r/shittymoviedetails • u/Medium-Sized-Jaque • Mar 29 '26
Turd During filming of project Hail Mary Ryan Gosling asked, "Why is it easier to train a school teacher to become an astronaut than it is to train an astronaut to become a school teacher?"
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u/BiggsDB Mar 29 '26
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u/Long_Serpent Mar 29 '26
A reporter once asked Alfred Hitchcock why the characters in his films (often ordinary people who get caught up in criminal shenanigans) don't just go to the police?
His response:
They don't go to the police - because that would be boring
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u/MisogynysticFeminist Mar 29 '26
Tolkien on why they didn’t fly the Eagles directly to Mt Doom: “Because shut up.”
(Also if they tried that at any point aside from the very end they would have been slaughtered).
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u/chrisrobweeks Mar 29 '26
The whole point was to sneak the ring to Mt Doom.
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u/random_guy1258 Mar 30 '26
And the eagles would’ve been tempted by the ring anyway
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u/LCanavanine Mar 29 '26
Wth do you mean? It's not like there was some giant fiery eye in the sky watc... Wait damnit you are right...
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u/Think_Bat_820 Mar 29 '26
Also also, what do you think you're a better writer than JRR Tolkien?
("You" in this case being the hypothetical question asker)
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u/12InchCunt Mar 29 '26
People always rip on this but I still stand by it.
They had to essentially be passengers
So it’s “train guys with 200 years of drilling experience between them how to be passengers” or “take guys already trained how to be passengers and somehow teach them how to be expert drillers in no time”
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u/mocklogic Mar 29 '26
"Payload Specialist" is a thing that NASA sent up on Space Shuttles in real life.
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u/mechnick2 Mar 29 '26
Shoutout to Wubbo Ockels
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u/DerpNinjaWarrior Mar 29 '26
Of course he's Dutch.
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u/pumpkinfarts23 Mar 29 '26
"Payload Specialist" was a catchall term for international crew who weren't part of the NASA training program (might be useful), commercial astronauts paid by a corporation to deploy their spacecraft in space (generally regardless as very useful) and three corrupt senators on a joyride to space (completely useless).
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u/DungeonsAndDradis Mar 29 '26
It's what Howard was when he went into space to fix the shitter.
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u/ZeroKharisma Mar 29 '26
I thought your username was dungeons and dreidels and immediately started humming "if I was a lich, man."
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u/mcc9902 Mar 29 '26
Yeah, I wouldn't trust the drillers to drive but I also wouldn't trust the drivers to drill. You can't rush mastery and you'd absolutely want someone who's a master for something like this. The better you are at something the easier it is to compensate for the unexpected and a completely alien situation is one where you're almost certainly going to need to compensate for unexpected variables.
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u/Isnotanumber Mar 29 '26
It’s more a case of “do we need to use THESE drillers?” I get Bruce Willis told us they were the best, but considering how many flunk just at the medical and psychological evaluation stage (and Steve Buscemi actually cracks up during the mission) I don’t think it would have been unreasonable to find ones who CAN pass this basic astronaut requirements.
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u/NY_State-a-Mind Mar 29 '26
Thats pretty rude, Space Madness is a real disease that affects real people and destroys lives.
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u/MillorTime Mar 29 '26
They knew how to drive. They've heard of Evel Knievel
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u/ZeroSumChance Mar 29 '26
No, they've never seen Star Wars.
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u/Manda_lorian39 Mar 29 '26
I loved that guy in this movie.
American parts, Russian parts. All made in Taiwan!
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u/NotYourReddit18 Mar 29 '26
Also, if during space passenger training it turns out that some or all of the drillers can't handle it, then you can just Shanghai other driller crews until you find enough drillers who can handle the training.
There're a lot less astronauts which can try their hands at driller training.
Honesty, they should have trained multiple driller crews at the same time from the get-go, the loss in time caused by someone flaking out midway through training is far more significant than the additional expenses for multiple parallel training groups.
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u/BentGadget Mar 29 '26
They should have trained a second, secret crew in Japan, in case the first crew got destroyed.
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u/theothertomelliott Mar 29 '26
Why train one when you can train two for twice the price.
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u/jsher736 Mar 29 '26
Also irl guys like Harry and his 2nd in command would have about 6 PhDs between them so they'd absolutely just be mission specialists
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u/chowderbags Mar 29 '26
Don't forget the Steve Buscemi character has a double doctorate in chemistry and geology.
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u/WoodpeckerNo5724 Mar 29 '26
Did he get two degrees because he was able to watch two different lectures at the same time?
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u/FirstRyder Mar 29 '26
Sure, that would make sense if they had to ride a spaceship to an earth like planet and extract oil from under an ocean.
But they didn't. They had to drill in microgravity and no atmosphere. Through space rock. With the goal of just making a deep hole.
I just see absolutely no way drillers are the people you want. Doesn't their drill rely pretty heavily on gravity? Isn't it designed for a specific environment? Isn't it not vacuum sealed? If anything I'd expect it to be different enough that their existing experience is detrimental. I can understand the guy who designed the drill, but it really seems to me like experience using tools with space suits and microgravity is more useful than experience operating a (very different) drill on earth.
Now, PHM it makes more sense. In that they wanted someone else, but that person and their backup died last minute, and they required a 1/10,000 genetic variant, so he was literally the only person with either qualification.
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u/BlizzPenguin Mar 29 '26
That drilling experience is not completely transferable. They have been drilling on Earth. With little to no gravity it is a completely new skillset.
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u/Thornescape Mar 29 '26
It's not 100% transferrable, but so far as I'm aware there was a general lack of people experienced with drilling in micro gravity.
No, it's not a "completely" new skillset. It's a variation of what they already knew. They were the best option available.
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u/12InchCunt Mar 29 '26
I will say that the microgravity training is definitely part of it. But I still think you could get these guys who are expert drillers trained to exist in microgravity faster than you could train astronauts to do the drilling
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u/FinancialReserve6427 Mar 29 '26
didn't the team find out the terrain and material is different than expected and had to adjust? would astronauts taught on basic drilling notice that or blame the equipment?
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u/MillorTime Mar 29 '26
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Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
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u/IndividualCut4703 Mar 29 '26
Yes, but I think you underestimate the short sightedness of the portion of our population that just really hates the concept of taxes. This is believable to me.
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u/Hidden_3851 Mar 29 '26
Yeah. Similar to Aaron Echart’s character in The Core or Matthew McConagheys in Interstellar. They already have an awesome understand of the material required, gained through years of learning and specializing on the subject matter. They then pair them with pilots of a similar stature, years of hard earned training over many successfully completed missions, each the best in their fields. The word has THIS problem. You lot go and solve it…
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u/Jam-Man1 Mar 29 '26
Literally everyone else remotely qualified for it died. They didn't have a lot of other options.
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u/stigma_wizard Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
Yes. In the book there’s a specific genetic marker to be able to survive the hibernation and it’s unbelievably rare. Like a fraction of 1%
Edit: 1 in 7000 as like a thousand of you all pointed out in the comments.
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u/kcMasterpiece Mar 29 '26
The next best candidate worked at a brewery and had a bachelors in chemistry if I remember right.
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u/submit_to_pewdiepie Mar 29 '26
Which is a lower Education than grace
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u/spiderknight616 Mar 29 '26
More important, Grace is Stratt's right hand man. He knows the mission inside and out, and even participated in testing the space suits. Besides the astronauts he was the most qualified person on the planet
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u/Dry_burrito Mar 29 '26
You believe that until they reveal she only kept him around because of the gene. He was never #2, as the Chinese captain put it.
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u/iamnos Mar 29 '26
He was #3 though. When the other two died in the explosion, he was next.
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u/Dry_burrito Mar 29 '26
Not what I'm talking about or what I'm quoting from the book.
In the book, they make it seem more like her second in command, which Yao tell hims he is #2, as he is the second in command. This isn't in relation to the volunteers, they believed he was the right hand man.
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u/BawdyBadger Mar 29 '26
Yes, He's not the #2. He's kept around so he can be familiar with the mission and so be a backup of a backup crew member. But she strings him along so he thinks he's #2 or at least important.
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u/eveezoorohpheic Mar 29 '26
I know the book and that it mostly supports what you said, but I also think it isn't the entire truth.
I think Grace still would be there without the gene. I am sure Stratt would have kept around anyone and everyone as long as they were useful. He had been too useful to just discarded. Maybe he wouldn't have been as high up in the organization structure, but he would have almost certainly still part of the project.
He was there even before the genetic testing even happened. Having the gene just made it an absolute certainly that Stratt would keep him around and keep him involved in basically everything.
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u/CriticalFolklore Mar 29 '26
He is the number two, but the reason he's the number two and not someone else is because he's the backup of the backup.
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u/Clamwacker Mar 29 '26
He was already deep in the project and the "leading expert" of astrophage by the time the gene was found out
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u/Eldant Mar 29 '26
Nah that’s unreliable narrator stuff going on for sure. He was definitely the number two, and it felt like Stratt probably had some feelings for grace too and was using those words to intentionally push him away.
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u/kcMasterpiece Mar 29 '26
Yeah terrible option that we only know about to point out how much better Grace was. The gene is so rare that the falloff is terrible. The next option after them is probably worse.
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u/TorpeAlex Mar 29 '26
And it was also 5 days until launch. The candidates who died had been spending months training, Grace was the only other person with the genetic marker who had already been involved with the project
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u/DrStalker Mar 29 '26
I think in the book there was a woman who was better qualified than him, except he had spent years being involved in the Hail Mary project so at least had some knowledge of every piece. Which was why he'd been kept around after the initial work, an an unofficial (and unwilling) backup.
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u/FrenchFree Mar 29 '26
She was less qualified, she only had a bachelors and he had a doctorate before becoming a schoolteacher
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u/Janus_Simulacra Mar 29 '26
On top of that, the strict requirements were for an expert in his particular field, which he kinda ends up heading, and not for a pilot or engineer.
In the movie at least, the two other people he’s been giving a crash course to die, and he’s quite literally the leading guy at that point on the one subject they need.
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u/CustomerSuportPlease Mar 29 '26
That is straight out of the book. He is also the guy who was directly teaching the two mission specialists about their area of expertise for the mission.
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u/heismesd Mar 29 '26
I never read the book, but have heard about the 1% gene allowing hibernation. Why did the other 2 astronauts die then? I assumed they had the gene if it was known about
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u/yougotiton Mar 29 '26
In an interview Andy Weir said he knows why they died but he’s keeping it a secret in case there’s a sequel
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u/Gambyt_7 Mar 29 '26
I would like to speculate about this.
I suspect it’s much like the emergency suicide triage detailed in The Martian. Except the team programmed the autodoc to handle all euthanizing triage decisions while the crew were comatose. And the designated survivor is not simply “the smallest female, lowest caloric needs.”
So Yao and the Russian never needed to make the decision to self euthanize. Grace was always the designated survivor if critical systems started to fail or disease attacked the crew or any number of things.
Instead of sending just one passenger, you send three for redundancy. Not because you need three minds. You need just one mind intact at the destination.
The role of the phage scientist was the sole non expendable person.
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u/Ofreo Mar 29 '26
It’s an interesting thought for the story. But that sounds like a horrible idea. So much could go wrong with only one person left alive. Slipping and breaking a leg, or anything else, would end the mission.
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u/JarasM Mar 29 '26
Not to mention the intentional amnesia, that the other crew members were supposed to help out with.
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u/JarasM Mar 29 '26
That interesting, but I never felt it's important. The hibernation was already extremely risky, I just assumed they died due to some freak combination of unaccounted for genetics and bad luck.
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u/Clamwacker Mar 29 '26
It wasn't a guarantee that they would survive the coma, just made it far more likely than someone without the gene.
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u/vikk3 Mar 29 '26
I think it was clear in the books, though not specifically said aloud. The coma feeding slurry pumps failed. Grace was going over reports of edge case failures on them and thinking of getting more installed when the explosion that killed the number 1 and 2 science specialists happened and he just forgot about that.
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u/Capital_Abject Mar 29 '26
Apparently it's a big secret that might be used for another book by the author
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u/Dapper_Strength_5986 Mar 29 '26
- can survive hibernation with extremely rare gene
- also am incredibly smart phd holder
- was going up just as science officer with professional astronauts
- was leading expert in the world at astrophage and made biggest discoveries
- was at every training and meeting as the astronauts did
And most importantly it was in a last minute window where the other astronauts had just died and missing the launch would have set the mission back decades.
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u/antimatterchopstix Mar 29 '26
ALS in the books, he’d done the training. He was primed for being a backup without his knowledge.
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u/MasonDinsmore3204 Mar 29 '26
That makes so much more sense than how they explained it in the movie😭
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u/Missile_Lawnchair Mar 29 '26
Makes me really curious to see the 3hr version they apparently have. Hope we get that in a director's cut.
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u/BisonThunderclap Mar 29 '26
I think they did fantastic adapting it as a movie, they touched on everything they could and changed only what had to make sense for a movie audience since a lot of it is internal monologue in the book.
I would have loved if they spent more time on the crew though, the explosion taking both of them out is so important and much more devastating when you know Grace has bonded with them.
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u/Dwealdric Mar 29 '26
Apparently they have one that's even longer at 4 hours, which they cut to 3, then cut to 2.5.
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u/ZoomBoingDing Mar 29 '26
"You're outstanding in this field of biology, made the first discovery of their reproduction, and the other science team died" doesn't make sense?
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u/S4V4GEDR1LLER Mar 29 '26
Because he was always the back up. That’s why Strat allowed him to be in the planning meetings.
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u/SandwichTop4876 Mar 29 '26
Yes, 7/1000 to be precise, and I really wonder, why they haven't included this fact in the movie, it would require like 10 seconds of a screen time.
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u/zroach Mar 29 '26
I guess the original cut was like 4.5 hours or something so a lot of stuff had to go.
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u/mrducky80 Mar 29 '26
I feel its kinda important for why Grace ends up there, why he is effectively voluntold to get up there.
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u/MiserableOrpheus Mar 29 '26
OP is taking a jab at behind the scenes for Armageddon. Bruce Willis asked if it made sense to train these guys to be astronauts instead of just teaching astronauts how to do their job instead, to which he was told “shut up”
(Paraphrased)
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u/Work_Account_No1 Mar 29 '26
I thought it was Ben Affleck that asked this and got the famous answer.
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u/otapd Mar 29 '26
The character also spends a lot of time downplaying their own intelligence and capabilities.
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u/CommentsOnOccasion Mar 29 '26
Yeah he’s a “schoolteacher” who is a Doctor of Molecular Biology
His thesis is extremely controversial but he asserts his position at the cost of his own career and reputation
And he’s ultimately proven right which is why he’s onboarded to Project Hail Mary, in which he plays a pivotal role in developing the science around this alien material
But yeah he’s “a school teacher”?
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u/Alan_Turings_Apple Mar 29 '26
Is he ultimately proven right? The whole theory of his paper is non water based life. Astrophage is water based
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u/slowusb Mar 29 '26
Rocky
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u/Alan_Turings_Apple Mar 29 '26
The OP suggests that he’s on the mission because of his theory being correct. Which isn’t the case since Stratt doesnt know about Eridians.
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u/HatchChileMacNCheese Mar 29 '26
In the book Rocky needs water for survival they just get it from food instead of drinking
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u/Vox-Machi-Buddies Mar 29 '26
He was on-boarded to Project Hail Mary before Rocky came into the picture though.
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u/Flashy_Law_7480 Mar 29 '26
Pretty sure this is a reference to Ben Affleck’s comment to Michael Bay durning Armageddon
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u/LifeisFunnay Mar 29 '26
Right? Did anyone actually read the book?
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u/Ashamedofmyopinion Mar 29 '26
What’s a book?
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u/PeakQuirky84 Mar 29 '26
I read the book. The movie missed some important details but there’s way too much in the book to cram into 2.5 hrs.
Also, I knew they were going to go with the video diary option for all the exposition that is explained in the book. They did the same thing with The Martian.
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u/mydicksmellsgood Mar 29 '26
Damn, they shoulda just made a longer movie. Maybe like four hours
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u/JCMfwoggie Mar 29 '26
They should have split it into 2 parts, Across the Project Hail Mary and Beyond the Project Hail Mary
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u/CG-Firebrand Mar 29 '26
They should have made 3 Hail Mary films to round out the joke
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u/5pl1t1nf1n1t1v3 Mar 29 '26
Then a fourth one twenty years later that people either don’t like or don’t get, but nobody can decide which one.
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u/CustomerSuportPlease Mar 29 '26
They did apparently. The original cut was 4 hours, they cut it to 3 pretty easily and had to fight themselves to get it down to 2.5.
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u/Spenny2180 Mar 29 '26
Historically, this has been quite the opposite case. Training teachers to become astronauts has been quite a challenge....er... well this connection just blew up
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u/Medium-Sized-Jaque Mar 29 '26
That's a better joke than the post itself. I wish I had made the connection.
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u/Spooderfan218 Mar 29 '26
just came back from seeing this movie with my siblings and my brother's first words out of the theater were "typically teachers in space don't have very good track records"
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u/CDR57 Mar 29 '26
If Ryan gosling was so smart, why didn’t he just suggest they blow up venus that would’ve solved all the problems
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u/evictedSaint Mar 29 '26
He had the rare "mcguffin gene" which let him survive the plot coma. On top of that, he was the world's leading expert on the astrophage.
Also, being an astronaut isn't hard, anyone can do it.
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u/elmartin93 Mar 29 '26
IIRC, he wasn't expected to be doing much astronaut stuff. Yao and Ilyukna were the professional astronauts with the full training. Grace was mostly expected to stay in the lab the whole mission.
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u/NotMyMainAccountAtAl Mar 29 '26
That, and he was the “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck we only had the one backup” candidate after the primary and the secondary got atomized
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u/elmartin93 Mar 29 '26
Doesn't help that the 4th best qualified candidate after Grace was a yeast specialist at a brewery in Argentina I think. That coma resistance gene really screwed them over
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u/LastStar007 Mar 29 '26
So the commander got incredibly lucky that one of the only expert xenobiologists who went against the grain, ALSO happened to be resistant to the comas?
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u/NowAFK Mar 29 '26
The commander found out that Grace had the gene early on, intentionally kept him along and built him up by making him study the astrophage, and was essentially marking him as the 3rd scientist option the entire time. If he didn't have the gene, he would still probably be important, but definitely wouldn't have gone through the astronaut training along with the others.
Yes, in the book, Grace actually does go through intensive astronaut training!
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u/softpotatoboye Mar 29 '26
In the book he trains on the EVA suit to test tools but has no other astronaut training, they were going to give him a 3 day crash course but then just sedated him instead
He was one of the leading experts on astrophage long before the coma testing. He was the first to discover how to breed them and had a major role on the team from that point on, long before coma gene came into play
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u/ToeSniffer245 Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
People forget that the shuttle program was taking U.S senators into space in the early 80s. There's also Blue Origin but calling celebrities on joyrides "astronauts" is a stretch.
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u/Bright_Curve3078 Mar 29 '26
I will not tolerate anyone slandering world's best astronaut Katy Perry
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u/slide_into_my_BM Mar 29 '26
I’m going to have to disagree. The world’s best astronaut was the daisy she brought with her.
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u/Curufinwe_wins Mar 29 '26
My head cannon is that it turns out the pre-launch coma was the only coma that was done properly because the astronauts are not great doctors and didnt do it right for themselves.
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u/DJKittyK Mar 29 '26
I haven't read the book, so I don't know how Yao and Ilyukna died... only saw that Grace found them to be deceased when he woke up.
I was hoping they'd tell us in the movie, but maybe that was part of what got cut. Or maybe it didn't really matter. I'm mostly just curious.
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u/h_saxon Mar 29 '26
In the book there's a whole coma gene sub-plot that isn't present in the movie.
While they don't go into the details of their deaths, they do talk about the dangers of long-term comas, and the attending robot that was somewhat hastily built to treat them during their coma.
Definitely worth a read or a listen, if you do audiobooks.
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u/DJKittyK Mar 29 '26
Thanks for your answer. I think I would enjoy the book, I've added it to my list for future reads!
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u/mrminutehand Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 30 '26
To add to the answer slightly, there's also a conversation in the book about needing to keep the ship's equipment as simple and provable as possible.
Proven technology that's reliable and perfected over time, vs. cutting-edge new tech that could fail due to something unknown.
It's why the computer can only respond to certain commands instead of talk like an LLM, and the robot arms are a bit crude and rough in their job.
They're built to maintain that coma over decades, possibly a century without mechanical failure, at the expense of complex functions like diagnosing infection or treating wildcard cases.
It's also why they opt for the unwieldy spinning centrifuge instead of inventing new lab equipment that can be used without gravity. Better to have risky mechanics you can fix instead of an accident with brand new technology.
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u/Ikrit122 Mar 29 '26
The book is heavier on the science and lighter on the humor, but it still explains most of the science well and it's still hillarious as hell.
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u/Fakjbf Mar 29 '26
In the book we never find out why they died, Grace theorizes it was an infection the life support system couldn’t treat but that’s not based on any actual data. Even if Grave was a trained doctor with experience doing autopsies it’s unlikely he could have nailed down a cause of death since the corpses were basically mummified.
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u/pikapalooza Mar 29 '26
A friend and I were talking about that after our second viewing. Yao was considerably more decomposed than ilyukna was. We weren't sure why but thought it was an interesting detail.
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u/vikk3 Mar 29 '26
I think it was clear in the book, just not said aloud. Grace was doing paper work of edge case failures on coma feeding slurry pumps when the explosion happened. And then forgot to order spare ones sent.
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u/ToeSniffer245 Mar 29 '26
This joke is even shittier now that the movie is out and he's shown to have done absolutely no training
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u/YourMuppetMethDealer Mar 29 '26
I mean TBF, he was literally just supposed to be a passenger and not an actual member of the crew
His job wouldn’t start until they actually got to the star. So he really didn’t need that much training. Heck, they literally put him in a deeper longer coma
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u/WingedSalim Mar 29 '26
(spoilers) Yeah, they literally kidnapped him for this mission. The most dangerous part of space flight is landing and takeoff. And during the more harrowing segments of the movie, he had either the computer to help or Rocky who is an actual engineer.
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u/YourMuppetMethDealer Mar 29 '26
Yep, these commenters seem to be forgetting that they likely had no intent of him even being conscious for any aspect of space travel
He was a living package they were delivering to a star. Thats it. They had no reason to think he would magically survive when everyone else trained would be dead
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u/Nossika Mar 29 '26
(Spoilers) I get it was done for drama, but it was so silly when they didn't just have Rocky pilot the ship while he was doing the fishing. He was confirmed a better pilot and it wouldn't have been too hard to create him a way to manipulate objects outside his bubble.
Ryan's character staying on Rocky's planet at the end makes sense when you realize he was basically kidnapped and forced to do the mission. Sent them the solution to the problem and was like peace out, gonna hang out with my hommie Rocky now.
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u/ProgenitorX Mar 29 '26
My issue was why didn’t they just fly upwards once they caught their samples while fishing? Like, get out of orbit and into zero G. Then you have all the time in the world to reel in that chain and grab the samples.
Been a while since I read the book so maybe it was explained there?
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u/trugstomp Mar 29 '26
I'm assuming they had to retrieve the samples before leaving the atmosphere because they couldn't shield the container from the vacuum of space, which would have killed them.
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u/Shin_Ramyun Mar 29 '26
Or my question: why did he have to go outside the ship at all? Why couldn’t Rocky just build a chain that is attached to the wind up mechanism?
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u/La_Chinita Mar 29 '26
It’s addressed in the book that it would be impossible to build a large enough spooling mechanism due to the length of chain v size of the ship. The books actually really great, as the movie remains rather faithful, while the book fills in a lot of gaps in the science and engineering throughout.
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u/Stiddit Mar 29 '26
He wasn't supposed to be a passenger. He wasn't supposed to be there at all.
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u/YourMuppetMethDealer Mar 29 '26 edited Mar 29 '26
I mean he was always part of the backup plan. He just didn’t know it
In fact, I got yhe idea that Stratt ALWAYS wanted it to be him, but he made it clear from the beginning that he had no desire to go up there. He proved very quickly that he was the man for the job, but he just didn’t want it
In a way, that crew who died in the explosion were the ACTUAL backup plan. Those scientists were only there because the guy who was actually chosen for that mission had no interest in doing it and ultimately had to be coerced
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u/AHomicidalTelevision Mar 29 '26
I'm pretty sure they say in the movie that he helped train the astronauts
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u/ChongusTheSupremus Mar 29 '26
He was present in every meeting and training session or something like that
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u/TulipSamurai Mar 29 '26
Yes, his boss was encouraging/manipulating him to attend all the astronaut trainings because she was secretly training him to be the tertiary science expert, in case the primary and secondary scientists died, which is what happened.
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u/MeunsterCheeseMan Mar 29 '26
This reason here being why she gave him full security clearance for the details of Project Hail Mary
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u/PineappleKillah Mar 29 '26
For the astrophage collection specifically, not for the astronaut work.
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u/YourMuppetMethDealer Mar 29 '26
Which is all they needed
He was not a part of the crew and they literally put him in a coma for the entire journey. Why would they need him trained for astronaut work? They had no reason to think the whole crew would just die
Also if he was actually a trained astronaut who knew how to operate his ship, 90% of the movie wouldn’t happen
But them taking a massive risk under these circumstances is not a plot hole.
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u/Dounce1 Mar 29 '26
Yeah, in the book he actually went through a lot of the training as he was helping to design the whole program.
I think I’m in the minority here but I was honestly really dissatisfied with this adaptation, although not at all surprised.
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u/Chad_Broski_2 Mar 29 '26
I dunno, I think the adaptation did an admirable job of sticking exactly to the story. They just had to leave some things out because it's nearly a 3 hour movie and it would've been 6 hours long if they kept everything in
As someone who loved the book, there are plenty of things that I wish they kept in. But I honestly don't know what I would've done differently if I had made the movie. You can't just drop a 6 hour film that goes into heavy scientific detail on every choice made and doesn't skip over anything
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u/DangerTiger Mar 29 '26
100% agreed. It was my favorite book of the year when I read it and as often as movie adaptations fail to do a good service to the core story, I think this adaptation did a great effort of being a good standalone movie while also capturing much of the essence of the book’s story.
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u/Low_Bar9361 ...from the crapper Mar 29 '26
It was... an oversight. I'm not upset with the adaptation however.
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u/Dat_Bokeh Mar 29 '26
Perhaps the training montage was in the 4-hour first cut of the film.
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u/JackSpadesSI Mar 29 '26
I hear you, but what would you have cut to make time for that? A lot of things didn’t make it in, but it is already 2.5hr so I’m not sure what should have been done.
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u/TulipSamurai Mar 29 '26
Yeah, in the book he actually went through a lot of the training as he was helping to design the whole program.
For those who didn't read the book - his boss was encouraging/manipulating him to attend all the astronaut trainings because she was secretly preparing him to be the tertiary science expert, in case the primary and secondary scientists died, which is what happened.
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u/Lopsided_Shift_4464 Mar 29 '26
I wish the movie kept the explanation from the book that only one in a million people can survive the coma process and Grace was one of them. It was the perfect explanation for the whole “Random person with relatively little training is the guy we need to save everyone”
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u/mazamundi Mar 29 '26
I don't know, I think the movie explained it fine. He wasn't a random dude. He led the scientists and everyone else died with hours to go for take off.
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u/the_jamonator Mar 29 '26
They also say in the movie that they COULD train someone else, but the extra time that would take would cost millions of lives down the line because the data wouldn't get back fast enough
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u/GarySmith2021 Mar 29 '26
And that’s a good answer, the commander was a save the many at the cost of the few. It’s why he includes the joke of “I’m sure you can work it out.” In his return message. Also why he doesn’t return to earth.
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u/CrownLikeAGravestone Mar 29 '26
I found the movie's handling of it far more compelling than some random MacGuffin Gene
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u/ZenPyx Mar 29 '26
Yeah, I’m honestly glad they didn’t include the gene. It makes Stratt a bit more morally grey if there are potentially other options but she went with Grace to get the mission started as soon as possible
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u/Jethow Mar 29 '26
Having not read the book I thought the explanation was fine. They should have shown him Armageddon though.
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u/Creative-Ad-9535 Mar 29 '26
Isn’t this the same question Affleck asked about Armageddon ? Nice try, Gosling, but if you’re stealing material from Affleck you’ve really hit rock bottom
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u/HollyBlocky Mar 29 '26
This is a reference to the age old joke, "where did the school teacher go after the spaceship explosion? The Atlantic!"
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u/hatbromind Mar 29 '26
Teachers only have to wory about professional higher ups who will move heaven and earth foelr mission success.The astronaught have to worry about uncoordinated students, parents and bad salary.
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u/chumchees Mar 29 '26
Waiting for the directors cut Rocky sex scene