The Controversial Project Hail Mary Book Moment Cut From The Movie

Contains spoilers for "Project Hail Mary"

The Ryan Gosling-led sci-fi movie "Project Hail Mary" looks set to become a rare non-franchise box office success. The critics have been left stunned and even author Andy Weir feels good about the film, despite the fact that it cut a critical scene from his book of the same name: the nuclear destruction of Antarctica.

In the novel, Eva Stratt (played by Sandra Hüller in the movie) orders a nuclear strike on Antarctica in an attempt to offset the effects of the Astrophage, an alien microbe that is causing the sun to cool. The woman behind Project Hail Mary (and who has been given unlimited power to solve the Astrophage crisis) has 241 nuclear bombs buried 50 meters into a fissure in the Antarctic ice at three-kilometer intervals. They go off all at once, dropping a huge shelf of ice from the Earth's southernmost continent into the oceans.

Why the rampant environmental destruction? To try and release trapped methane that could help insulate the planet amid the sun's dimming. Harnessing greenhouse gases is a temporary solution for keeping the planet warm enough while they deal with the impending Astrophage catastrophe. The hope is that this will give them enough time for the Project Hail Mary crew to reach Tau Ceti (a star with active Astrophage that hasn't lost luminosity) and find some answers.

The destruction of Antarctica is among the most memorable parts of Andy Weir's "Project Hail Mary," so why wasn't it included in the big screen adaptation of the novel? For the same reason that many book-to-screen adaptations miss certain things out: time constraints. When SlashFilm's Ethan Anderton sat down with the film's screenwriter Drew Goddard (who also penned the 2015 adaptation of Weir's "The Martian"), he explained that the scene was originally in the script but he couldn't do it justice with the amount of time he'd been allotted. He said:

There's a moment in the book or scenes in the book where they decide they have to nuke Antarctica to buy themselves time on the Earth side of things. And it was in there and I loved it. It was such a concept that was interesting and showed the desperation that we were in. But it was just too complicated to explain to an audience within a short period of time and we just didn't have a lot of screen time to take the time to do that correctly.

Goddard went on to reveal that instead of the eight pages of script he wanted for the scene, he had a mere three, and that proved to be nowhere near enough to cover this part of the story. As a result, a decision was made to remove the scene altogether, leaving the struggle on Earth largely silent as Gosling's Ryland Grace labored lightyears away to solve the Astrophage problem. On the bright side, Goddard said that the vast majority of his favorite things from the book made it to the movie, which is a rarity in Hollywood according to the veteran screenwriter.