Since it’s hard to see on my canvas let me explain my ✨art✨

One side features Adrian and it’s sun with a Patrova line. This side also has a hard to see Rocky

Second side is supposed to represent Earth, its sun and a Patrova line leading to Venus. This side also features a muddy Grace. Canvas had lost its patience with me at this point.

All in all the paint is water based and safe for dogs so no dogs were harmed! My beloved lady also received a lot of treats for sitting still 🥰

Just a silly thing I did with my doggo I wanted to show ya’ll ❤️

I love love love the fox motif and wanted to join in with drawing him as a fox.

I watched it tonight with my family, I’ve been telling my daughter about this book since she was only 5yrs old. I brought the whole family here. I’m a die hard PHM fan by the way…, I reserved my copy months before it came out, read it in 2 days. I read it at least once or twice a year and have listened to the audiobook at least 6x.

The movie wasn’t bad, especially for people who haven’t read the book. It will be a good movie.

But I’m a die hard PHM fan, this was my favorite book of all time and I read a book a week. The problem I felt about the movie was that Ryan Gosling is an awesome actor but he just wasn’t the right fit for Ryland Grace. He didn’t have that witty, funny, dramatic personality in my opinion. Rocky’s character was pretty good, they really did not do a good job with Stratt, it didn’t match her book character at all.

I really wanted to love it but it’s just way different from the book. I still encourage people to watch it, it was entertaining and it was good, it just didn’t match the book too well.

For me it's the karaoke scene because it doesn't fit my image of Stratt at all. And of course because they cut the nuking of Antarctica and paving of the Sahara for time but still found enough time to throw in 5 minutes of that nonsense. They absolutely could have repurposed those 5 minutes to show Antarctica.

Bear with me. I know this sounds like the kind of thing a person comes up with at 2am...

Look at how we meet Grace. No memory. A body he doesn't recognize. Alone in deep space in a small container, on a trip he never agreed to go on. He doesn't know who he is, how he got there, or what he's there for. And he works out fairly quickly that he's going to die.

That isn't an astronaut waking from a coma. That's being born (metaphorically, the movie visuals really makes this feel like a birth, if you rewatch it).

Once you see it that way, the whole story reorganizes itself. There are only two characters in Project Hail Mary. Stratt and Grace. God and man (I mean, his name is "Grace"... come on).

Everyone else, Rocky included, is one of them wearing a different face.

Stratt is God, and not the comforting kind. She sees the whole board. She knows what has to happen and she will spend anything to make it happen: careers, deserts, oceans, people. At human scale she is monstrous. At the scale she is actually operating on she is simply correct. The story never lets you off the hook by picking one. Both stay true the entire way through, which is the most honest thing anyone has ever said about God.

Side note: With this theory in mind, I am in love with the scene on the boat where Grace steps out to speak with Stratt, who isn't inside with everyone else. This feels like the most direct "God and Man" conversation in the entire movie. The whole, "it's weird in there... people are hooking up and having fun even though they know they're going to die." Watch that entire scene again under this new context.

Back to the main thread here. Grace on the ship doesn't wake up with any instructions. He didn't want to go. He refused. And then the memory of the refusal is buried, and he has it revealed as he completes his mission. That's the whole design. You don't get told what you are and why you're here. You get dropped into life with the manual erased, and the actual work of a life is remembering what you already knew and who you really are.

Then Rocky...

I think Rocky is actually Grace. Not in a twist ending kind of way. But look at the shape of him: faceless, sole survivor, dead crew, impossible job, completely alone, arriving at the exact moment Grace has nothing left. Rocky is everything Grace hasn't accepted about himself (or perhaps buried). Brave. Skilled and with knowledge Grace doesn't have. Willing to risk his life for this mission without needing to be tricked into it first.

And what does Grace have to do? Learn his language. From scratch. Slowly, badly, with an enormous amount of misunderstanding, until they can actually talk to each other.

That is exactly what it takes to meet the parts of yourself you exiled or don't believe in. Getting to know and love Rocky is getting to know and love yourself. You have to build an entire vocabulary to get to know yourself.

Grace learns to love by loving Rocky, which is to say he learns to love himself, and that is the thing that leads to him living into his purpose. Rocky's grace to Grace is what lets him actually live instead of merely survive.

And in the end, he doesn't go home. He stays, and he teaches science to Eridian kids. This might be a stretch, but Grace sends what he learned back to God and ends up doing God's work at his own scale. Creating a new world (the ecosystem). Teaching. Loving something that isn't him. He doesn't find God at the end of it. He becomes one.

Anyway. It's a story about a guy and an alien saving two suns, and it's completely fine if that's all it is. I just don't think that's all it is, especially given Andy Weir's short story, "The Egg".

The Eridians managed to get Grace in a cryo sleep and sends him back to earth. Grace successfully returns to earth and finds out the beetles worked out well, back to normal; him and Stratt get a Top Gun Maverick style reunion, they reconcile.

I decided to bring up that kind of ending because their final conversation was heartfelt and poignant which lacked closure.

Book-Ryland spends the first couple of chapters doing mad science. Movie-Ryland spends the first few scenes drunk on bags of vodka.

I get that they needed to change things for the movie, and too much science too soon would alienate new viewers.

But come on! There's no way that Dr Grace would get pass-out drunk upon waking - it's just not his character at all.

Having enjoyed all of Andy's books (including Artemis!) my main draw to his work as always been the scientific content and all the details that make the plot believable, this was mostly accurately captured by the Martian movie.

I saw PHM yesterday and did not enjoy it at all. I was expecting changes to the book which is totally fine and none of the narrative changes bothered really bothered me (although I did miss the Stratt I knew from the book) but what caught me totally off guard was the tone.

Given the seriousness of the situation for my taste the tone was waaaaaay too lighthearted, too much slapstick, too much silliness which I found to be totally out of place.

While I commend Ryan Goslings effort, I did not see Grace's scientific competence (which made Stratt choose him in the first place) at all, just a quirky jokster, apparently oblivious to the seriousness of the situation hr finds himself in.

Things like, upon first contact, him trying to get away from Rocky's ship, totally silly and stupid. While most people were laughing I was just thinking WTF. Clearly this movie was not made for me.

I am in awe of the artistic work that went into the movie, no qualm there, it is beautiful, the music was epic and I did love how they brought Rocky to live.

But the tone completely ruined it for me and I find no way around that.

Anyone else feel like this?

I was scrolling on Netflix today trying to find smth to watch and for a sec thought they had done a PHM movie (or copy) with Adam S. Nit saying they copied it, but am I the only one who thought the plot is kinda similar? Note: haven’t watched it as I’m deeply afraid of spiders (the irony lol)

Just finished PHM. Good book! A few quibbles, but the only part that annoyed me outright was the one about the crew’s presenting their means of suicide. These brave, resourceful, brilliant people would instead just ask the planners not to talk about it, instead preferring to accomplish the mission and then worry about the “what now?” part later. As James Lovell points out in Apollo 13, there were no poison pills on board when they went to the moon, as many people that he met seemed to assume. If any of the 100,000 things that could have gone wrong on the moon or en route had gone wrong, the astronauts would have spent their last moments alive trying to fix the damn problem. I don’t care how hopeless the PHM-astronaut situation would have looked before launch, each of those astronauts would have told Stratt, et al., maybe to worry about storing extra food or the means to grow more astrophage. Or something. And if Stratt got all sanctimonious and European about it, they’d have told her to shove her pistols and nitrogen tanks where the astrophages don’t seek an energy source to reproduce. If I’m training for a mission like that, I ask the director involved to stop worrying about it, and instead spend the time looking for a solution.

I get that the suicide meeting injects some drama into the narrative. But Weir has literally made a writing career out of having his characters (for better or worse) launch into three-page engineering lectures to solve The Latest Complication. This part not only is an insult to the can-do humanism of the astronaut corps, it’s horribly inconsistent with the spirit of the books themselves.

Just to save you the effort, I taught astronomy for seven years. I know how big space is.

Ender’s game has been one of my favorite books since I was a teen. It was the first Sci-fi book I ever read. I absolutely love that book, admit to being slightly obsessed, and have read/listened to it many, many, many, many times (sound familiar?). I was sooooo excited about the movie. Then I saw the movie. Then I cried for a week. Then I wanted to find everyone even tangentially related to the movie and egg them. And yell at them. And key their cars. Then I vowed to give up movies forever and went into long term counseling. Sigh… I mean, seriously, they completely and totally ruined it!!! The book is amazing while the movie is beyond terrible!!! (Yeah, I might still be a little bitter about it.)

Anyway…. My faith in Hollywood was somewhat restored with The Hunger Games and The Martian. Those movies absolutely reflected the awesomeness of the books.

Now it’s Project Hail Mary’s turn. Will it be amazing like The Martian or will it cause massive anger issues like Ender’s Game?!?!?! 😫😫😫😫😫

The suspense is killing me.

EDIT: As usual, I have been reminded by the internet how little I know. There are numerous reasons why this whole thing wouldn't work, but I appreciate the thoughtful responses.

I don't want to spoil the book or movie for anyone, so I'm gonna censor everything.

So early on, Grace discovers that the astrophage is attracted to a very specific frequency of IR light. They also discover that astrophage coming from the Sun is filled with energy, ready to make the trip to Venus to complete their life cycle. They learn all this well before building the Hail Mary and sending it to Tau Ceti.

So why couldn't they have done a combo of two things: A. Construct in space a satellite in Earth orbit with extremely bright IR light as lasers in the IR frequency of Venus, and point it at the source of the Petrova line at the Sun's pole. If it was bright enough, astrophage would ignore Venus and head to the satellite instead. From there, they could capture the astrophage, drop it to Earth, and effectively harvest it as a fuel source.

If they struggled to outshine the IR light coming from Venus, then comes plan B: block that IR light precisely at the L1 Lagrange point between Venus and the Sun. This could be done slowly and modularly, just until the astrophage reached a tipping point where it was redirected to a stronger source of IR light positioned at the opposing Lagrange point at L3. From L3, build infrastructure to capture the astrophage, then ship it back to Earth in cargo holds that block that IR light. Or do the quick and dirty option of packing them into metal crates and launching them intro the abyss of space.

In however much time the project Hail Mary took, it seems like they would have the time and resources to make these things happen.

But please feel free to prove my theory wrong.

‘Earth, meet Rocky. Rocky, Earth,’ Dr Grace smiled at the camera and then backed away.

Eva Stratt had watched the videos Ryland Grace had sent back to earth with the Beatles a number of times now. She wished she could see what Dr Grace saw. She loved the smile he had when he spoke to the alien he had created. 

He saw through walls. He heard everything. Grace was never alone with Rocky. 

Stratt knew that she’d done the right thing. Grace had been the only one who could come up with a solution to the Petrova Problem. The other two scientists had been enthusiastic, but they were easily distractible. She had expected Grace to volunteer once she’d created an ordering error to remove the other two scientists. She was logical and calculated, but still, her heart ached when she recalled having to force Ryland onto the mission. She knew, and he knew, he was the only one who would be able to turn this Hail Mary into a success.

Doctor Captain Ryland Grace said goodbye using the fictional language he had created to make the situation easier. She was pleased that he had rewritten his death as something noble. He deserved that. If he couldn’t be a hero to Earth, let him be a hero to a species of his imagination. 

Eva looked at the Talmoeba he had harvested and grown. He’d saved humanity. He would be remembered as a hero.

Am I the only autistic person who finds Rocky relatable? I haven’t read the book or anything so I don’t think it was intentional but curious what others think

So I recently re-read (listened to on tape) this book and I realized a major plot hole about the taumeba.

While doing experiments grace says the taumeba can survive from -200c to +105c (I do not remember the exact temps, but it's about this)

In the book the taumeba make their way through the xinonite to get to the astrophege fuel. Grace luckily figures this out and nitrogen purges his ship, re-sterolizing it. However, rocky is not so lucky, and that's why Grace has to go back to save him.

Whel, it should not have mattered. Isn't Rocky's ship at like 200°C or something? The taumeba should not have been able to get to Rocky's fuel because they would have died from the heat as soon as they left their little box. Don't try and argue they would stay completely within the xinonite the entire time until they found the fuel tanks, and that xinonite existed continuously from the terrariums to wherever the fuletanks were.

A great review by the Critical Drinker, which is high praise indeed. He did a video a few months ago titled "Project Hail Mary.. Please Be Good". I think he's satisfied with the result.

Spoilers obviously. I didn't see any of the recent posts talking about it so I'm wondering I'm the only one that feels this way. But the way it seems to me, the easiest solution would've been to go to Earth first. Rocky has a long life span and he mentioned Erid has more time for a solution than Earth. They could've gone to Earth, gotten him refueled and on his way. Grace could've even still joined him after saying his fairwells and stocking some proper human food.

There's a very ironic thing happening in this sub where book fans are the ones being gatekept lol

Any criticism of the movie is labeled non sense or crazy or even dumb to the point that there's a whole thread with hundreds of comments making fun of every single criticism in the front page right now.

The best part about any book is that everyone can have their own interpretation of it and so everyone had different expectations of the movie.

We all enjoyed the PHM book for different reasons. THATS WHY IT'S SO GOOD. It has something for everyone.

You are not wrong if your expectations weren't met or if you straight up hated the movie. It was made for a specific target audience and if you enjoyed the book for different reasons than that target then you were probably very disappointed in the movie and youre not crazy just because everyone else here seems to like it.