Project Hail Mary is one of my favorite lighter reading, page turner books. I was worried they were going to screw the movie up, and I’m happy to say they didn’t. It was actually a really faithful adaptation. They even spent an appropriate (fairly long) amount of time on the first contact communication struggles. Of course after they advanced past that point, they quickly moved into the super easy communication stage, but the book did that too if I recall correctly.
They hit all the story beats I can recall. The way they interweaved the flashbacks was pretty well paced and pretty faithful to the books. I’m glad they didn’t write out the part about Grace being an unwilling volunteer. The woman who played the German project manager was really good. Ryan Gossling was actually pretty good and I’m not always a huge fan of his. The way they interpreted Rocky was fine - I kind of wish his voice was a little more like windchimes, but still very charming. They got his sort of enthusiastic but easily confused by human communication style down really well.
All in all, great adaptation. And totally worth seeing even if you didn’t read the book. Fist my bump. Go see it.
That’s something that I love to see in first contact stories: Just how do they even get started on communicating? Once you’ve got rudimentary understanding, it’s straightforward to go from there to deeper understanding (so it’s OK for the story to fast-forward at some point), but that first step is a doozy. The book did a good job on it, and I’m glad to hear that the movie did, too.
I should say they spent longer than I would expect for a Hollywood movie who would usually assume their audiences are too dumb to hold their attention during a “learning to communicate” scene without a montage. The scene between first contact and having the computer start to interpret Rocky is maybe 12-15 minutes? Fairly long but not as extended as it would be in the book.
Long enough to catch the vibe, longer than I’d expect for Hollywood.
After they solve that, most of the communications issues are mostly cleared up (aside from humorous misunderstandings), Rocky speaks through the computer, but the book is like that too IIRC.
Almost everything about this matched the visualizations I had reading the book; more so than probably any other movie I have ever seen. The only thing that didn’t match was Grace’s habitat on Erid. From the book I pictured Billy Pilgrim’s dome on Tralfamadore.
We saw it today and really liked it. Like others, I had read the book and thought that it was pretty faithful. I think they short changed Rocky’s engineering prowess somewhat.
I wish Milana Vayntrub had had a bigger role just because she’s so darn cute.
It might have just been our theater but it was LOUD. My wife forgot her hearing aids but didn’t need them at all.
I pictured Rocky as black and shiny like a black widow for some reason.
I was kind of surprised that there was only a single Beatles needle-drop considering how prominently the Fab Four figured in the book. But the one song they did use was placed perfectly.
Our judges also would have accepted “Across the Universe” as an alternate choice.
I think the only thing I noticed being cut was the explanation of how the Astrophage worked that involved antimatter. But I guess you didn’t really need to know that. They explained that the Astrophage is eating the sun and that it stores a lot of energy; the mechanism (by creating antimatter) didn’t necessarily need to be explained.