Movie was good, not great. I think the Martian is a lot better.
You do have to give her character credit: she was thinking about 8 steps ahead and covering all bases. In the book, it seemed to make it clear that she was keeping him close specifically to use in an emergency.
For anyone who’s read the World War Z book, Redekker (or whatever his name was) who came up with the plan of basically setting up a safe enclave with strong borders, and leaving smaller enclaves basically on their own (though supplies were sent to them as possible) seems similar: coming up with a plan that will guarantee that he is LOATHED, but which ultimately saves humanity.
Similarly, Stratt runs roughshod over everyone, but she gets it done. She fully expects to be hated, maybe imprisoned or killed, but she knows what needs to happen.
Well, after 6 years on tube feeding with no extra calories, he’s not gonna be chubby any more. Maybe not MUSCULAR, unless they had some way of addressing muscle atrophy (they’d kind of have to, if they expected the crew to do anything when they woke up).
The book made a point that there were electrical stimulation attachments for his muscles that kept them toned. That’s why he initially expressed surprise that he was “better than solid” and “ripped” after waking up from what he thought was a coma.
I mean, Grace was a brilliant scientist, who’s worked with astrophage before, and made multiple key discoveries about it. He’s about as close as anyone else is to being called an expert on it. That alone would be good enough reason to keep him close, even if he weren’t a candidate for the mission.
In the book even more than the movie, she had a “Why? Because fuck you, that’s why.” demeanor. It was fun.
Agreed - and that’s what everyone believed, and it was very reasonable. Being the secret last-chance candidate was clearly something only Stratt thought of.
That makes sense. It’s been a few years since we did the book (on audio - we sometimes drove out of our way to listen to more at exciting points, LOL).
By the way, I’m surprised nobody else has mentioned this “easter egg” with names.
The ship was the Hail Mary….. full of……
I didn’t make that connection. My husband saw it somewhere online afterward and we both went d’OH!!
I completely missed that even though I was trying to figure out the significance of the name Grace…
But in the book, Stratt didn’t just keep Grace around as a research scientist and secret backup astronaut. She brought him with her to Geneva for the meeting with Lokken, and to the NZ prison to meet with Redell, she asked his opinion on whether to use the coma technology, etc. Narratively, that was so he could be present and have flashback memories of those events and conversations, but in the book, it wound up with the rest of the team assuming they were sleeping together.
There was a scene in the movie, perhaps during the karaoke scene, where various people were pairing off and Stratt and Ryland seemed to contemplate it. In the book, did they sleep together?
No, and Grace is shocked that the rest of the team thinks they are.
Thanks. Another question; the explosion that killed some team members seemed to be on land. Had they abandoned the aircraft carrier by that point? The movie said that working aboard the aircraft carrier was meant to limit destruction in such an event but I was thinking they could have set up the station on an island someplace.
They were based at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan by then, and that’s where the explosion happened. They had long outgrown the aircraft carrier, and were launching the Hail Mary components and eventually the astronauts from there. At some point they had to move to a permanent base, doing all your training and manufacturing from a ship was never going to work.
The procedural mistake was letting any 2 crew members of the same specialty work together on anything astrophage related, ever. It’s not stated in the movie (though implied in the karaoke scene) but Dubois and Shapiro had been sleeping together for pretty much the entire time.
My husband is Jewish, so I wouldn’t have expected him to get it. But me: I had 12 years of Catholic school. I should have gotten the joke.
It was one of the summer reading books at my Catholic high school a couple of years back, and I don’t think any of us caught that.
And in-universe, I think that the reason why Stratt brought Grace along to so many events was as a sort of mascot: “Schoolteacher makes key astrophage discoveries” is a good storyline for catching the public interest. And for all of her “I don’t care what you think” attitude, she really did need public opinion on her side.
Though of course, it was also because if Grace wasn’t there, it wouldn’t make it into the story.
Our nephew saw it and really liked it. He’s just shy of 21. We’re going to see it in the coming days. It’s time for a date night.
I’m reading the book right now, have to correct/add some things about the explosion:
They actually still had been using the aircraft carrier for astrophage experiments right up until the launch. They had relocated to Baikonur because the launch was only weeks away, so the entire team was there for the final preparations.
DuBois was doing an experiment he probably shouldn’t have been doing, and certainly not with his own backup in the room. In fact, that close to the launch and with the extreme limitations on qualified crew, the backups should have been hundreds of miles away from the primaries by that point.
DuBois and Shapiro probably shouldn’t have been engaging in sexual congress (that’s how DuBois describes it) at all, but it’s likely difficult to put your foot down for people volunteering for a suicide mission. They apparently liked to schedule bathroom trysts in the downtime between meetings.
One bit I appreciated from the book: After the explosion, Grace muses that maybe we, as a species, aren’t ready to deal with something so energetic, where such a small mistake could have such huge consequences. But as we gradually learn through the book, the Eridani are ready, as a species, for that.
I think you’re misinterpreting that scene. He and Stratt thought they had been moving too fast and didn’t have good safety procedures in place to prevent someone thinking they had a nanogram of astrophage but really had a milligram, but that’s not because we as a species weren’t ready, it’s because they had to move as fast as possible and cut a lot of corners.
And the Eridians weren’t more ready because of any moral superiority or anything. They just have more time to find a solution because their planet is very hot with a very dense atmosphere, so it will take much longer to cool to uninhabitable temps. And because their planet is above 95C , breeding phage is simple for them, no need to cover the Sahara in billions of glass panels required.
One interesting difference - in the book, there’s never any scenes on Earth other than Grace’s flashbacks, so no scene of Stratt’s icebreaker finding a beetle and having to assume they save Earth. Instead, the Eridians have been observing Sol and tell Grace that it’s returned to full luminance, so he knows that civilization survived enough to get the beetles & successfully seed Venus with taumeba.
Eridians aren’t morally superior to us (or at least, it’s not stated that they are, but let’s be real, more moral than us is a low bar to clear), but they do think differently than we do, in a way that makes them much less likely to make brain-fart math mistakes like that. Normally, we have a high tolerance for brain-farts, since we’re prone to them, but astrophage is so energetic that brain-farts become very lethal.
Sure, but we also have often procedures in place to avoid blowing up buildings due to brain farts, but they didn’t sufficiently implement those procedures when setting up the “request astrophage for experiments” pipeline.