goodbye my moonlight

[flashback to the space program prep phases]

Rocky: [wholly focused on building the ship itself and does not care where the astrophage to power it comes from]

Eridian!Francois Leclerc: [having a total emotional breakdown because breeding however many million kilograms of astrophage in the oceans is an extinction level event for marine environments with massive and unpredictable effects on the ecosystems of Erid but it's also undeniably the fastest way to get enough of it to power a spaceship]

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.

What a good movie and outstanding soundtrack!!!

I forgot how much I liked Grace's canon personality

Stratt is funnier than people give her credit for. Or maybe I'm just British and her scenes appeal to my humour idk

In fact there were so many more chuckle-worthy moments in this movie than I remembered, especially in the first 50 minutes before Rocky is even introduced!

Carl is a lot more expressive than I remembered and has more characterisation than he's given credit for?? I'm surprised he's not more popular in the fandom outside of casual shipping. Also he's in more scenes than I remembered

I miss Yao's responible personality from the book, which didn't make it to the film. Granted though, his 'oh perfect, there are no elevators on the spaceship' line is still one of my favourite gags

Grace is eating a kabanos when the PHM team are introduced to him!! Poland mention RAAAH 🫶

Ryan Gosling does an amazing job during Grace's emotional scenes, words of great praise!

The little sonar-looking dish that follows the Eridian hull robot so that rocky can see what's going on!!

The exaggerated reverberation effect whenever Grace tapped the wall in the space tunnel was a very cool way of audibly hinting at the importance of sound waves in eridian communication!

having paid attention this time, rocky continues to speak eridian throughout the movie, and you can hear it if you listen closely. I think it's a little quieter and is talked over by the computer, but the detail is still there!

The top of rocky's carapace is so cool and mobile, I wish we saw more of it after the introduction scene

Previous times I felt a little off during the taking-off-the-helmet scene, because there's no way that Rocky would have known that Grace can remove his helmet, and I liked that (if I remember correctly) in the book Grace figures it out on his own. However! This time I paid particular attention to Rocky rather than Gace, and it actually seems to me like Rocky wasn't asking Grace to take off his helmet but instead was trying to explain that he'd put oxygen in there for Grace to breathe - while pointing at his wiggling air vents.

There's a scene where Grace depressurises the airlock in preparation to enter the tunnel and gets blown back by the door when he opens it - surely this wouldn't happen(?), since the airlock adjusts to the pressure it detects outside of itself by letting air out and wouldn't need to do this in the tunnel this time, since the pressure outside matches inside and the air simply wouldn'tmove? (I thiiink this is how it was in the book but I'm due a reread) Unless in the movie the airlock pumps air back into the hail mary instead of out of it, but that doesn't address the airlock's sensors not detecting the outside pressure unless Rocky's tunnel didn't envelop them. If anyone reading this knows more about airlocks PLEASEE lmk I'd love to know more and I'd appreciate any pointers 🫶

I love how frightening they can make the spacewalks feel without using any typical spooky music or techniques, just a perspective shot with Grace's legs wiggling over infinite space is enough to trigger a response, I love it!

the unbalanced centrifuge and copious wads of specimen on the microscope slides are devious Grace is nawwwt passing his practical assessment lmfao he should've been kicked out sooner haha (callback "I can't seem to see through these buggers" not surprised mate, the sample's supposed to be one cell thick so that the light can get through right /lighthearted)

The whole roommate section of Grace Rocky and Armando is so brilliant, I'm very fond of it

I'm a fan of the biophilic elements included in the spaceship as opposed to the book! I didn't really pay much attention to the plants until my first rewatch post-book. Since the wellbeing of the astronauts is so important to the sucess of the mission, it makes so much sense to have the wellbeing room and the plant rack (and the plants could even double up for experiments, they didn't know what they'd find after all.) If I understood correctly, NASA's current CHAPEA mission irl has some plants for the crewmates, which makes total sense for such long seperation of the natural world. Actually I could go on about biophilia, maybe I should post my mini research project on it here on my Tumblr, lmk if anyone's curious. Also anyone curious about CHAPEA there's a few episodes on NASA's podcast that are an interesting listen. Woah where was I

I think the moment in between leaving Adrian's gravity and the excessive centrifugal force scene is AMAZINGLY done. I'm in love with the show-don't tell of zero-gravity disappearing progressively, first with the gentle slump of grace's seatbelt and then with the slightly heavier thud of rocky's sensor gun thing. It worked so much better than if they'd simply had Mary report that they were about to go into a spin or something. Kind of a little experiment thanks to Rocky intentionally dropping his sensor, that really helps maintain this idea of two scientists in space working together using scientific methods to understand what is happening around them - if you like this idea and haven't read the book yet you SHOULDDD you'll love book Rocky!!

I love that they get to have a little party in the movie, I don't remember that being in the book

Rocky tends to double tap on a leg when asking 'question'

Also the video log idea in general is perfect, cause it wasn't a thing in the book if I'm not mistaken. And I love Stratt being able to watch those logs at the end

Stratt's ship is not in a polar sea!! I didn't put the dots together before now, the shot of arctic-esque waters around her boat is due to the global cooling Earth has experienced, how cool! On my first rewatch I thought it was just a reference to her nuking antarctica to maintain global heat, but actually it makes total sense that after over 20 years sea ice would have stretched very far out

I love Grace's house on Erid, it's so cozy, and that he moved Armando there too! I'd like to imagine that now that they've repaired the hail mary, they can make grace a space station so that he doesn't get artheritis from Erid's gravity like he does in the book, cause that's just cruel. Grace's epilogue in the movie seems set a lot earlier than the book's (and I bet it took very little time for Erid's engineers to repair the Hail Mary), so there's plenty of room for hope!

If you made it this far, thank you for listening to my rambles! I love Project Hail Mary so much!!! And I bet you do too haha

P.S.

The xenonite repair panel on the outide hull of the Hail Mary, seen for a moment during the scene where Grace and Rocky part ways - I believe this is an easter egg to the book, where the taumoeba leak happens even earlier (while rocky is still on board) and Grace has to clean the engine tanks from the outside and reseal them with xenonite. Since Grace has ejected the leaky tank from earlier in the movie, I can't think of a reason for this repair panel other than a reference to the book, which is really cool!

the house:

y'all oh my god, someone posted a leaked deleted scene from PHM wherein Rocky and Grace start humming together and oh my god it's so soft and cute I had to draw it immediately