i love love love how Project Hail Mary (the book at least the movie isn't out yet) handles Eva Stratt's morality. she wants to save the world and she will do whatever it takes...and the book does tackle how, if it's in the name of "the greater good", you can justify doing just about anything. Stratt did an absolutely terrible thing to Grace - but in the end, she was right. it saved the world. but also? Grace never forgives her! while it's pretty clear he wouldn't change anything in the end (it did save not just one but two worlds, and he met Rocky because of it), he never stops being pissed at her for what she did to him, and it's clear even she knows that she's crossing every ethical line there is. and even outside of Grace, this is a woman who nuked antarctica and wreaked havoc on the world's ecology - there are definitely people who died as a direct result of what she did. she knows that. but more people would've died if someone less ruthless, someone less pragmatic were in charge. and the fact that she fully accepts she'll probably be thrown in prison for every illegal and unethical action she took shows that she's not evil or heartless; she just won't let anything, including her own self-preservation, stop her from doing what she thinks will save the world.
i really love how Project Hail Mary takes "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" and "human rights are a thing and no one deserves to have theirs violated" and lets them coexist with no easy answer.
<insert animorphs ruthlessness quote here>
i feel like she's depicted as a little bit of a sociopath. not because she is, but because that kind of mindset might be the only way to do that job as well as she does. to look people in the eye and ask them to die for her. to work with leading scientists and make them go against their entire philosophy. to face the reality of 1/3 - 1/2 of the world's population dying if she doesn't do her job well enough
//one reaction I was watching, two people who knew the book really well and watched the movie together, pointed out that book-->movie changes that were actually really needed was humanizing Stratt and also making Yao and others more likeable because the movie would be less moving if they really portrayed them with the cold/dark characters they came across as. Book Stratt was perfect, but I also really liked that for Movie Stratt it was clearly very hard for her to send Grace, though there was no question she would. It made the movie much more relatable to the broader audience it needed to appeal to.
