Grace's line "I like to keep a wall up in my relationships anyways" (when he's recording his video diary about meeting Rocky and how they can't survive in each other's atmosphere) is so funny to me because... we see exactly the opposite during the whole movie. Even literally, a few times!
He keeps trying to break walls or ignore them, but it's never good enough, he's still not able to connect with people
When he's in the lab and all those people are observing him from outside (safely behind glass) he keeps talking to them and involving them ("You guys fired up?")
When he's back in the lab on his own, and Carl is sitting in the observation room, he talks to him until Carl becomes involved in the experiments and is literally no longer behind the glass anymore
There are two scenes on the boat where Grace is initially seen behind a glass partition (first the conversation between Stratt and Lokken about gravity, then when the astronauts arrive and Stratt introduces him to them) and both times he literally walks around the partition to join the group (not fully, in the first instance, but his body language and awkward fun fact suggest to me that he wants to)
And then - after the conversation when YƔo tells him "you just have to find someone to be brave for" we see Grace fall far behind the group - and for a moment the camera moves and we see him through a glass pane again. He's on the same side of the glass as the other people but he's not one of them in that moment
He tries to build a connection with Stratt ("Permission to come aboard, captain?") during the party but she rebuffs him ("Camaraderie helps them do their job, you know? Not so much me? Soā¦")
Ryland "I've made peace with it" / "I didn't mean any of that" Grace has never put up a wall in his relationships in his life. That's just something he'd say to explain why he's so often alone (he's the only person on his own at the party. And Stratt, of course, but she choose that, while he didn't - he went to talk to her after all). He doesn't want to keep people at a distance! He keeps trying to build a connection with them and it never works!
And then comes Rocky. The person he connects with the most. The person he ends up being brave for. The person who's always behind a wall of xenonite (except once, when Rocky breaks that barrier to save Grace's life at the risk of losing his own), a wall that he even helped build (so that Rocky could move into the Hail Mary), although the barrier keeps getting less and less rigid (from a wall to a ball to an atmosphere suit). The one barrier he can't break, the partition he can't open, but he keeps reaching out anyway (with fist bumps, with hugs, by drawing goggles on it in front of Rocky, by putting hats on Rocky's ball, by handing Rocky his little Earth ball) and Rocky reaches back! At last, someone reaches back!
And that huge grin at the end of the movie when Grace is teaching his Eridian students. Who are also separated from him by a xenonite barrier (obviously) but while it is visible, the camera doesn't focus on that. He's having the time of his life with them - he looks even happier than when he was with his human students at the beginning of the movie. He's living in this big bio-dome, physically isolated from the rest of the planet by a xenonite bubble. But he's finally found a place where he belongs and so the walls don't matter. The connection is there even with the walls still standing!!!
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