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

In Project Hail Mary, Ryan Gosling plays a middle school science teacher who is sent to space on a suicide mission against his will. He meets an alien he nicknames ‘Rocky’, and the two learn to communicate, discover they’re both the sole survivors of their missions, and join forces to save their species from a life form that is eating their respective suns, “astrophage”.

When they discover the only star that is immune to astrophage is near a planet that contains its natural predator, Rocky repeatedly exclaims, “Life is the reason!”. The biological finding is the reason they will save their people, the reason they will get to go home, the reason everyone gets to live. But in reality death is the reason. The sole catalyst that holds every character’s plot line, motivations, and growth trajectory together. 

The film is the perfect memento mori, a reminder that we too must die, that life’s temporary and illusive nature is at its core, also our biggest reason for living, and it’s this concept, that, like astrophage, is the jet fuel that will propel you into The Year of the Fire Horse.

2025 was The Year of the Snake. A year in which everything that no longer serves you is meant to be shed, like a snake’s skin. The thing about things that no longer serve us, is that they are still familiar, and sometimes familiar is more comfortable than the unknown. The devil you know, right? 

Gosling’s character, Ryland Grace, knows the earth will die, knows humankind is doomed, knows working on this problem with top secret clearance has become his life’s purpose, but he still refuses to leave everything he knows behind to join the suicide mission. The powers that be drug him and put him on the spaceship anyway. 

The Year of the Snake doesn’t ask for our permission. Doesn’t care if we’re ready to leave the life we know behind yet or not. It plucks us from our routines, whether we’re a middle school teacher or not, and places us onto Spaceship 2026, The Year of the Fire Horse, a combination in Chinese astrology that only comes around every 60 years to propel us into unbridled, transformative growth and change.

When Grace wakes from his induced coma in outer space and discovers that his crew mates have died, he falls into a depression. The ordeal has fogged his memory, and he’s not fully aware of what has happened to him, or why he is there. It’s the perfect analogy for the emotional whiplash and grief people experience after great change or loss. 

Grace mourns his life on earth and his fate to die alone in space simultaneously, while drowning himself in the bags of vodka his Russian counterpart stowed away on the ship. But he doesn’t actually die alone. Meeting Rocky changes his entire trajectory. 

We too have to grieve the trajectories we leave behind with the Year of the Snake. The skins we thought we’d live in forever, be it a mindset, a value system, a relationship, or an identity. They represent versions of ourselves we were emotionally invested in that no longer exist in our realities. And when we lose a part of ourselves that is so deeply connected to our identity, we too can jump to our own worst conclusions. We don’t know who we are or how to live without them. We lie on our ego deathbeds wracked by fear, regret, shame, and guilt, paralyzed by our inability to integrate ourselves into our new reality. 

Until we meet our Rockys.

Sometimes it takes meeting someone who has gone through their own painful transformation to snap us out of our pity party. Someone who serves as a mirror, reflecting our own grief back to us in a way that allows us to finally see it clearly. Rocky does that for Grace, in the same way the film did it for me. 

The Year of the Snake made me realize my entire framework for life and decision making was one giant memento mori. When evaluating my relationships, my career, my “purpose” in life (if I even had one), I consistently found myself asking what I would regret on my deathbed, and lived my life in an attempt, like task force leader Eva Stratt, to anticipate negative outcomes early enough to avoid them. I told people how I really felt, I followed my heart, gave second chances more times than I could count, and processed the pain of that future regret now, while there was still time to do something about it. 

But the world is full of people who only live in the now. Who, like Grace at the beginning of the film, prioritize short term comfort no matter the long-term cost. The people who choose to run or hide from every problem or bad decision until the clock has literally run out, until the relationship or the opportunity or the potential now lies on a deathbed that was anything but inevitable. 

My grief was that incongruence, was knowing that not only was I going to die, but I was now going to live with the kind of irreversible regret I had dedicated my life to avoiding. Or so I thought, until Grace and Rocky’s selfless sacrifices brought on my movie epiphany. 

Realizing the other is in imminent danger, they each risk their own life to save the other. Rocky exposes himself to the oxygen in Grace’s spaceship, and Grace abandons his one chance to get home to earth once he realizes Rocky’s fuel tanks have been infected and will leave him stranded in space, condemned to a slow and painful death. 

We don’t need a galactic apocalypse to learn the true lesson of memento mori. Acknowledging our own mortality isn’t about avoiding regret or negative outcomes. Both are guaranteed to find us in a world where we only have control over our own actions. But the inevitability of our death is also our best reason to live. 

Grace didn’t know Rocky was out there, but he never would have found him had he not been forced to look. Had life not placed him on that rocket ship and sent him hurtling into outer space. When life takes us out of our comfort zone, when other people let the clocks run out, when the life we thought we were living comes to an irreversible end, we can’t sit in that regret and grief forever, because we are going to die. 

The speed, power, and ferocity of the Year of the Fire Horse represents the urgency of that truth. We have to go looking for the answers we need, now. For our Rockys, for the people who will reciprocate our short term risks and sacrifices in the pursuit of shared long-term benefits. Even if we don’t know if they’re out there, or where to find them. We only have this life, this time, however long may be left on the clock, to try. 

Life is not a cautionary tale where death is the deterrent. Death is the imperative, the obligation. We have to live our lives in a way we will be proud of, a way we can make peace with, a way that maximizes every opportunity for us to find happiness. And getting there requires us to leave behind all the ways that don’t. 

Memento mori is our Project Hail Mary. We have to take the long shots because our life depends on it.