The Biggest Book Changes in ‘Project Hail Mary’

“Project Hail Mary” is a deeply faithful adaptation of Andy Weir’s book, but it’s impossible to convert from page to film everything without cuts or tweaks.

The film follows a lone man far from home looking for a cure to save Earth’s sun from dying. Confused and alone, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) crosses paths with an unusual alien on the same mission to save his planet. The two form a bond and work together to save their stars.

While the film is one of the more faithful book-to-movie adaptations made in the last few years, there were always going to be a few things that had to be changed or cut for time. Here are the biggest alterations that did not make the jump from the book to the screen.

Grace Names Astrophage

In the film, the name Astrophage just crops up at one point of the exposition, and that’s that.

In the book, Grace has a bit of a closer relationship with it. After the initial studies he gets brought in for, Grace coins the term Astrophage himself and is shocked to learn that within a day the President of the United States had used it in an address to the nation and even his students were calling the sun eaters by the name.

Coma Survival Rate Genetic Trait

In the movie, the Hail Mary crew is told they will be put into a coma for a major portion of their trip to keep from any personal issues cropping up through the years in isolation.

In the book, the selection process for the crew is made even harder by the discovery that only a certain genetic trait equating to coma survival rates would give a shockingly slim (when considering Earth’s population at least) recruiting pool for who could be chosen. The Hail Mary can’t just have the best of the best, they get the best of the best from the people who could survive the trip.

Grace obviously has that coma-survival trait, which is another major reason Stratt forced him onto the Hail Mary, alongside being clued in on the mission procedures.

More Focus on What Earth Did to Prepare for Years of Planet Cooling

Not everything can make it into an adaptation, and some cuts make more sense than others. One of the wholesale omissions from the film is how Stratt, Grace, and the rest of Earth’s Project Hail Mary scientists both pulled off the mission and prepared the planet for years in a cooling environment.

When it came to the mass production of Astrophage needed to pull off the trip to Tau Ceti, Stratt and Grace actually employed a New Zealander named Robert Redell. Stratt pulls Redell from prison, where he had been serving time for the deaths of engineers on a previous project as well as embezzlement. They task Redell with fixing the Hail Mary’s fuel issues by building Astrophage breeders. The engineers’ idea is to pave the Sahara Desert with solar panels to farm what will turn into the ship’s fuel.

As a secondary prep for the planet while the Hail Mary is away looking for a cure, the group employs Dr. Francois Leclerc. The climatologist figured out that half of Earth’s population would be dead in 19 years, and Stratt asks him to give them more time. Reluctantly, he comes up with the idea to blanket the planet in more greenhouse gases by blowing up icebergs in massive chunks and releasing their methane. It buys the planet time, but Leclerc warns it will have devastating effects on a number of Earth’s biomes going forward.

Grace Almost Kills Rocky Trying to Save Him

Rocky saving Grace after their misadventures to acquire Taumoeba is obviously in the film, and the alien’s near-death is depicted from Grace’s distraught point of view. But there was more to it than just the hand-wringing in the book.

Grace takes a more proactive approach to helping Rocky heal. When he realizes that their differences in atmospheres led to the alien’s internal furnace literally catching fire, and his “vents” being full of ash, Grace tries to clean them out to give Rocky a better chance of recovery. The ash, it turns out, is part of the healing process, and in trying to clear it from Rocky’s vents, Grace was actually making it harder for the alien to recover.

Grace Never Goes on Rocky’s Ship

This is the big one. In the film, Grace gets a chance to explore Rocky’s ship before the two depart for their own planets and save them from the Astrophage.

In the book, this never happens. Rocky does not make a bulky xenonite suit for Grace to put on and explore the strange Erid vessel. It’s a fun moment in the film for book fans, though, who were curious about what the Blip A might look like on the inside.

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