Project Hail Mary Changes a Dark Moment from the Book
The Project Hail Mary movie avoids a queasy moment from the end of Andy Weir's book.
This article contains Project Hail Mary spoilers.
At the end of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s crowdpleasing sci-fi movie Project Hail Mary, Rylan Grace (Ryan Gosling) has to make a difficult decision: go back to Earth along with his Taumoeba organism samples and reunite with his fellow humans, or track down his new alien friend Rocky and warn him about a xenonite leak that will lead to fatal consequences for Rocky and his entire race.
Given how close Grace has become with Rocky, it doesn’t feel like a very difficult choice. Grace launches the Hail Mary’s beetle probes and charts a course for Rocky’s ship, understanding that he probably won’t be able to survive much longer. The final piece of Grace’s past and his cowardly decision to reject a place on the Hail Mary are revealed as he realizes once again that he is capable of bravery and self-sacrifice after all.
But in the film’s closing moments, we see that everything has turned out surprisingly okay for Grace on Rocky’s home planet, Erid, where the Eridians have built him a biodome so he can survive in an environment with a high-pressure, ammonia-heavy atmosphere. Grace lives out his days on a pleasant beach, cloaked in the fog he loves, knowing that beyond the dome lies only the darkness of Erid and the appreciation of the aliens he helped save. Rocky starts to discuss options for sending Grace home, but it’s clear he’s content to stay and teach science to the kids on Erid.
It’s an upbeat ending that would have been slightly darker if the movie, like the book, had revealed how Grace was surviving without human food. The Eridians have gone the extra mile in Andy Weir’s tome, helping to produce synthetic vitamins to keep him nourished, but also cloning his muscle tissue in a lab so he can eat meat patties called “me-burgers.” That’s right, Grace is also technically eating himself to stay alive.
Project Hail Mary is pretty faithful to Weir’s bestselling book, but you can understand why the filmmakers chose to leave this particularly dark twist on the page. It would be a very odd piece of information to process during the movie’s joyous conclusion. But hey, some might suggest that eating yourself is much less dark than eating another living creature for sustenance!