We see Marissa in one scene only, and it's just a blurry outline of a person with no face. Grace doesn't remember that he had a friend before project hail mary, he doesn't remember her at all. There's no mention of Marissa by her name, there's no memories with her in it, there's nothing. It's like she just doesn't exist- except she does. We see her in this clip.
Grace lost the memory of his only friend he had before the project. Marissa doesn't know she's forgotten. I wonder if she thinks about Grace, if she wonders why he never said goodbye, why he never reached out. She will probably never know he lost his memory of her, and that she exists only as a blurry presence of another person in one memory.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i think maybe grace never fully remembers everything. like Giving Someone Amnesia is no joke and i think it would be cool and also worse if there were just time periods in his memory from pre hailmary that he just can't remember no matter how much he tries. and i think it eats at him a little that they took even some of the time he DID have on earth from him. and i think sometimes rocky asks him a question about himself that he KNOWS he should have an answer to but its just. not there.
tags from @insomniaruler you are SO correct and this is EXACTLY the kind of thing i was thinking of when i wrote this.like he just can't remember her. he tries and tries and he cant do it. he knows she drinks whiskey, she likes mint choc chip icecream, and he can't remember her name. he doesn't know what her hobbies were, who she was to him, why they knew each other. all he knows aside from a scattering of unconnected surface details is that she mattered to him enough for him to remember all those surface things once and he'll never know why.
do you think stratt oversaw it when they gave grace the amnesia drug. like bear with here im about to do some book and movie canon blendering. but in the film someone is sat in the room with grace watching over him for like a couple of frames when hes on the gurney. and in my heart thats stratt. but what if she was there when they were administering the amnesia drug. like hes already in a coma, and they've got it going into him via an iv, and shes sat in the room trying not to look at how fragile he looks laid out like that covered in medical equipment. and she cant find it in herself to hope that it means he doesnt remember her. like it would be undeniably better for the mission if he never actually has time to remember her because of the risk of him remembering everything else that comes with that. but at the same time she was one of the few people in his life and arguably the most important to him during his final years on earth. but if he only has what ilyukhina and yao tell him to go by, he might be one of the last three people who ever see her as anything but a villain or a scapegoat. BUT i think she would think that if there were some way to do it without risking him compromising the mission that he deserved to know what she did to him. that it was his right.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i like when eridians describe grace in other-worldly, incorporeal, eldritch ways. that he's beautiful and terrifying at the same time. a horror you can't look away from because you don't want to miss a thing.
you can never get a clear listen to him. his primary sense node is covered in "hair" and the part that isn't is hidden by two crystals that refract sound waves in a pleasing but disorienting way. he covers his body in billowy cloth at all times. not snug and sensible and unobstructive like eridian coverings, but loose and layered, draped and flowing.
the most clear part of him are his internal organs. because yes, the alien's carapace isn't sound-proof. his single heart beats insistingly in his core, his lungs exchanging gas constantly, his long digestive tract always bubbling and contracting. his thorax is packed impossibly tight and it's all moving and singing.
and it shouldn't be possible, with how fragile he is, for that internal pressure to maintain. how does the thin membrane of his external organ (another horror that sends eridians reeling) keep it all contained? his "skin" is so easily pierced, cut, bruised, burnt, how does he not split open under his own mass?
when savior rocky first arrived home and described the environmental needs of his alien, the scientists thought he'd made a mistake in his frantic panic to get everything out. it isn't possible this being lives at such low atmospheric pressure, at half the gravity, and in a gas that's nearly double the weight of ammonia. in a gas so dangerous, so caustic. and if it does then how is it obligately terrestrial like rocky claims? shouldn't it fly or float instead? (and then to see it in the water, learning that it can float or sink at will.)
and this alien has come bearing gifts that will not only save your species but launch it into impossible heights of technological and intellectual advancement. he has discovered the solution to astrophage and bred it to thrive on threeworld and translated his instructions into eridian. he has given your people the complete sum of his people's knowledge, advanced in ways the eridians can't believe and behind in ways that seem ludicrous. and he has given his life for your people to have these things.
he knows how your solar system was formed. he knows how the universe started.
his name means beautiful and generous and relieving.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
so the project hail mary ground team probably had communication with the ship for a little bit before it traveled out of range, right?
i’m talking video feed, microphone, and remote access to the care robot.
stratt watched the ISS crew assist yao and ilyukhina and a sedated grace prepare for their induced coma. she heard ilyukhina make a joke about waking up the most well rested she’s ever been in her life. she watched yao shake hands with the crew captain and thank them for their help. she watched the fate of humanity drift off to sleep, watched as the ISS crew wrote “good luck!” on the sleep pods, watched the hail mary detach from the ISS.
stratt checked the feeds almost obsessively. she would pull up the cameras and tap into the microphone, even though she saw no movement and heard no sound. she scrolled through health reports that she couldn’t understand. it became part of her routine. despite all her bravado, all her efforts to remain distant and detached, these people had become her friends.
and she had betrayed them all, in some way. grace most of all, yes, she had forced him on a mission he didn’t want to go on, had signed his life away to the stars for the sake of a dying star and a suffering planet, but she had also betrayed yao and ilyukhina, sending them on a mission without knowing that grace had said no. a lie of omission, but a lie nonetheless.
once the ship had cleared the requisite distance from the ISS and any satellites, the astrophage engines kicked on. the speed increased and with it the distance, which eventually led to delays in communication with the ship. the reports began to slow, delayed by a few hours, then days, then weeks. the video feed became glitchy before going dark. the mic feedback was nothing but static.
the hail mary became a ghost — something that was there but could not be seen or reached.
but perhaps most haunting of all was the last report ground control was able to receive:
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality
Anya is LIVE right now
FREE
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
i do love the twizzler behind the ear in the box constructing scene but it does quietly horrify me that grace takes it out from behind his ear and eats it without taking his gloves off. like as far as i've encountered (and all my research experience is in astrophysics or material physics so i haven't encountered much) there is no reason why you would wear gloves that would make it safe to eat while wearing them. either you're wearing them to protect yourself (med/chem/vet/bio/etc) or you're wearing them to protect the research (materials/lasers/electronics/etc) and either way you dont want your gloves touching your food (residue or contamination) or anything that goes in your mouth.
solution: grace is just so used to teaching middle school science (where if its anything like it was for me the gloves and safety glasses are a formality to teach the kids lab safety before they start working with anything thats actually harmful) that he forgot you cant just eat while wearing gloves and then keep working without swapping gloves
This is a follow-up to "I am losing my mind over the lighting of the Hail Mary," which I wrote pretty much to set context and argue It Really Is That Deep. Going into this, I am assuming you also believe the way lighting is used in PHM is intentional.
(Note: My screencaps come from a specific leak of PHM that is shockingly HQ but does have desaturation issues. I've done a HSV Saturation run on several images but not all of them. My screencap folder is like +300 items now and there's only so many hours in the day. If I could buy this on blu-ray TODAY I would.)
Sooooo... what's up with Grace and rainbows, question?
In Grace's very first flashback/recovered memory, one of the first things we see is a ring of light, rainbow. When he finally remembers being betrayed and put onto the Hail Mary against his will, this memory is triggered by the refracting light in Rocky's ship connecting to the rainbow overhead on the day he tried to run.
Refracted light is practically Grace's thumbprint smudged onto every corner of the story, the narrative voice in prismatic form. It truly reaches drinking game levels of ubiquity.
When Stratt first meets Grace, he just happens to be draped in a cloak of rainbow light. More subtly, but still obviously once you're looking for it, when he arrives on the aircraft carrier, he brings along a small halo of colored light.
At its most subtle, it comes from glass. Every time the camera implicitly slides into Rocky's POV, settling over his shoulder to observe Grace through xenonite glass, there are coronas to be found, touching Grace at all times. In the Clock Bros scene, when Grace leans in to observe Rocky's eridian clock, a smudge of refraction just happens to pop up. I cannot emphasize enough how no frame of this movie is safe from the rainbow.
Dr. Ryland Grace adjusts a light and it looks like a dance club in the Castro, it's absurd.
So, down to basics: why? What makes cameras do That Thing?
Well, it's not unique to cameras. It's a matter of glass and white-toned light. Modern camera lenses are either treated with a diffusion layer or have specific filters meant to diffuse light-- to break it up more clearly. When you use a lens without that coating, almost any light source can make this happen.
The rainbow, the prismatic light, it comes from a lack of filter, from the removal of deliberate or accidental barriers. You need light. You need glass. Clarity.
Okay but why, narratively?
Nope, not yet. First, let's look at Grace's physicality as more and more lenses surround him. I'm personally deeply obsessed with how Grace interacts with Rocky's xenonite barrier.
In their first meeting, Rocky assumes he's dealing with another creature that relies on hearing as primary form of perception. After all, Rocky can hear through to the other side of the Mary with pinpoint accuracy, can even track Grace's status and location on the hull of the ship when falling into high orbit. But this weird alien bypasses each section of the nice big solid acoustically-friendly wall to focus in on the one spot where light shines through.
So the next wall Rocky builds is geometric blocks of glass. Which Grace, without prompt, makes himself comfortable with, finding any and all alcoves and wedging himself in.
Fun fact: It takes less than 30 seconds for Grace to go from "IDK you watching me sleep is weird" before the smash cut to "i have now dragged a cushion, pillow, and my favorite quilt into the glass to sleep here." I counted 26 seconds.
I can't even make that weird by pointing anything out about it. We have already started at Grace making it weird, to my absolute delight.
But even when Rocky decides to move onto the Mary, Grace doesn't seem to mind beyond some token protests on his little vlog. Which is quite remarkable, because wow. Wow. Look at this.
Here is Ryland Grace, under glass.
There is such an secession of space to Rocky. Even if it weren't, these shapes and the way they bend light and cast shadows are the focal point of every scene. Always center of frame, and we always watch how Grace interacts with this, how he bends to duck underneath, how he drags monitors closer for Rocky to see, how he continues to sleep pressed along any sympathetic angle he can find.
Add to that how Grace is framed, as a significant chunk of the film is looking through the glass at Grace, and this begins to invert the core concept of what's occurring here. Who is in an enclosure here, really? Does the glass keep Rocky safe? Yes, but does it also keep Grace safe?
Even after the two have gone their separate ways, Grace doesn't dismantle the enclosures to reclaim the space. Instead, as he contemplates turning back to his almost-certain death to save Rocky and Erid, he lays in the Don't-Go-Crazy room with a foggy memory surrounding him, his body weight against alien glass.
Grace's happy ending was something that I could not even conceive of until the moment it happened. I honestly couldn't imagine the story would let Grace live, let him save Rocky, and then let him be a teacher again.
Erid is a planet without enough light to see, and yet the people there build a ball of glass just for Grace, tailored to his happiness and whim.
That's a whole lotta motif-building. Now is time for the question: what does it mean?
Art is subjective and my answer will differ from yours. Here's what it makes me feel:
Between this post and the previous table-setting post, the thing that I cannot stop fixating on is how this situation should feel versus how much effort the film goes into to avoid that exact emotional beat.
We have a story about a man from earth, sent off into space, expected to live out the remainder of his life on a spaceship. This ship is further encroached on by necessity as the space is sectioned out to create a habitable area for an alien. In the end, this man's reward is a dome built to give him a habitable space on an otherwise inhabitable planet. He'll never see his home planet ever again.
All of the markers are there. This should be a story of claustrophobia and small spaces and feeling trapped with the walls closing in and no way to break through them because death is on the other side, be it the void of space or the hot, ammonia-drenched atmosphere of Erid.
Should be.
But there's the other side of the story. Grace's last memory of Earth is his voice failing mid-sentence as a needle pierces his skin, as one of his only friends and protectors watches him struggle, and overheard there is a rainbow.
Earth wouldn't take no for an answer. He'd never be a teacher again. A barbed wire fence stands before the rainbow.
I know writers who use subtlety and they're all cowards.
Here's what Project Hail Mary is really saying, with all of its rainbows and refractions and a crying man who sleeps against prisms: Ryland Grace was the light the entire time. It's not something he's looking for, it's not the Deep Truth he's seeking. He just needed a way to shine, to remember it was there.
"Oh yeah, uh... I'm Grace," he says, introducing himself as the world blooms with colored light around him.
They told me that the end is near; we gotta get away from here.
