Project Hail Mary is a mostly faithful adaptation of the original novel. All the major beats, including the ending, are the same. However, a few small, crucial changes were made, and not only did you almost certainly miss one in particular, but it also opens up a wild, fascinating offscreen rabbit hole.
In Andy Weir’s novel, basically everything that happens at the end of the movie happens. Grace and Rocky find the cure for astrophage. The cure could kill Rocky before he gets home. Grace changes direction to save Rocky, and he ends up living with Rocky on his home planet. One thing we never see in the book, though, is life back on Earth, which we see for a brief moment in the film as Sandra Hüller’s character, Stratt, watches Grace’s videos on a boat in a world that has begun to freeze over.
It’s a short but incredibly dense moment, showing Earth in dire straits and that the mission was a success. But there’s even more to it. Speaking to Slashfilm, directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller revealed that Stratt has a tattoo on her neck that teases that she had been sentenced to life in prison in the decades since Grace and the Hail Mary left Earth.
“One of the things that we kept trying to cram into the movie and just didn’t stick was this idea that after Grace went off to space, people did not cooperate,” Lord said. “The governments turned on Sandra and dragged her before a criminal court and sent her to prison. And she has a tattoo—this came from Andy [Weir], his idea—so she has a tattoo that says, ‘I’ve been in French prison for life.’”
In the book, one of the things Stratt does to allow life to last longer on Earth is basically to try to destroy large, uninhabited sections of Earth. That’s not referenced in the film at all, but this off-screen revelation certainly suggests maybe it, or worse, happened. Either way, though, Stratt wasn’t going to let herself be defeated.
“In the final little scene that we added back on Earth, where she’s getting the message that Grace sent her, she has a little tattoo that has a ‘V’ with a line through it—meaning ‘V’ as in ‘life,’ and then the line meaning ‘without parole.’ So Andy thought that she had gone to prison without parole but then had broken out of prison from her connections and then was sort of on the lam, still trying to save the world.”
Which, thanks to Ryland Grace, Rocky, and Project Hail Mary, she finally does.
Did you notice Stratt’s tattoo at all? Do you buy this as an off-screen subplot? Let us know below.
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