Do you guys think there was a bit where the Taumoeba leaked from the ship and Rocky just quietly accepted that he was going to die like the rest of his crew. Grace had helped him gain closure that he couldn’t have stopped the radiation sickness, but the breeder tank design was all Rocky’s doing. Erid and Earth and Grace—Rocky’s entire world—were going to die because he overlooked yet another detail. No one would know it was Rocky’s fault either—there would be nobody left to speculate who let the universe down.
Erid’s best engineer who killed himself with his own ignorance and brought the stars down with him. The damage, complete and thorough in it’s cosmic destruction, was done.
But then Ryland Grace shows up at blip-A’s door and says they’re going home, that it’s his turn to fix.
Things in the Project Hail Mary book that aren't in the movie that I think are delightful
Spoilers under the cut for the book
Stratt hires a climate change scientist and then nukes Antarctica and paves the Sahara desert and the scientist just sobs
Rocky calls Grace a leaky blob
Rocky thinks humans are crazy for doing EVAs
Stratt gets sued by Everyone for plagiarizing Everything
Grace gets scurvy
Grace drags Rocky back into his habitat after Rocky saves him, and he gets really bad burns from coming into contact with Rocky's atmosphere
Grace also power washes Rocky, but we don't talk about it
Rocky was orbiting Tau Ceti for 40 years before Grace came along
Rocky has anxiety about oxygen after he gets lit on fire by Grace's atmosphere
Rocky also has anxiety about Grace using the centrifuge because of how it almost killed him that one time
Grace also pulls that maneuver a few more times and repeatedly passes out (at least he doesn't get crushed by a metal chair after the first time, though)
During the confrontation with Grace and Stratt, Stratt calls Grace a coward and Grace says that Stratt is murdering him. Just much more aggressive language all around
Grace doesn't lose his memories from the coma; Stratt injects him with memory altering drugs. Her hope was that by the time he remembered, he'd either already be done, or he'd be in too deep to stop
Eridians don't know about relativity, which is said in the movie, but in the book Rocky talks about how he was basically running the ship alone with a faulty trajectory and STILL managed to make it to Tau Ceti
When taumoeba leaks into the Hail Mary's fuel, Grace immediately dismisses the possibility of Rocky's boxes failing because Rocky is such an incredible engineer
When Grace and Rocky separate, Grace does loser amounts of math to figure out how long he'll be able to see Rocky's ship
When Grace does something stupid, Rocky forces him to take a nap to be less stupid
Rocky doesn't have a voice, Grace just learns Eridian by using his laptop setup
Grace gets arthritis at the end from Erid's intense gravity
Grace also gets a slew of other diseases from malnutrition
He survives by eating taumoeba until the Eridians can figure out how to feed him
The Eridians feed Grace by synthesizing human meat. Grace calls them "me-burgers" and they're his favorite food
Rocky's blood is mercury and he eats toxic heavy metals
When Grace teaches Rocky about radiation, he gets Rocky to cover his side of the tunnel in astrophage to protect him. Rocky tells Grace to do the same, but Grace just lies and says that humans are immune to it. On the inside, he thinks that it doesn't matter if he gets cancer because he's going to die anyway :(
Rocky's ship is the first actual spaceship Eridians ever made. Rocky has to fix so many things on the way over, because they just have no experience with space travel
Rocky thinks it's really cool that Grace can see light, and he's a little jealous until the power goes out and Grace keeps blindly walking into things and Rocky is like "wow you are useless"
Honestly the book puts so much into perspective why Rocky is so grateful for Grace.
His species is a bit less advanced than humans, his spaceship keeps getting broken so he continously has to fix things, he is alone bc all his crewmates died, he has no idea about space physics, nuclear physics, anything except engineering. In the book he also says something like how all the smart science eridians died and he is not smart science eridian, he is only an engineer. He was completely alone for 40 years before Grace arrived, just imagine the stress and depression he must have felt - his species is on the brinck of extinction and he is alone, he is not a scientist, his ship continously needs repairs, he has no idea how to even study the petrove line. THERE WAS NO ONE TO WATCH HIM SLEEP FOR 40 YEARS WHILE HE WAS ALONE AND FAR FROM HOME.
it means so much to me that rocky's lead puppeteer james ortiz got to voice him and got like. full billing right next to ryan gosling in the opening credits. and he's gotten to do interviews and red carpet appearances and talk about puppetry and it's all being taken so seriously just like he's any other type of actor. gonna make me cry fr. like they could have gotten some famous person to be rocky's voice to try and pull more star power but. they went with the guy who acted him. and like of course they did. like there he is. how could they do anything else. he's right there and he's perfect
Can you imagine being stuck in space completely alone with only the corpses of your friends for company, and the first living thing you meet after 46 years of that misery is a fucking weird alien creature who just rolls up with crazy advanced tech and goes "hi let's work together" and makes it possible for you to save your world through the power of friendship and molecular biology. AND THEN you find out that in this creature's language, its name means "mercy". Happened to my good friend Rocky btw
grace, who has been alone for five minutes: oh my god. an alien! im not alone anymore! i hope he wants to be friends :)
rocky, coming up on 50 years of solitude, imprinting on grace in ways baby ducklings can only dream of: if you leave me to sleep where i can't watch your heart beat i am blowing up this tunnel with us both in it
I've been rewatching project hail mary so many times and i finally decided on my favorite line. Its when rocky tells grace he will give him astrophages for fuel.
In the movie he says:
"Rocky watch crew die, could not fix. Grace say Grace will die, Rocky fix."
For Rocky there is absolutely no doubt that he will fix this. He doesn't say "I can fix", which is - writing wise- the logical sentence to use after he says "could not fix", but he says "I fix". This is intended because for Rocky there is no other option - he will fix this, he will not let Grace die. No matter what Grace says, Rocky fixes. He doesn't even use the statement proposition, no future verb, just "fix", Rocky fixes, right then and there.
I love this little gimmick because we are missing so many Rocky moments from the book - like when he says he wants Grace to stay on Erid and not leave!!, so this gives a glimpse of just how important Grace is for Rocky, in the absence of other Rocky friendship declarations that we have in the book but not the movie.
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