when the mission arrived.

The movie also reminds us that courage is not always solitary. Grace’s journey becomes powerful because of connection and trust. Even in the emptiness of space relationships matter. Survival is not only about intelligence. It is also about learning to trust someone else enough to imagine a more ideal future together. That part of the story keeps the film from becoming only a puzzle about hard science. It becomes a story about friendship and responsibility. It becomes a reminder that people often become brave because someone else is counting on them. Heroism is not always born in isolation. Sometimes it is born in relationship.

Conclusion: Why I Bought the Shirt

That is why the movie stays with you after the spectacle fades. The film is asking us in the subtext whether we can still become the people the moment needs us to be. What responsibility are we avoiding because we do not feel ready? What opportunity are we minimizing because we think our potential has passed? What crisis or calling might be dragging us toward a version of ourselves we have not yet met? Those questions are uncomfortable because they move the story out of space and into our own lives, into the moment we are living. They ask us to stop seeing heroism as something reserved for Hollywood films. They ask us to consider whether courage might be waiting inside the very places where we feel most uncertain.

Maybe that is why I bought the “I had potential” shirt. There is something deeply human about admitting that we may need to be dragged toward courage. Most of us like to imagine we would choose the heroic path with clarity and confidence. But real life is often messier than that. We hesitate. We doubt. We bargain with the moment. I have spoken previously about moments I wish I had been more courageous. We wonder why the burden has come to us. Dr. Grace’s journey matters because it does not shame that hesitation. It simply shows that hesitation does not have to be the end of the story. A reluctant person can still become a necessary person.

Returning to the conversation with my Stanford roommate. Maybe the science of the shirt is the point. In physics, potential is not the same thing as failure. Potential is stored capacity. It is energy that has not yet become motion. It can sit quietly inside an object, unseen and unused, until the conditions change. A rock at the edge of a cliff has gravitational potential. A battery has chemical potential. A person standing at the edge of fear may have moral potential. The question is not whether the potential existed in the past. The question is what force, crisis, love, friendship, duty, or calling will finally convert it into action.

Maybe that is what the shirt means in the end. “I had potential” sounds like a joke about something already lost. But the science says something more hopeful. Potential is not gone simply because it has not yet been released. It may be waiting for pressure. Waiting for purpose. Waiting for the right collision between who we are and what the world needs. Maybe potential is not a past tense word after all. Maybe it is something life can call forward when the stakes become high enough. Maybe courage is not always the thing we choose first… it is what we discover after being dragged to the edge of ourselves and realizing we can still step in and make a difference.

I give Project Hail Mary ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ out of 5 stars.

NEW: If you’d like to hear me read the post, you can find the audio version on my Substack here.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar, former provost and dean, and public commentator whose work explores leadership, equity, social justice, and the ways institutions shape human lives. He approaches film with the same analytical lens he brings to education and public policy, viewing cinema not simply as entertainment but as a space where questions of identity, responsibility, science, courage, and moral choice are explored. That perspective was shaped during his undergraduate years at the University of Michigan by Professor Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado, who taught him to read film as social critique, historical argument, and an inquiry into the human condition. Whether writing about Project Hail Mary or contemporary public issues, Julian is interested in how stories illuminate the choices individuals and societies make when the stakes are high, and how those choices reveal the potential we still carry within us.