Listen can I be a sap for one sec? Can you hear me out?
Do you understand how much it meant to me that Stratt was never seen in anything other than comfy loose business clothes in the movie? Her every outfit is layers, loose pants, a turtleneck sweater, scarves. Ever article of clothing is about her comfort alone, literally not one bit of it serves any other function.
Do you understand how rare that is? What that means? To me and probably every other person who was raised to feel like their body was a display model only? Other characters that might have comfy outfits inevitably have this moment where they suddenly dress like a bombshell, like it's their debut as a romantic candidate.
But not Eva Stratt. She got to be interesting purely for the person she is. We got to see HER. Focus on her character and not her body. To this DAY it blows my mind. Every time I see her dressed this way that feeling of being bowled over by it renews.
Eva Stratt continues to take my breath away for all the right reasons. That woman is ethereal and I can say that about her character without every having known what her body even looks like. Thank god.
"If we blow the whistle on this," Eva murmurs, "we'll be killed."
"So we die," Hatch shrugs, rather matter-of-fact about it all. "Too many people gave their lives for this project. The U.N. can't just abandon it to flee Earth."
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WIP / AU explanation below
In this AU, both Project Hail Mary and the Quiet Rapture (from Iron Lung) happen in the same universe, 300 years apart from one another.
In the 2 decades between the HM's launch and the Beetles' return to Earth, Stratt needs to find a way to keep the worlds' leaders too busy to tear the world apart by way of war, so, along with Steve Hatch (an engineer from the book), she proposes a new space program "for redundancy."
This space program includes putting Astrophage production plants not on the Moon, as Hatch suggested in the book, but on Mars.
This program is exclusively meant to distract world leaders, and is not meant at all to be profitable or stretch beyond a 20 year lifespan.
Despite this expectation, the U.N.'s leaders develop a vested interest in Martian colonization following Hatch's discoveries regarding the ability to synthesize water using Astrophage-fuel (Astrofuel), and decide to dedicate 50% of the funds needed to finish Project Hail Mary to this program, instead.
Stratt protests, of course, but her pleads fall on deaf ears. There's no guarantee Earth will heal back to the way it was before the Petrova Line, and it's incredibly unlikely to happen within any of their lifetimes, anyway.
The few begin to see little profit in continuing to aid the many...especially when a clear option for a long, prosperous lifestyle is dangling right in front of them.
It's spoilers so I'm not going to say how, but hasty Martian colonization is what eventually leads to the Quiet Rapture happening 3 centuries down the line.
