SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Project Hail Mary. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk!
A big part of what makes Project Hail Mary (both the movie and Andy Weir’s superb novel) such a satisfying story is seeing characters confronted with conflicts and work methodically and intelligently to solve them. Alien microbe eating the sun? Figure out what it is and why it’s doing what it’s doing. Find a distant sun that’s unaffected by said microbe? Find a way to travel there. Find the microbe’s predator but need to adjust its atmospheric tolerances? Perform selective breeding experiments. Like The Martian (also sourced to Weir), it makes hard science compelling, cool… and sometimes a bit weird.
It can be said that just about all of the most important parts of the source material are kept intact for the big screen experience, making Project Hail Mary a mostly successful adaptation of the book, but there’s some standout cut material that I miss, including what can unequivocally be called the nastiest aspect of the ending. Folks who are familiar with the novel surely already know what I’m here to talk about: me burgers.
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For those who haven’t read the book, I’ll briefly explain: when Grace makes the decision to send the beetles off to Earth with Taumoeba so that he can go rescue Rocky and every living thing on Erid, he does so thinking that he is once again going on a suicide mission. The food supply aboard the Hail Mary is limited, and there are too many poisonous materials in Rocky’s food for him to safely eat. He is happy to die knowing that he managed to save life on two planets – but then Rocky comes up with the solution for him to eat Taumoeba.
Early during his stay on Erid, Grace lives entirely off of Tamoeba, but that changes when scientists develop a solution. They take a sample of his muscle tissue, replicate it, and process it as a meat that he can consume. So when he references “me burgers,” it’s a discussion of burgers he is eating where the patty is technically made out of his own ground human flesh. There is no getting around the word “cannibal.”
Is this totally disgusting? You’ll get no argument from me; referring back to the headline will remind you that I think this is super gross. That being said, I also think it’s both fascinating and necessary for the story. On the former front, it’s a perfect illustration of the kind of problem solving that makes Andy Weir’s writing so much fun. And as for the latter, the whole question of “What is Grace eating while living on Erid?” is left unaddressed, and that’s a reasonable plot hole that movie-goers shouldn’t have to go back to the source material to answer.
At the end of the day, I don’t know why it was cut (One detail too many for the two-and-a-half hour-long feature? No proper way to deliver the exposition? Perhaps it was too intense an idea for a PG-13 blockbuster?), but I do know I wish it was left in.