Drew Goddard wrote the screenplays for Ridley Scott’s 2015 film The Martian and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary, both based on Andy Weir novels about astronauts using all their ingenuity to survive in space. Goddard captures Weir’s mix of complex science and goofy humor in highly faithful and captivating adaptations, but he also cuts one of Weir’s weirdest recurring gags from both books: cannibalism humor.
Food supplies are a major concern in space, so it’s not surprising that Weir’s thoughts turned to the possible necessity of cannibalism. Much of The Martian focuses on astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) growing enough potatoes to survive after he’s left behind by his crew, who thought he was killed in a dust storm. However, the book makes it clear that the members of Watney’s crew also need to worry about their own food if they’re going to return to Mars to rescue him and make it back to Earth together.
NASA sends a rocket with more supplies, but the crew have a contingency plan if they can’t successfully intercept it. Their youngest and smallest member, computer specialist Beth Johanssen (played by Kate Mara in the film), would eat everyone else to survive the trip back. It’s a grim plan, but presented in a very funny way. Johanssen reluctantly explains to her mom that she doesn’t have to worry about her, while the rest of the crew teases Johanssen about who she would eat first.
[Ed. note: The rest of this article spoils the ending for Project Hail Mary]
In Project Hail Mary, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) is sent on a one-way trip to Tau Ceti. Goddard’s script keeps the morbid joking about what that means, with ship engineer Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub) explaining she’d like to die by lethal injection laced with heroin and commander Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) agreeing that sounds like a good way to go. But then Grace gets a lifeline from his new friend and lab partner Rocky (James Ortiz), who can supply him with enough fuel to get home.
In the book, food becomes Grace’s new primary concern. Because his other crew members died, he has a decent supply of food for the mission. He’d still run out before going home, though, and have to either put himself back in a medically-induced coma and risk death, or eat the disgusting coma slurry he was being fed while unconscious. He can’t eat any of Rocky’s food because it contains heavy metals that would be toxic to humans.
This adds extra weight to Grace’s decision to rescue Rocky when he discovers that the taumoeba has escaped containment. Rocky created containers made of xenonite to breed taumoeba on the Hail Mary, but over the course of many generations the single-cell organisms evolved to be able to escape from the material. Grace is able to isolate the taumoeba by enclosing them in aluminum but Rocky’s ship, the Blip-A, is entirely made of xenonite. That means there’s nothing to stop the taumoeba from getting into Rocky’s fuel tanks and eating the astrophage used to power his ship. It’s proof of Grace’s character growth, since he refused to die to save Earth but is willing to risk starving to death in order to save Rocky.
Thankfully, the Eridians work very hard to keep Grace alive. He spends years eating taumoeba for calories, but was severely malnourished, contracting scurvy and beriberi because he was missing vitamins. The Eridians eventually learned to synthesize the vitamins he needed, and also started cloning Grace’s muscle tissue to create lab-grown meat.
“I’m eating human meat. But it’s my own meat, and I don’t feel bad about it,” Grace says in the final chapter of Project Hail Mary. “I love meburgers. I eat one every day.”
It’s understandable why cannibalism was cut from both films, as it doesn’t really add anything to the plot. Weir is much more disappointed that the Project Hail Mary sequence where scientists nuke Antarctica to keep Earth warm while the sun cools didn’t make it onto the screen. But these jokes show why it’s worth reading Weir’s books to appreciate just how weird and dark the bestselling author can be.