Matthew
Welcome back to this episode of Superhero Ethics. Friends, we’d love to talk about the fact that ethical decisions are not made in a vacuum, that the context matters. Well, what if the context is existential? What if the context is about the literal end of all life on Earth? What ethical decisions become justified? What ethical choices should or can be made? And how do we live with that?
These are the kind of questions asked by Project Hail Mary. And I am here with returning guest Becky Allen. Really excited to talk about this movie because the minute I walked out of the theater, and then picked up the book and went through that one as well, I thought to myself, there’s so much here to discuss. We’re probably looking at multiple episodes on this, to be honest. But in talking to Becky, I realized they had been really excited about this movie as well. And so I’m looking forward to hearing from Becky. How are you doing?
Becky
I’m doing well, thank you. Yeah, I have not read the book yet. My library hold just came in, so I am excited — that’s going to be my weekend treat. But I saw the movie and I loved it. And when you happened to email me a day later, I knew I really wanted to talk about it.
Matthew
Perfect. And I will just say that if you haven’t seen the movie, we will fill you in on enough to follow along. But we’re going to be giving away some very big things that happened, including one that is revealed towards the end of the movie that really affects everything going into it and all the ethical decision-making that’s happening. So if you haven’t seen the movie, feel free to hit pause, go see it, come back.
This will still be waiting for you because we will be discussing some pretty big spoilers. But before that, Becky, it’s been a little while since you’ve been on our podcast. Remind folks who you are.
Becky
Yeah, so my name is Becky. I am a writer. It’s been a while since I’ve had anything come out. But I do have two young adult novels, Bound by Blood and Sand and Freed by Flame and Storm.
They came out some time ago, but you can probably still find them if you try hard enough. I live in New York City and I do a lot of reading and writing more than watching movies or TV these days, I think. But I did go see Project Hail Mary. I live with my sister who was very excited about it. And so I’m really glad I went to see that one.
Matthew
Awesome. And we will have links to — your books are still available for purchase online, right?
Becky
I believe so. We can double-check that after.
Matthew
Yeah, we’ll double-check, and if they are, I’ll definitely provide links to them in the show notes. So let me just give a quick summary of what the movie is about and some of the choices and ethical decision-making that it raises, and we’ll go into more detail as we go.
Basically, the conceit of the movie — and if you’ve seen The Martian or read the book, it’s very much like that in terms of positing a scientific possibility and then going into a lot of the science behind it. This is a bit more science-fiction-y than The Martian in that it does posit the existence of a number of different types of alien life, but a lot of the science is a big part of it. And scientific knowledge is an important part of how things get fixed, which is in itself an ethical statement about our world.
So the idea is that Earth is facing an existential crisis. What they discover is a life form that is feeding off the energy of the sun, causing the energy the sun gives off to decrease. And that is going to cause massive climate and environmental change for the Earth — possibly full-on human extinction, but certainly a reduction of the resources and living space that humanity has access to by a huge amount, leading to terrible wars, billions of people starving to death, dying in wars over reduced resources, and all sorts of things like that.
Into that situation, basically a single scientist is given the power to make any and all decisions needed to deal with this crisis. That includes sending people on what is clearly a suicide mission — a one-way trip to a different star, where for some reason this life form is not doing that thing to that star — in order to try and figure things out. And again and again our characters face the consequences of what that kind of existential stakes means, and what decision-making it justifies and what it does not. So let’s start from there. What was your overall feeling on how this movie approached those questions?
Becky
I thought it was really interesting. To get right to the big spoiler, because I think that’s really where the meat of the discussion is and what makes it so interesting: when the movie starts, the protagonist, Grace, has amnesia, and throughout the movie he is remembering what happened on Earth that led him to be in this position on what is definitely a suicide mission, but will hopefully literally save the planet. And what he eventually remembers near the end of the movie is that he was not a volunteer.
He was knocked out and put into the coma needed for transport and was sent to do this because he happened to be the only scientist alive who could. And I thought that was a very interesting choice — like, oh, when there are millions or billions of lives on the line, do you still have a choice? He had made a choice. He had very explicitly said, no, I don’t want to do this. And the scientist in charge basically said, too bad, and sent him anyway. And I think I can probably be convinced otherwise, but I think that was probably the right call. She framed it as, I’m doing this because I believe in you so much. But it really was: is there any way to save the world? And if there is, then that is more important than this one person’s life, even if this person is not willing to give it up himself.
Matthew
That person’s name is Eve Stratt. She’s German in the movie — I think she’s Finnish in the book. And it’s interesting that they make her not only German, but someone who grew up in East Germany. The implication is that she’s somewhat comfortable with certain authoritarian trade-offs, having grown up in that kind of “for the greater good” environment.
And yeah, the way the story approaches this is so interesting, because — and I’m speaking for both of us as Americans — we’re both born and raised in the United States. Although, are you actually from New York City?
Becky
I’m from upstate, but I’ve been in the city for 20 years now. So I’m a New Yorker. Yeah.
Matthew
Right, and I say that because there’s this sense of, I’m not an American, I’m a New Yorker. But we’re both part of the United States, part of New York, and those are cultures and communities where individual rights and individual liberties are held as really sacrosanct. And I think for very good reason.
And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. But this movie really pushes that to the outer edge. Because in some ways there are two different ethical perspectives being set up here. If we had started the movie knowing either of these two things, we would have felt very differently. If we had known from the beginning that the person we’re looking to as a heroic secondary character — Stratt, who was willing to do terrible and difficult things for all the right reasons — if we had known from the start that she had sent a man to his death without his consent because she felt it was necessary for the larger mission, I think we would have seen her very negatively.
At the same time, if we had known from the beginning that this guy was unwilling to sacrifice himself to save half, if not all, of literal humanity, the idea that we would ever see him as a hero would be almost impossible. What do you think it does to these questions that we don’t get to know that those are the questions until almost the very end?
Becky
I mean, I think from a storytelling perspective, you’re right — it is much harder to root for a character who you know ran away from what the movie posits as his duty and the right thing to do. And as people living in the world, we would want him to do that. We’re used to narratives about heroes being heroic and being willing to go on the suicide mission. I think if I remember Armageddon from 25 years ago or whatever it was correctly, the expectation is, oh, that’s going to be a suicide mission, but we have to save the world. So it’s really interesting to have a hero who does not respond that way.
And I do think that by withholding that until the end, you get to see a lot of character growth on his part — which he doesn’t know is growth. It makes him a more interesting character, and it makes for a more interesting ethical dilemma to discuss, because we’re used to the story of the hero who steps up and is willing to sacrifice everything to save an almost unimaginable number of people. And he’s just not.
But I do think she says — not early in the movie, but maybe a little more than halfway through — he asks her, and I thought this was really interesting, “It must be so hard for you. How can you stand sending people to their deaths?” — before he knows that he’ll be one of them. And she says, “It’s not that hard.” And I thought that was fascinating. That made her such an interesting character to me.
Matthew
And it’s something the book goes into a little more detail on, but I think the movie gives us enough. She is someone who, I think, early on accepts the monstrosity of what she’s going to have to do. Because although this is the most extreme instance, there are a number of other things she has to do along the way to make all this possible — in terms of marshaling resources from huge amounts of the world and at some point doing harm to huge amounts of the world. The book goes into much greater detail about that.
For example, one thing they talk about is that since the literal danger is now global cooling instead of global warming, they actually need to speed up global warming as a counterbalance. So one of the things they do is melt half of Antarctica as a way of trying to warm the Earth more, so that the cooling will go slower. Because the whole idea is they’re sending this mission — it’s going to take basically 25 years until a result can happen, and they have to survive in the meantime.
And what keeps coming back for her, I think, is that the result of not doing these things is so terrible that anything and everything can be justified against that one goal. And to me, that is such a scary idea, because that existential threat is so often used as a justification — once you accept that any evil is permissible against the opposite outcome — how do you feel about the way that was presented here, where it’s a literally real fear, and that makes it okay?
Becky
I think it’s really interesting to think about in comparison to authoritarian government, because authoritarian government is ultimately serving its own power — that’s its end goal. And what really makes this feel different, and it certainly feels different as a viewer, is that we know her end goal is not her own power. Her end goal is literally saving the world. So it can stand in contrast to a lot of super-villain-type stories where you have a character who thinks they’re doing the right thing but is willing to sacrifice everything, including other people’s lives — and the reader or viewer understands that character is wrong. They’re going about it wrong. Their goals are wrong.
But the movie posits this case as: this is actually the only way. They’re presumably trying other things, but it’s literally a Hail Mary play to try to save the world from what will definitely be the end of humanity — and maybe all life. So if you take away the audience’s knowledge of what the stakes are and that she’s right, it does sort of become just an evil authoritarian doing what she wants. But because we have the perspective of knowing the story, knowing the stakes, and knowing she’s right, it does not feel ethically as terrifying as when it’s just a super villain sending people to their deaths for their own ends. It helps that she is not doing this for her own power. We don’t see anything about how she came to this position, why she was the one selected, but the movie never gives any indication that she is trying to gain something personally. It is only focused on she wants to save everyone.
Matthew
Yeah, I think that’s made very clear, and I think it becomes necessary. Because when I think about this kind of thing and I look at our own history — first of all, there is a long history of people claiming an existential threat where maybe they actually believed it, and maybe they just knew it wasn’t there and used it as a way to control people. But either way, we can look back and see that the so-called existential threat simply wasn’t true. Whether it’s looking at the Holocaust, looking at the Crusades, looking at the concerns about undocumented people in this country today — whatever that fear is — once someone says, “The fear is so bad that it’s okay that our police or our ICE or our stormtroopers are doing terrible things,” we know that none of those things are justified because the fear isn’t real.
And by positing — wait, no — in this case there is no labeling of blame onto one specific group or anything like that. But by knowing that it’s true, and by making it about something that is not for her personal aggrandizement, that it is not about her power base, that she’s not trying to set herself up to rule afterward — because I think one of the things that can happen so easily is that sometimes it is someone who just wants the power. But also, a person can get to a place where they genuinely think, I am doing what is right. I have to save humanity or my country or my whatever it is. And people challenging me are threatening that good goal, so I have to have all power and crush anyone who challenges me because they’re going to get in the way.
And I appreciate that the movie doesn’t push in that direction. Part of the point is that she never gets to that place. She’s able to keep herself in a state of: I know I’m doing this for the right reasons, but it’s not about me. When I’m challenged, I’m willing to listen, because I’m not afraid. I’m not so convinced that it has to be me doing this.
Becky
Yeah, in a way it’s actually sort of optimistic — there’s this sense of: I am focused only on the greater good, and it’s not for me. It’s everybody coming together, and there’s broad agreement that put her in this position. There’s no sense that it was a coup, that she just took over somehow. Governments are still acting and working together to make this mission a success. And so it is a culmination of a lot of powers coming together to do what everybody agrees is necessary and right. And the person who disagrees is, unfortunately, Brian Grace, who gets drugged and put on a spaceship. It’s sad for him, but important for the survival of literally billions of people.
Matthew
And we’ll get to him, I promise — I’m kind of doing the dance of looking at everything else first. But I do think she’s such an interesting character, because there’s also no personal life for her. There’s no sense of who or what led her here. It is so laser-focused on what she is doing and her willingness to do it. And you do get the feeling that if she were the scientist, she would get on the ship. She used volunteers when there were volunteers, and when an accident leaves him as the only one, she’ll make that call — even though you don’t get the sense she’s necessarily happy about it or that it’s what she would have wanted. But she is still willing to do it.
Matthew
And it’s something I really appreciate because I often talk about the low-hanging fruit of moviemaking. It would have been very easy to give her a child, to give her a sentimental reason — like, I have to keep this person alive — or some emotional investment in why she’s willing to do all these things. Or to show her more personally wracked by the choices. Because yes, he is basically sentenced to death. Though we’re dealing with huge spoilers — he was not dying because of the technology, and he’s also not the first. Along the way there are a lot of other terrible choices: in order to make this happen, we have to take these resources from this group, and other people are going to be terribly hurt.
And we see that at times Grace wants her to have some emotional outburst, to say, “I’m so sad about these choices I have to make.” And she basically acts as though that’s not a luxury she can afford. And again, that was so challenging to me, because I often feel like science without empathy can get really scary. Utilitarianism — the idea that we do what produces the greatest good for the greatest number — means you can do really terrible things to a small number of people, and that can lead to really bad places. I just liked that the movie keeps forcing us to challenge that and to ask: in this kind of existential crisis, are there any lengths to which we’re unwilling to go?
Becky
Yeah. And one thing I think is interesting about what you said — the idea of, oh, it would have been easy to give her a sympathetic reason, but they didn’t. The other crew members who go on the ship do have that reason, and Grace develops that reason as he goes. That’s part of the movie, and it’s another piece of the film’s climax — a big decision he makes and why he makes it. And I think it’s really interesting that they did not give that to the scientist, but we do see him develop that sense of, now I have an emotional stake and I have to make a big sacrifice myself because of that investment.
So to get into that spoiler: at the end, so he’s made friends with the world’s cutest alien rock puppet spider. Rocky is amazing. I would die for Rocky. He literally decides at the end — he and Rocky have successfully figured out what they need to do. They’re going back to their respective home worlds to save the day, and then he realizes there’s been a problem. He can fix it for himself, but Rocky won’t be able to fix it and will die alone in space. So he sends what he needs back to Earth, and then he goes after Rocky and rescues him, knowing that he will die doing it.
And it’s really interesting, because that is not posited as a question of his ethics. He is literally now saving a second world, because if Rocky doesn’t get back to Erid, Erid will be wiped out the same way Earth was going to be. That never even comes up as a consideration. His only real question is, this is my friend. How do I protect my friend? Now I have an investment I feel is worth dying for. And he does. And then — spoiler again — he doesn’t die. So it is a happy ending. It is a very optimistic, warm and fuzzy movie. It’s really funny and really lighthearted, but it does have this deep ethical question at its core.
But I do think it’s interesting: once that bond is introduced, it’s no longer a question about the ethics of saving the world for him at all. It really becomes, I want to be the kind of person who will save my friend even if it costs my life.
Matthew
Yeah. I think a thing we discuss a lot is that it’s a lot easier to be emotionally invested in a specific person than in an abstraction. When you talk about saving humanity, yeah, 8 billion people should matter a lot more to you than one friend. But one friend, one family member, one child, one parent, one lover — that’s a much more real thing to hold on to.
And it’s interesting because I want to dive more into his character, but then we’ll get to the bigger question of how Stratt sends him. As we said at the beginning, he’s revealed toward the end of the movie to have been, in a sense, a coward — and maybe even “coward” is a judgmental word to use. But I think I’m willing to say, yes, we lionize people who sacrifice themselves for a brother or a stranger. I’d like to think that when it’s my life versus the lives of literally every other person on Earth, or even half of every other person on Earth, that I would do it.
And then I’m going to be pretty judgmental of someone who wasn’t. He basically gets a second chance to face that. And as you said, he is willing to say, yes, I’m willing to give up my life to go after Rocky — and by extension, Rocky’s people, but basically for Rocky. He faces again the choice that he knows he failed the first time. What does that say about Stratt’s choice? Because to me, it all feels like she says she’s doing it because she believes in him — she believes that if he could get over his fear, he would go ahead and do this.
And there are numerous times in the movie and in the book where he, at a later point, accepts that he’s going to die and is willing to say, you know what, I am willing to sacrifice myself. He kind of has that self-knowledge, like, well, I already made this choice, so clearly I’m the kind of person who can do that. I may have gotten a bit lost along the way here, but how does that factor into your feeling that part of why he’s able to make the decision to be a hero is because he already believes he was?
Becky
Yeah, I do find that so interesting. Watching it — I’ve only seen it the once, so going in I didn’t know that he had refused. I was waiting for the buildup to him being the one who went, but I didn’t realize it was going to be framed in terms of the hero’s journey as the refusal of the call. And then we’ve already seen the journey, but he did not enter it by choice, which is just so interesting.
Because he didn’t know, and we didn’t know, we don’t judge him as a coward — even though the scene is played very much for laughs while also very much playing it as an act of cowardice. He literally climbs a bookshelf and they have to chase him across a field. It’s very silly, but it does make clear that this is a man who understandably is afraid for his life, but less understandably from an outside observer’s perspective is unwilling to do what everybody else agrees needs to be done and that only he can do.
And I think that him not knowing that about himself actually enabled him to be a braver person once he was on the ship. He certainly was afraid when Rocky first contacted him, but he got through it. There are definitely moments throughout where he very stoically tells Rocky, “Oh, this is a one-way trip for me. I can’t get back. But that’s what it is.” And Rocky tells him he’s brave, and you can see that clearly means something to him. And then Rocky says, “Oh, I’ll give you some of my fuel so you can get back,” and he realizes he might survive, and he starts crying. Which is a funny moment, but also a very touching one, because it shows that at least in that moment he has been a brave person. He believed himself to be, and so he became that. He has been doing the science and doing the work and was going to continue even knowing he was going to die. And he doesn’t have that particular breakdown until after he realizes it might not be the case. It’s a very humanizing, lovely moment.
Matthew
Okay, so let’s get into the biggest question here. You started off by saying that you defend her decision. And I think I’m with you, but I admit it hits against the grain of so much of the idea that we have to give a person the chance to do the right thing.
And I’ll say I walked into the movie feeling like it was a little contrived — like it just had to be him. In the book they go into a lot more detail about why it has to be him. But part of the point of the movie is that it just doesn’t have the time to give you all the science, and you have to go along with it, and that’s okay. So accepting that he’s the only choice — for you, what is it that makes it okay for her to make that decision?
Becky
I mean, it’s four billion people dying and one person being able to prevent it if he will. So it’s a trolley problem, but it’s a very weighted trolley. There is literally no choice — not to act is the choice for everyone to die. So you literally have a choice between one guy and four billion people. That doesn’t feel good to say, “Okay, it’s the one guy.” But if you accept that as the premise — which is what the movie is — then yeah, you’re going to choose the one guy.
And I think what you said earlier about American individualism: “But it’s his right, he gets to choose not to” — that is a very American point of view. And I think a lot of the time that point of view is wrong. I think about the reactor meltdown in Japan, where a lot of senior citizens were the ones who stayed to handle it because they felt like they were at a point in their lives where they could sacrifice for their community. Obviously it would still be a loss, but they were the ones who felt like they could do that. I think that is the kind of thing we see as the noble choice, the standard expectation we’d have of a sci-fi hero. So again, it’s interesting that he didn’t — but I can’t fault Stratt for saying, “I gave you the chance, you didn’t make the right choice, so now I’m going to make the choice for you.”
Matthew
I agree. And I think it’s very intentional that, as I said, she’s European — she’s presented as German, having grown up in East Germany in the movie, and Finnish or possibly Swiss in the book. Either way, she’s not American, and she doesn’t have that framework. Because to me there is a very real pendulum here. A lot of the enlightenment philosophy about the power and importance of the individual comes at a time in world history when, for a lot of countries and governments and philosophies, sacrificing individuals for the greater good was done very easily, and individual liberties and rights were not seen as important. And I think, you know, I can look at some other cultures where I think it can be too communitarian to a fault, and there is real value in individual rights.
But this is not the first and won’t be the last episode where we’ve talked about how the American focus on the individual above all else gets deeply problematic and deeply harmful. And there’s this feeling that part of why we see it as noble when a person is willing to sacrifice themselves is because we see it as, of course, that is their choice. And what’s interesting is that the other people who volunteer to go on this mission don’t see it that way. Even before Grace himself thinks of it, he’s clearly baffled that these other people would willingly send themselves on a suicide mission. He asks a couple of them at various points: why are you doing this, or why are you not more upset about it?
And I think the fact that none of the other crew members are American either has a big part in this. The two most prominent are Chinese and Russian, and for them it’s not about making a grand, noble sacrifice. They have more of a sense of: it’s for my community, it’s for my world, of course I’m going to do this. The movie doesn’t explore that in depth, but I think it makes a powerful statement. If we keep that individual perspective, we can see it as a great, noble sacrifice that he’s just not willing to make. Or we can see it as: actually, there’s something the community owes the individual, and something the individual owes the community. And it’s not that those others are doing something noble — it’s that Grace is failing in a fundamental aspect of, yeah, of course you sacrifice yourself if it’s literally for everyone else.
Becky
I mean, I think it can still be a noble thing to do, but I do think the community focus is something the American perspective often lacks. And it’s interesting that Grace is somebody who doesn’t really have community. He is a teacher and he does care about his students — we see the letters from them, he carries around the hacky sack he would use in class. That seems to be his only real connection. We know he has an ex, but he doesn’t seem to have any friends or family. I think Stratt literally cites that as part of her justification for why he should make the choice to go — which he then does not make.
And he lacks community, so I think for him it reads much more as: why are you sacrificing your own life? Whereas people with deeper community roots and more community-oriented expectations see it differently. It is still a sacrifice, and I don’t want to take away from that. But it is also more accepted that yes, that is the thing you do, because you care about other people — and Grace is lacking that connection with many other people.
Matthew
That’s a great point, actually — I hadn’t really thought of it until you brought it up like that. At the beginning of the movie, he’s a middle-school science teacher. And I say this not to put that down in any way — anyone who teaches middle schoolers, by the way, is brave in and of itself. I’ve taught Sunday school to that age group and it’s really hard. And you can be an incredibly brilliant person who chooses to do that.
But the idea that one of the greatest scientists needed for this kind of work is doing that raises some eyebrows, and I think that’s intentional. Part of his story is that he was the kind of young academic hotshot who had this theory that life could exist without water, got treated really badly by the academic community, and kind of slunk away with his tail between his legs. And I think that is a subtle but real part of the story — he feels like the community he wanted to be a part of rejected him. And that may also be part of why he doesn’t have that same sense of sacrifice for others, because in his mind, he tried to put himself at risk and got really smacked down for it.
Becky
I think that’s true, although I think he was also represented as being somewhat antisocial within that academic community. When he was told his theory was wrong, his response was very publicly, “I think you’re a waste of carbon.” That might be part of why he had trouble finding a home there.
But I do think it’s true that the lack of community — I can only imagine if you have put yourself through that much grad school, you are hoping and assuming that will become your community, and it very much did not for him.
Matthew
Yeah. Not being in community isn’t necessarily his fault entirely, but it definitely is a factor. Well, let’s take a wider view here. Because you talked about how this is a fundamentally hopeful movie. One of the things I’m really struck by is that Stratt — as you said — doesn’t seize all this power. She doesn’t rise up a mob or hand it to the military. We don’t really see how it happens, but the conceit is that all of the governments of the world have just sort of agreed: this is an existential threat, we need to deal with it, here, have all this power.
And for me — and I’m guessing for you and a lot of people watching this movie — I couldn’t help but think about that within our own lifetime, in just the last five years, our planet has faced not quite an existential threat, but still a global pandemic that could have probably become something much worse without a lot of the wonderful things that were done to intervene. But we didn’t have a global consensus, and we certainly didn’t have a national consensus in this country of, okay, let’s let the scientists tell us what we need to do, and even if it’s hard, we’re going to do it. We are still fighting about what precautions should have been taken then and should still be taken now, because it’s by no means over. In many ways, that part of the movie felt almost like a fairy tale. How did you feel watching the whole world come together and say, “The scientists are telling us what to do, let’s listen to the science”?
Becky
Well, it’s funny, because I was nodding, but I thought you were going somewhere else with that. I was thinking about global warming, which I would say is an existential threat and is something where there have been numerous attempts to get together and say, “Hey, let’s listen to the scientists.” And some of it has worked. Some countries have not — or have gone up and down depending on who’s in power. But that to me was where I was seeing the parallel. I can’t even call it a global warming allegory, because I don’t think it’s trying to tell a story about that. But I was seeing it as: this is a thing that will lead to who knows how many millions of deaths if we don’t do science about it.
And the reason the movie feels hopeful to me is because they do science about it. In the Earth sections you have the top scientists in the world coming together and being empowered to do whatever it takes to save the world and save as many lives as possible. And then in the story of Grace and Rocky, it’s literally a story about saving the world with the power of friendship, because they need to work together and develop this wonderful relationship — which Grace then is literally willing to die for. But they have to develop that, and work together, and pool their skills to save both of their planets.
And at the end, the planets are saved. Presumably many people have died in the interim, which the movie does not really dwell on — and I think that’s a fair choice, because it wants to be a hopeful story. But at the end of the day, they figure out how to stop the astrophage from destroying the sun. They prevent that from happening and prevent any further collapse that might happen. And that is very hopeful to me.
I like stories in which — even if it does not feel realistic in this particular political moment — our stories are about people coming together and doing the right thing and figuring out what needs to happen and getting it done, because it’s the right thing to do for the world. That’s really important to me. That’s what draws me to speculative fiction. Not the sense of, oh, the world is a drab place where only bad things happen — but really the sense of: we could come together and make something better. And this is a story in which there is coming together and making things better.
Matthew
No, I think it’s really true. And it’s funny — you’re right that you thought I was talking about global warming and not the pandemic. And I think that is just as powerful an allegory, if not more so. Part of it is because when I was watching the movie, I was initially thinking, oh, this is an interesting way of talking about global warming by positing that the threat is actually global cooling.
And one of the things I thought the movie might do is explore the politics of how we talk about global warming. Part of what goes into that is that a lot of the nations that are the most prosperous are not being affected as much or as quickly. We often talk about the global north and the global south — the global south often has the fewest resources but faces the most severe effects of global warming. And because where it’s hottest is where it’s going to get worse — where people are closest to sea level, where there’s already a lot of damage being done in Polynesia, the island communities, and things like that — here in North America and a lot of Europe, we’re not as affected as much, and we won’t be for as long.
The minute they mentioned global cooling, one of my first thoughts was, oh, this is going to hit North America and Europe and northern Asia a lot faster than it’s going to hit the Caribbean and Africa and places like that. And that’s a topic the movie just doesn’t engage with in the slightest. Andy Weir has said that he doesn’t like science fiction that has an agenda, that he just wants to tell a good story. And I want to push back a little on that and say, no, every story has an agenda, and I think his stories have much more of an agenda than he thinks they do.
But I do think that because this is really a hopeful story, I like that instead of showing how the world would actually react in a situation like this, it kind of says, no, but what if the world just did what it should do? There’s a real lesson and a real hope in that: why isn’t this what we’d expect the whole world to do in the face of an existential threat? And what can we learn from that, since we are facing an existential threat — just with the temperature going the other way?
Becky
Yeah. And I do think the idea of who is affected is really interesting, because I do think about — you brought up the pandemic — our response to the pandemic was not right, and it could have been worse. The effects of the pandemic have caused a lot more chaos, directly and indirectly. But that vaccine came out very fast, as vaccines go. And I do think that has to do with the fact that it hit people who are usually very powerful. It turns out that viruses don’t care if you have a lot of money. You will still get sick.
And I think you’re sort of positing: oh, it’s hitting those people and they can’t avoid it, and so that may be part of the backstory of how the world came together in the movie. And it may very well be. I think that makes a lot of sense. It does not feel like that needs to be explicit in the story, because it’s not really what the story is about. But it does make a lot of sense.
Matthew
Yeah, definitely. And we kind of mentioned it briefly, but it bears repeating: one of the things Stratt talks about a lot is that we don’t actually know how much of humanity would survive this, and that it wouldn’t just be people dying of cold and starvation. There would be horrible war. If you have the same number of people and half the resources, people aren’t necessarily going to get together and ration and share. There’s going to be horrible conflict. She talks about how even those who survive — will there be nuclear war, will civilization exist, what horrible traumas will they have to go through beyond just the cold? So living isn’t necessarily going to be great either.
Becky
Yeah. And I do think that’s why it’s important that at the very end, in the closing montage — and my sister told me about this, because I haven’t read the book yet — there is a shot of Stratt on a boat surrounded by ice, but receiving this data and presumably making use of it. And I think it’s really important to include that as part of what makes it an optimistic story. We don’t know what’s happened in the interim, but we do see: this was successful, he got what they needed and sent it back, and it’s now going to be used. That was the whole goal. And I think that is a really important thing to include rather than leave ambiguous. I’m very glad they did.
Matthew
Yeah. And the book gives it in a much more extended way — and again, big spoilers for the book. In the end, he winds up on Rocky’s planet and decides to stay. And the epilogue scene in the movie is mostly him and Rocky together, seeing what’s happening and learning that he is still a teacher — just now teaching some of the people on Rocky’s planet.
In the book, what sets that up is Rocky coming to him and saying, “Our scientists have seen that your sun is doing okay again.” Because part of it is that scientists on both of their planets had seen that the stars in this whole neighborhood of the galaxy were affected. And of course, because of light speed and they’re 13 light years away, it takes 13 years to find that out. But yeah, it’s implied, though we don’t quite get that in the movie.
And after you’ve read the book, I’d love to have you back on, because there’s a lot to discuss about what the movie shows versus what the book shows. The book goes into a lot more detail about some of the other really awful choices and the sacrificial things that had to happen — for instance, the entire Sahara Desert is paved with solar panels, which does horrible things to Africa for a while and terrible things to the environment. But at the end of it, Africa has free power, completely and totally. And there’s no one from Africa in the room when they make that decision. So yeah, that’s just one of the differences between the book and the movie.
In the book, it’s mentioned, but in a much more abstract way. We don’t see it made tangible the way the movie makes Stratt’s situation tangible — showing someone on Earth in a totally frozen environment that shouldn’t be, but receiving information, learning what can happen, and we see that.
So I want to close with one last question. It’s maybe a little bit of a right-turn, but it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about, and you and I have talked a lot about gender and how it affects storytelling. How do you think it affects the story that Stratt is a woman? There’s a part of me that wonders: would I be even more fearful of one person having that kind of power, and less willing to believe they wouldn’t abuse it, if Stratt were a man?
Becky
I had not thought about that. I do think that’s certainly plausible. Most of the evil authoritarian dictators we see in fiction and in real life are generally men. And so culturally we’re taught to look at women as the ones who bring people together, who take care of people. So even though I think it’s interesting that Stratt is not shown as having that kind of motivation or those connections, I can see that as part of it.
I think on the flip side, it’s really interesting that Grace is a man, and that it is a story about a friendship between a man and an alien whose gender is irrelevant. There is certainly a lot of cultural conversation about the male loneliness epidemic, and Grace is a character who we know has no friends and no community. And it is a movie about him forming a very deep connection. And I think that is also a really important gendered aspect.
Matthew
Yeah. And I’ll say that Rocky isn’t gendered in any way, but Grace, I think, uses “he” language to refer to him and admits that that’s a construct of the English language he uses. But the one conceit is that in order to communicate with each other, they teach each other their languages through math and science, which is great. Grace creates a computer database of all of Rocky’s word sounds and the English words they mean, and then a computerized voice reads it back to him in English — and that voice is a masculine voice. So yes, it certainly projects itself as two men forming this bond. And while fan fiction has had a great time with that, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, I don’t think the text itself presents it as anything other than a close, emotionally bonded friendship, not necessarily a romantic one.
Becky
Yeah, and I just think that’s also a really cool and important thing. I don’t know that it was done deliberately or for any particular reason. But having a male protagonist who cries several times in the movie, who is very human with his emotions — not stoic at all — and who does have to form a connection and find somebody he loves enough to sacrifice himself for, in order for the story to work: that’s his character arc. And I think that is equally as interesting as the choice for Stratt to be a woman with that kind of power and without that kind of shown community or connection. I think those are both really interesting choices that make the movie work really well, and that I’m sure did have some subconscious impact on me whether or not they were intended to.
Matthew
Yeah, no, I think that’s incredibly true. It’s very interesting how we gender the idea of sacrifice. On a cultural level — and I’ll speak for myself on this, but I believe we both identify as nonbinary, so forgive the binary framing — women are much more often expected to do a lot of sacrificing in ways we don’t talk about. And yet, the nobility of sacrifice as a grand, visible act is often seen as a very manly thing to do. And I think there’s a sense that if you’re still in that kind of mindset, his decision that he wouldn’t make the sacrifice is seen as very unmanly — a lot of the words used for him would probably be references to female genitalia or other feminizing words to describe him as not being brave enough. So yeah, all the gender stuff at play there is subtle, but I think it’s very important.
And I’ll also add — and whether this is in the text or not is completely up to you, since this isn’t a community I’m part of — he mentions one ex, but romantic motivation is not part of his story in any way. And in the book that’s even more the case. He’s been claimed by the aromantic asexual community in a lot of ways, and I think that’s totally awesome. Whether or not that was the intention of the author, seeing him that way makes complete sense. That’s a very underrepresented community, so if people see themselves in this character, I think that’s great.
All right. Any other last things you want to bring up, or questions from the movie you want to dive into? We’ve been about an hour and it’s been a great conversation.
Becky
Not really any more questions about the movie. I would just say, give it a watch. We’ve talked a lot about the deep ethical questions, which I do think are really valid, but it is also a really heartwarming story — and Rocky is a puppet. There are a lot of practical effects in the movie in ways that make it feel like a gritty old-school sci-fi, but with a really funny buddy comedy story at the heart. I just feel like it’s a good watch, whether you’re looking for something with a lot of deep themes to explore or whether you’re just looking for something fun to watch with your family. It’s just a good movie.
Matthew
Yeah, it really is. And I think you’re right — there’s very little CGI, very limited AI-generated imagery, and I think that really adds to it. And also to say — I hope I’m not spoiling anything about The Martian beyond its general premise, which I think most people know — if you’ve ever seen that movie or read that book, there’s a further conversation to have about how much this movie is in dialogue with it. The whole idea of The Martian is how much will the entire world come together to rescue one lone man. And this is about how much can one person sacrifice, or be expected to sacrifice, to save the whole world. There’s very much a mirror conversation happening between those two stories, and that’s an interesting one to have.
Well, Becky, thank you so much. I agree with you that people should go see this movie. I don’t have any way to make money from that, but I’m going to put up links to the book in the show notes, because I think the book is fantastic. The audiobook is also incredibly well narrated — the person who does the voice is just so good. To the point where, apparently, so many people had listened to the audiobook and loved Rocky’s voice there that they were upset the voice in the movie itself wasn’t closer to it. I think you can get a little mad about that, but honestly both voices are great. Links to all of that will be in the show notes.
And we’re going to try to find ways to get links to Becky’s books in the show notes too. But beyond that, Becky, where can people find you and your work?
Becky
Yeah, people can find me on the internet on Bluesky and on Instagram as allreb. You can visit my website, BeckyAllenBooks.com. And at that website there’s a newsletter signup link, which I would love for folks to sign up for. About once a month I write a short personal essay and I share a picture of some terrible ceramics I’ve been making.
Matthew
Awesome. The world needs more of these things. So thank you so much.
Becky
Bad art is still art.
Matthew
That is really true. And you don’t get good art without making a lot of bad art along the way. I’m a big believer in that. If you listen to some early episodes of this podcast — I don’t know if this is art, but it’s certainly a lot closer to what that was.
Well, thank you so much, Becky. We will have Becky back on for a number of things, but among other things, I know Becky is already interested in our What Made You Rebel Scum discussions. So we’ll have them back for that too. And on that note, thank you so much for tuning in.
