Biomechie

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.