So, we went over to see the grandkids and watch “Project Hail Mary.” I read the book a few months ago and I’d been waiting to see it with them but everyone has been so busy this summer we just never had a chance. But with school starting in Dunwich next week, I made a point of setting up the visit.
So, we sat down surrounded by all the kids and all the dogs and up went the curtain (metaphorically speaking). Well, it was pretty good. Of course, a movie couldn’t spend the time that the author Andy Weir lavished on the technical details of the astro-phage biology or the star ship that it fueled. And neither could it explain the project to selectively breed taumoeba to survive in Venus’s atmosphere and several other technical details that fill out the story. But the movie does a good job of fleshing out Ryland Grace and detail the friendship that develops between him and the Eridian alien that he names Rocky. And in fact, it more than matches the book’s description. It adds a good amount of comical interplay between the human and the alien.
I intend to do a full review of the movie soon but I just wanted to give a few impressions tonight. And since it’s so late I’ll leave it here. It’s a good movie.
To my surprise, I found the Movie on Amazon Prime a month and some back and have pretty much the same opinion on the movie. I thought they did a great job on faithfully duplicating the book given the limitations of the medium.
Yes. This was not an easy book to translate to the screen. Any of my criticisms fall well within the boundaries of individual taste. Kudos all around to the team that created it.
I have not read the book, though I intend to. Saw the movie in the theater, and then again when it came to Prime. I can imagine that like The Martian there was a whole bunch of technical stuff that they trimmed. It is essentially a Buddy movie at its core with the MacGuffin of resolving the Astrophage as the plot device that drives the story. I thought Ryan Gosling gave an excellent performance only to be upstaged by the puppet version of Rocky and one of the puppeteers, James Ortiz, who provided the voice as well as led the… Read more »
What’s a mystery to me is how long they’ve been willing to lose hundreds of millions of dollars just to carry on the culture war in their movies. It takes almost nothing to make a decent movie if you just find a good story and don’t muck it up with woke preaching.