Project Hail Mary
Apr. 14th, 2026 09:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
utilitymonstergirlFun in a lot of ways, deeply silly in others, but my biggest structural complaint is that Ryan Gosling is simply too Hollywood-handsome for this schtick of "b-but I'm just some schlubby science teacher!"
I would've preferred someone like Sam Rockwell, who is much better at playing a bedraggled dipshit, but my Magical Christmasland casting wish would be to make this character an offputting transsexual, which would juice up the core themes of the story quite well: they're already a heterodox weirdo who gets cast out of the scientific establishment, makes ends meet with gigs they're vastly overqualified for, then gets scooped up and treated as both a brilliant auteur and disposable lab rat, and after someone else's catastrophic fuckups they get strongarmed into becoming a martyr at a distance where nobody from Earth will ever have to look at them again. The transmisogynist subtext already writes itself!
I like the ending's exhumanism of Grace choosing to stay on Erid, but if I'm being mean, I could say that him bringing the American education system to aliens is the same type of horror as the space station in Interstellar recreating American suburbia.
I would've preferred someone like Sam Rockwell, who is much better at playing a bedraggled dipshit, but my Magical Christmasland casting wish would be to make this character an offputting transsexual, which would juice up the core themes of the story quite well: they're already a heterodox weirdo who gets cast out of the scientific establishment, makes ends meet with gigs they're vastly overqualified for, then gets scooped up and treated as both a brilliant auteur and disposable lab rat, and after someone else's catastrophic fuckups they get strongarmed into becoming a martyr at a distance where nobody from Earth will ever have to look at them again. The transmisogynist subtext already writes itself!
I like the ending's exhumanism of Grace choosing to stay on Erid, but if I'm being mean, I could say that him bringing the American education system to aliens is the same type of horror as the space station in Interstellar recreating American suburbia.
