Project: Character Nuance

Photo Credit: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. “Project Hail Mary” [film]. Amazon MGM Studios.

A trolley is speeding along the path with no way of stopping and hurtling towards five people tied to one side of the track. You are standing by the lever that can change the trolley’s path to the other side of the track where only one person is tied up. You can change the path and one person will die, or you can leave the lever as is and five people will die. What will you do? 

This hypothetical question has stumped many on what the correct moral choice would be. Intervene and the blood of one is on your hands; watch the trolley and do nothing and you live with the knowledge that you could have done something to save five people. 

 Author Andy Weir dove headfirst into the controversial hypothetical and asked the difficult questions out loud: how much value do you place on a singular life? Does your answer make you a bad person? 

Simplistically speaking, Weir raised the stakes by increasing the numbers within the existing trolley problem. Instead of five tied to the other side of the track, it is the whole world. 

Life will be lost regardless, and you have all the control over how it ends. It is a heavy burden to bear. 

Earth’s Sun is dimming at an alarming rate; if the Sun dims completely, the Earth will experience a rapid global cooling that will eventually kill all life. This rapid dimming was caused by an infrared line connected to the Sun, full of Astrophage, a microscopic organism that absorbs energy within stars. This red line connected to the Sun is coined The Petrova Line. 

Project Hail Mary’s personal Atlas, Eva Stratt, is placed in charge by all leading governmental powers to direct leading scientists and military personnel equipped to solve the Petrova Line Crisis.  

Weir introduces her as a woman who loves Earth more than she loves herself and is willing to do the hard things to protect it. Within the novel, she makes countless painful choices to benefit the survival of humanity. 

One of which is nuking a portion of Antarctica to release large amounts of methane gas as a way to combat global cooling. Weir is not shy as he shows the audience how far Stratt is willing to go to give humanity a chance to survive. 

Stratt is a character hell-bent on winning a losing war for the benefit of humanity and using herself and others to succeed. This is a trait usually placed onto male characters. Often, they are given the titles morally grey and complex. Audiences and fandoms treat understanding these complex men as an honor; they are characters that hold nuance and make us think about our own morals and what-ifs. We sympathize with the evil they have to do for the sake of good. We mourn the life he could have had if his world was a perfect place. But we, the audience, understand his choice in his personal trolley problem. Whether it was pulling the lever and sacrificing one or turning his cheek to the situation, we can empathize that he made the right call for his home and loved ones. 

Eva Stratt, by the majority, is considered none of these traits; very few earnestly honor Stratt with the title of complex without it leading up to a backhanded comment, even though all she did was choose an outcome in her trolley problem. 

Stratt is defined and recognized by the majority of fans in a few words: cold, cruel and stoic. She is robotic when making hard decisions. She coolly sacrificed a portion of Antarctica, bypassed intellectual property and took global resources by ignoring protocol, all in the name of buying humanity time for the Petrova Task Force to prep the suicide mission, Project: Hail Mary. 

What really gets the fans up in arms about her choices was her sending Ryland Grace on the suicide mission to space against his will when an accident at the site of the Petrova Task Force killed all leading scientists willing and able to go to space. 

With humanity out of time and herself out of patience for Grace's refusal to volunteer, Eva Stratt pulled the lever. 

She sacrificed Grace in favor of the potential of saving humanity. She chose to use an unwilling participant in a suicide mission to give humanity its best shot at survival. 

“You are my solution…Grace, we will lose a quarter of the world’s population in the next 30 years. And that assumes that the nations of the world work together to ration food, which they won’t, so I’d double the estimate.” –Eva Stratt. “Project: Hail Mary” [film]

Fans were outraged at how cruel a woman could be to ultimately murder a man who didn’t want to die. She’s heartless for having men chase down Grace after he tried to flee. Stratt is a “bitch” for being so mean to Grace during his final moments on Earth, 

“If you don’t go, you die anyway. You have no immediate family. You don’t even have a dog.” 

Why is it that most people cannot objectively view Eva Stratt and her motives? 

I’d be inclined to say it is because she is a woman. 

If Eva were a man, would he be seen as multifaceted? Or would we still call him an evil and conniving bitch? 

I think Mr. Stratt would have been labeled a tragic hero by us all. He’d be a tortured man forced to weigh the value of life and pick the lesser evil of it all. I think we as a collective would have found Ryland Grace’s refusal to volunteer unbearably selfish and his attempt to escape would make us scoff. We’d commend Stratt for the efforts he made to save the world.

But Eva Stratt is a woman. Instead of being a nurturing love interest that holds our male protagonist's hand through all the tough battles, she is blunt and grounded in their grim reality. Since she is not an eye-candy sex symbol, her character is not important enough to pay attention to. 

Stratt was handed the option of one man she considered her friend, or the whole world. I think she chose correctly. Stratt refused to be selfish. But she is not given the same leeway as a male character in her position would get. 

Unlike many male characters, she’s even punished for the crimes she committed while in power, including the kidnapping of Ryland Grace and forcing him into space. She is, in her own words, the World’s personal whipping boy. She takes the fall for everything and is tried and imprisoned for her actions, even though said actions saved Earth. 

She does not justify her actions to make herself feel better or to save herself from punishment. She knows she pulled that lever to sacrifice Grace, and she doesn’t let herself forget the wrongness of it all. Stratt accepts the punishments she will receive without complaint because she knows in her heart it was for the greater good of humanity. 

She didn’t just sacrifice Grace on the trolley tracks, Stratt sacrificed herself alongside him. In tragic irony, Grace gets the best outcome out of the two of them. He gets a second chance at life; Stratt gets life in prison, only let out when Grace’s research returns to Earth. 

Sandra Hüller, who plays Stratt in the film, describes her character beautifully, 

“I feel I am playing her as the softest girl you’ve ever seen, but she has to make tough decisions.” 

Stratt is a beautifully complex woman and one of the most three-dimensional characters I have had the pleasure to both read and watch. She is not a heartless monster. In the novel, she is abrasive and stressed under the pressure the world has put on her shoulders. She has a bachelor's degree in history and can foresee the fallout an apocalyptic world will have, and it is up to her to try and prolong that from happening. 

In the film, Hüller gives her quiet emotions as we watch the scenes unfold. Her eyes were glossy and her voice choked up as she realized she must send Grace against his will. We see the self-reassurance she gives herself with a small nod of her head as she watches guards chase down Grace. They were subtle but insanely impactful as Hüller exposes the hidden emotions within Stratt. 

Eva Stratt recognized the unfairness of her trolley problem. No matter what she chose, she is responsible for murder. But she is a woman of history and chose the love she has for humanity. Yet she is still villainized and would have been equally hated if she chose to let humanity slowly die in favor of keeping her friend on Earth. 

She wouldn’t have been beloved and understood for choosing Grace over humanity like we do with Joel from “The Last of Us”. Her commitment to the cause of Project: Hail Mary is not commended by the audience the same way we do with Batman’s commitment to Gotham. 

Joel and Batman are considered in many ways selfish, yet we also see their reasoning for their actions and understand that you cannot put them into a box of good, evil, selfless or selfish. 

They are complex men who only seek to protect what they love.

 They’ve answered their own trolley problem. Joel refused to pull the lever and let Ellie be sacrificed, even though her death could have meant a cure to end or slow the apocalypse. Batman will ultimately pull the lever in favor of keeping all of Gotham safe, even if his love for the city extends to the rogues that terrorize Gotham and harm the people living there.  

Eva Stratt’s motives are no different from theirs. The only difference is that she is a woman with zero regrets about pulling the lever.