There was one deliberate reference to Rocky Balboa in the book. Grace tells Rocky that, according to Earth customs, since Rocky was the first person to discover the planet Tau Ceti 4, he gets to name it. Rocky then names it after their mate. Since Eridani names don’t mean anything other than names, the name can’t be translated to English, so Grace renders “Rocky’s mate” as “Adrian”.
Just got back from seeing the film. Glad to have seen it; they stuck very strictly to the book, so it maybe wasn’t as enjoyable for me as for someone who went in blind. But still enjoyable overall.
I agree with critics who indicate the movie could have been a little shorter. It never really dragged anywhere, but it probably could have been a little leaner.
The casting of Ilyukhina was somewhat surprising; I envisioned that character in the book as being middle aged. Milana Vayntrub is only in her late 30s.
One thing I would have added was a depiction of the “thrum”: the collective thinking and problem solving by learned Eridians that Rocky describes to Grace in the book.
That made it into the film. In space no one can hear you roar.
Saw it today. Read the book quite a while ago. Unfortunately I had to take a 20 minute call with my lawyer that covered the first contact part.
Pretty decent translation of book to screen. Had to suspend a bit of disbelief in places such as the size of the ship.
I didn’t get the Rocky homage to “Adrian” until this thread, so thanks for the enlightenment.
Shout out that, for once, the Chinese line spoken by the German Hail Mary lead actually convincingly sounded like a German person that could speak Mandarin. The line was "无所谓.“ Pet peeve of mine is that almost every freaking movie out there that has the non-Chinese actor saying one or two lines of unintelligible purported Mandarin would be better served being dubbed. Dubbing is pretty good now, and having Tom Cruise or whomever utter “arghugrhaha” as Chinese takes me out of the scene every time.
Saw it, enjoyed it enough but thought that ending DRAGGED and I found it weird we had the Rocky death scene and then immediately they did the whole I PUT THE NOT IN ASTRONAUT scene right after. In general I think there were too “laugh” moments especially in the 3rd act when everything should have been deathly serious considering the stakes.
I saw it on ScreenX which I had never heard of before. It extends some scenes onto the side walls creating a 270-degree panoramic view. For the first few scenes I wasn’t sure how I felt about it, but during the mission to Adrien when Grace collects the local astrophage and later TauMoeba, both scenes were spectacular in ScreenX! I strongly recommend it if you have a chance.
Interesting–that might have been my biggest problem with the book. I thought the communication with aliens by a non-expert went way, way too quickly, and for someone who probably comes across as a complete spreadsheet dork on this board, I laughed at how much it relied on spreadsheets. Compare to linguistic-scifi like Arrival, where a brilliant linguist working with a team takes weeks to communicate, or Embassytown, where it takes many years before there’s successful communication; I remember thinking that Andy Weir regarding cross-species communication as an almost trivial problem, easily solved by someone with an ability to gin up a cool enough spreadsheet.
Otherwise, I agree that in the science fiction genre of “Smart Man Solve Problem!”, this is a really fun example, and I look forward to seeing the movie.
Thanks! Doesn’t IMAX also extend around the sides somewhat? It’s been so long since I saw an IMAX movie I can’t remember.
IMAX expands the top and bottom of the screen. I really liked how they used the expanded 1.43 ratio for all the space scenes, and anything on earth was 2.39, so you always knew where you were. And the image would kind of bleed out of the 2.39 frame to begin the flashbacks. Really clever.
That bothered me in the book too. It’s like a 6 year old’s conception of other languages, they’re all essentially English just with different sounding words in a 1:1 correspondence. So learning French or Swahili or Laotian merely consists of memorizing vocabulary.
I saw it today and really enjoyed it, though I had not read the book previously. I was reminded of Sunshine, a 2007 by Danny Boyle in which the sun is dying and the crazy mission sent to fix it. And also, like The Martian, this one featured one (human) character for much of the story. I wonder if that’s a thing with this author.
And by the way, I think the movie said that Tau Ceti was 11.[something] light years away. How long did the voyage to there take? And didn’t Rocky say something about how getting Grace home would take 4.[something] years. That suggests faster-than-light travel.
It’s not FTL, it’s relativity. The movie skipped the details of relativity, even more so than the book. The good ship Hail Mary travels at just under light speed. Earth sees that as taking about 12 years (a bit more than a photon would take, but really 24 years for the round trip, plus the few months our plucky heroes spent working in the Tau Ceti system). At those speeds time dilation matters a lot to the Hail Mary and those aboard. For them, the journey to Tau Ceti just takes 4 years. It’s way outside our everyday experience, because we never travel at significant fractions of the speed of light. And since the Hail Mary spent a lot of its travel time accelerating, the math gets really complicated.
Which is why the details were not in the book, and even less in the movie.
Actually, if you’re just trying to calculate the travel time as measured by the astronauts, the complicated relativity bits of the math all cancel out, and you get the same answer you would in Newtonian physics.
Which, actually, was one of the physics mistakes in the book. In the book, Rocky’s people didn’t know about relativity (until Grace explained it to them), and so they calculated the wrong time for the trip. But their calculation should actually have been right, even if for the wrong reasons.
Thanks for the explanation. What I’m wondering is how long after Grace’s trip started would it take for the probes to reach Earth?
Short answer? Take the light travel time and add on a bit more.
Is that because the ship accelerated to near light speed, coasted for a while, and then decelerated? Can you expand on this? How would the elapsed time on the ship compare to that on the home planet?
ETA: and would the fuel consumption really be less than that calculated by Newtonian physics?
As I recall from the book, they had a constant 1.5g acceleration the whole way. Or more specifically halfway, then they turned around and decelerated at 1.5g for the remainder of the trip. In the book, Grace is surprised how toned his body is despite being in a coma, and the answer is both the medical robot and the constant 1.5 g’s.
Dr Becky did a good job of breaking down the science.
Yes, one of the first things Grace did when he came out of the coma, before he remembered his own name, was measure the time it took test tubes to drop 1 meter to realize he was in a 1.5 g acceleration and therefore not on Earth.