something that i find very fascinating as far as project hail mary goes is this contrast between the book and the movie in portrayals of kindness and humanity. this is gonna get long, but it's been haunting me for like three weeks at this point so you're coming on this journey with me.
so phm, the book, is of course a story about hope, and humanity, and connection. but it's also a tragedy. it's about the stark reality of the situation it presents. obviously there's the mathematics, the physics, the hard numbers, but beyond that, there is a strong focus in the narrative on how dire it actually is to be on a planet when your star is dying. we have subplots focusing on a climatologist who is utterly haunted by the impending ecological collapse, which he himself is willingly complicit in worsening, and simultaneously on a man who is quite happy to be profiting off the destruction of a mind-bogglingly massive swathe of unique ecosystem. of course a movie can't contain every facet of a book with so many characters and narrative beats, but i find it interesting not just what the movie chose to cut, but what it chose to explicitly change.
phm, the movie, is not just about hope and humanity and connection, it's about love. it's about kindness. it's about the unspoken and wordless ways we make connections with one another, lessen the burdens of one another. and it does this via quiet visuals but also by blatantly defying things presented in its original source material. i wanna talk about those changes, why they work, why they so profoundly alter the tone and the overall feel of the story.
some obvious changes from the book i want to touch on:
-carl, easily one of the best additions to the movie. he is almost certainly an extrapolation and fleshing out of a minor side character in the novel, steve the army guy, the only person in the book who we see show grace genuine kindness without expecting anything in return. now, carl of course has an agenda that steve the army guy did not, but his presence allows grace to have a human connection that he otherwise entirely lacks during his time studying the astrophage. he serves a narrative purpose of showing that grace (and people, more generally) operates better when having someone with him, someone who can offer a unique perspective, someone who can make this not just the grim and exhausting work of saving the sun, but something fun and joyous.
-the "don't go crazy" room. this is just the most notable of all the ways in which the hail mary itself is changed from the book, but it really highlights how profound those changes are. in the book, the hail mary is three rooms: dormitory, lab, cockpit. they have only the absolute barest essentials for their mission and not a milligram more. it gives the impression that the crew are expected to come out of their comas, spend all of their available time performing their duties, prep the beetles, and immediately end their lives. no thought is given to their mental and emotional wellbeing, with the coma explicitly only being a point to begin with not as a kindness or a way to save food or fuel but to prevent the crew from killing each other during the four year journey. the only reason grace has entertainment in movies, books, and video games is because it was easier to give them every available piece of media than to take time and choose what out of all of human knowledge might be relevant for the mission. but in the movie, the hail mary isn't just a mission machine, it's portrayed and treated as the place where these three people are going to live out the remainder of their lives. there's a mental health node, music and beautiful imagery of earth, the ship itself has a conflict resolution program (a simple and unhelpful one, but an attempt was made!) where in the book the ship explicitly has no plants or seeds, in the movie there is an entire grow rack of little seedlings, presumably for both food AND crew wellness! the crew are provided not just with uniforms but with their own clothes, allowance to be comfortable and garbed in the familiar, in pieces of home. the crew, even grace, were heroes, beloved by those who created the ship, beloved by earth, and treated with all the kindness that could be afforded them.
-armando. this to me is something the movie chose to include that the book just plain got wrong for not having. this is humanity distilled. armando has a name. in the book, grace thinks very little of the ship. he makes occasional comments about the ship's computer lacking intelligence. he dismissively refers to the robotic arms as "nannybot", but otherwise the ship factors very little in his thoughts and feelings. in the movie, they are his companions. and it's so obvious that this would be the case! grace is utterly alone, of course he is going to form an emotional attachment to the only things that respond and react to him. he addresses the ship by name, mary, he names and anthropomorphizes armando, he takes the time to get mary to acknowledge rocky by name once he becomes part of her crew. humans on earth will name and baby talk their roombas and thank siri, of course grace would do the same.
-stratt. honestly i could write another entire essay about just the differences in book!stratt vs movie!stratt but i'm going to try and just stick to the highlights. movie!stratt loves the project, and earth, SO MUCH. she doesn't show it in obvious ways, she's quiet and awkward and very german, but god does it leak out at every possible opportunity. not just with her kindness in how she treats grace, but in how she treats the team, how she talks to people who aren't grace. THE KARAOKE SCENE AAAAAAA. excuse me. honestly the beat that just sums it all up is the difference in the scene where she tells grace he's the third scientist. book!stratt plainly telling him he was only kept around because he was coma-resistant and was their second backup all along (which, we can argue all day about if she was lying there or not, that's not really the point here), versus movie!stratt just as plainly telling him he is smart and capable of doing this, that he is her choice for this because she believes in him.
-one last very minor one: grace's belongings. in the book, grace has nothing. in the nine days between the deaths of dubois and shapiro and the mission launch, no changes are made to the ship's cargo. dubois' nitrogen and effects are still aboard, and grace is sent to the ship with nothing. meanwhile, in the movie, there are only three days between the explosion and launch, but time was still taken to pack grace's things and get them onto the ship. an unspoken and unexpected kindness.
i don't think of this as taking a hard stance that the movie is better than the book, or the book is worse for not having these things. i think you could have a very interesting discussion about weir's assumptions bleeding into the writing and about authorial intent, but i'm not approaching this as a matter of better or worse. the book and the movie are telling the same story, with the same themes, but the book chooses to focus more on realism, on the (very human!) "ugly" side of things, while the movie chooses to place its focus on hope. for me, personally, feeling somewhat awash in gritty dystopian sci-fi, i feel a much more profound connection to the movie's interpretation.
hey i’m not good at social media management or whatever and i don’t wanna make a whole big post but uh
so my friends and i wrote a book. like a real book that’s published and everything. it comes out june 20th. it’s called the falcon files, it’s a steampunk noir detective story that is fundamentally about hope and found family. it’d mean a lot to me if you guys read it. here’s a link to the goodreads
something i think is super interesting in the pristine cut is how it really gets into the nuances of the voices, specifically how the voices can go bad. we do see some of this in the original routes, of course, but the additional context and opportunities granted by the new routes and dialogue make it just so much more of a fascinating subject.
namely, none of the voices are fit to be in charge. we know some of them aren't, obviously, with the broken in particular just overtly fucking you over on more than one occasion, but it's not just the "bad" voices that are capable of being a problem if left unchecked. the cage shows how the skeptic sabotages your efforts by refusing to accept the logic of the world. princess and the dragon shows the opportunist will do literally anything to end up on top, including killing YOU. the hunted, who previously was one of the more grounded voices interested in keeping you alive and aware of your surroundings, goes completely feral and violent once given a taste of predatory behavior while fighting the den. even the smitten, largely considered harmless comedic relief, hurts everyone in single-minded pursuit of what he thinks is the perfect ending. of the voices, only the hero is never shown to fuck you over, but he's far too passive and easily overpowered by the other, more insistent voices.
much like how the princesses are only part of the shifting mound, the voices are only part of the long quiet. alone, they're just incomplete fragments, with equally incomplete and flawed ideas of what they want and what to do. "they are only perspectives. they are not me."
overall the pristine cut does so much cool shit to really drive home how similar the long quiet and the shifting mound are, that they are a single being that was messily split in two. quiet and the princess are reflections of each other, each bringing their own perspectives into this relationship, but no single voice and no single perspective gives the full story.
it’s so unbelievably fucked up that we have now two generations that were told over and over again to go into medicine, to go into nursing, that nursing was a strong career choice, "you can get work anywhere, everywhere wants more nurses". so tons of people, almost entirely women, went into nursing and completely overfilled the programs, straining the resources and reducing their quality of education. and then when they get those nursing jobs they’re paid like shit to work inhumane hours doing unglamorous work they have no passion for despite how much they insisted they "love helping people" (a lie to everyone including themselves).
so now the medical field is overrun with nurses who are burnt out, bitter, and taking it out on the vulnerable people they have power over
frankly the best thing a roguelike youtuber can be is kind of shit at roguelikes because you'll be watching them like "oh my fucking god, can you even read, that item was perfect for your build what is WRONG with you" and it makes you so mad you buy the game yourself and go get that particular synergy to prove how dumb the youtuber was being. brilliant marketing strategy, honestly.
