a perpetual state of confusion

*SPOILERS!!!*

Grace waking up from the coma was the first shot they filmed for the movie! They wanted Ryan to feel eased into the character, and what better way to do that than have him play a character who can't remember who he is?

The little "GOOD LUCK!" note in sharpie that's written on Grace's sleeping bag was canonically written by the other astronauts on the I.S.S. before the Hail Mary crew got put into the ship. In real life, Phil and Chris wrote one word each. They said it was like "a blessing on the movie."

Ryan's most nerve-wracking day on set was when he had to shoot with the classroom full of children. Most of the kids were made up of the children of the film's crew members.

The scene where Grace looks through Yao and Ilukhina's photos is footage of him looking at and reacting to actual pictures of the actors with their loved ones.

When Grace calls Stratt to tell her that he and Carl figured out how to breed astrophage, Ryan is genuinely calling Sandra on her day off set, and her audio is her genuine reaction to the unexpected line: "Carl and I made a baby!"

"We like showcasing Ryland Grace's social anxiety while having a lot of people staring at him. LOL!"

Their intention for the space funeral scene was to have Grace convey that he was trying to ease his own sadness by making the dead people with him feel better about being dead :(

The markings on Rocky's body convey his mission patch, his rank in the crew, his wedding band, and his family crest.

Grace and Stratt's conversation on the boat is Grace asking her if they're allowed to be close friends, and the response from Stratt is no, they can't. This gets driven home in the karaoke scene. She understands the value of connection, a part of her wants it, but "Her love for people has to be suspended for her to do her job."

Rocky has different forward-facing faces for different thought processes! They named his "satellite dish" face, his "scrunched up thinking face", and his "monobrow face".

Direct quote: "I love how on the spectrum Rocky is." ROCKY AUTISTIC CODED CONFIRMED!

After Rocky recovers from his injuries: "As Rocky returns to the movie, the lights turn on. The warmth returns. It's like the day breaking."

Confirmed that when Grace and Rocky reunite, Rocky says to Grace, "You came back for me, question?"

They throw this out there for two seconds and do NOT expand on it, but according to Andy Weir, Stratt is imprisoned for life but somehow ESCAPES???

The Eridians built Grace an artificial tree in his enclosure because Rocky knew he liked trees

Wait says the yellow light, twinkling in between. 

From James Ortiz's Instagram page. Details on Rocky's limbs!

reposted here to be rebloggable by request. 👎🏻

"The fun thing for us for that end sequence was his costume -- what he would have left over from the ship. I don't really think you see it in the film but the trousers that he's wearing, they're cut from one of the flight suits. And we've done a belt buckle that's made of xenonite that Rocky would've made for him. And all of the sewing on it is a little bit - it's nowhere near as good as Jenny would normally do, so we had to purposely ask Jenny to do bad sewing at the top of his trousers, so it'd look like he would've done it.

And then our brilliant breakdown department, run by Tim Shanahan, they break everything down to look like it's 10, 20 years old. So his cardigan and the t-shirt's all faded. And even on the laces -- the laces in his chuck taylors -- because your laces always break after a certain period of time, so we found stuff that was on the ship, like elastics and stuff. There's a nice big close-up actually in the film, so you can see that they're not normal laces, they're like stuff that he would've got from the ship that he's made as make-shift laces."

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May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

I had to find a reaction video that paused on some of these clips, because I noticed on my last watch that some of the Eridians at the end are wearing either small bandoliers or ...

LITTLE ERIDIAN BACKPACKS

and I actually screamed in delight when I realized that. That is cute as heck.

Also! Also! The rock variety! Oh my goodness! LONG POST below about geology and rock types and me nerding out about these Eridian carapaces. (Plus Rocky, for good measure.)

I've tried to fact check this as best I could, but if a real geologist sees this and has corrections, please let me know!

link to the podcast, this section below is from timestamp 24.35

“andy weir provided a packet to the creature shop that was like a packet of eridian biology and stuff but there wasn’t much about eridian culture or eridian sociology and i made a bunch of choices going in because i just needed to have like a ‘who am i?’ right? 

[…] and i made a decision that rocky’s species, that eridians are really social animals that in fact are like a beehive or a pod of dolphins - it’s a unique and really integrated ecosystem of everybody doing their [specific] part. and the fact that rocky had to fly that ship for about 45 years - longer than grace has been alive, i wanna point that out - he’s been alone on that ship, having to run that by himself and- ryan and i would talk about that, one day we sat down and he was like “so what’s the movie from rocky’s perspective?” and i was like “oh it’s like ‘alien’, […] like he’s in a ‘contagion’ movie by himself and he has no idea what’s going on.”

he’s basically in castaway by himself which of course ryan is too but like, one reason why we never cut to the past of rocky is like, i think it was really horrifying! i don’t think rocky has slept in however many years and so a thing i was really struggling with is this idea of like “rocky must watch sleep” because how do you make that a need as opposed to like, a cute idea? and i just had to make the decision that […] he has a lot of unprocessed trauma around the things that he doesn’t understand and how much he is blaming himself because he’s the guy who fixes, he’s the guy who fixes and there was something really freeing about deciding that rocky was a deeply emotional, deeply anxious, deeply horrified person - being - that is trying to move through that in some way and how that affects the early scenes with him until there’s a point in the story where you can see we’ve physically softened rocky’s behaviour, because he’s finally feeling more safe and ok but all of that lore, all of that information [was essential].