Okay, I saw Project Hail Mary yesterday and I'll jump onto the review train.
⚠️ UNMARKED SPOILERS FOR PROJECT HAIL MARY BELOW ⚠️
#Lux has rewritten Project Hail Mary
tepid merlin
I need to start out by saying that I'm really hard on book-to-movies. I almost always prefer books to their movies, and I almost always read books before seeing their movies. I recognize that ordering probably introduces some bias, but the few times I've swapped the order, I've still tended to prefer the books.
The two exceptions I can think of to this, where I think the movie stands up to the book, are The Silence of the Lambs and The Prestige, both of which are just among my favorite movies of all time anyway, and in both cases, I think there are still details of the books that I would have loved to have seen captured in the movies.
What I'm trying to say is that when I go to see a movie that's based on a book, I'm going to see it because I want to experience the same things that the book evoked for me, but in the "bigger", "more powerful", "grander" ways that the cinema theoretically can deliver in a way that a book theoretically can't. I recognize that that's a high bar to clear. But I also don't think it's an unrealistic thing to expect of a piece of media that's presented as a direct translation of another piece of media.
(A filmmaker likes the basic elements of a book, but wants to make major changes to it? Fine. But title the movie something else, then, and call it "inspired by" the book. You're not telling the same story anymore. Don't mislead your audience's expectations.)
I feel obligated to disclose my biases up front because my overall takes were that this was an extremely pretty movie (I completely agree with the folks pitching it for Best VFX); that I was stunned to find out that Rocky was a physical puppet and not all-CGI, which displays a level of commitment and technical skill that blows me away; that the movie, while successful at translating the broad strokes of the plot, failed almost completely at translating the particular aspects of the book that make me love the book so much; and that, as a result, I really didn't like it very much.
⚠️ LAST WARNING, UNMARKED SPOILERS BELOW ⚠️
Project-Hail-Mary-the-book is a cerebral book about researching and solving technical problems, which, as part of its journey, talks about the forged-in-fire bond between Grace and Rocky, and which is puncuated with comic relief throughout. Project-Hail-Mary-the-movie is a comedy movie, that's primarily about the bond between Grace and Rocky, that happens to be set against the backdrop of the Astrophage problem, and that sacrifices nearly all of the problem-solving from the book in order to spend more time on comedy gags.
I was hoping for Apollo 13, and would alternatively have been fine with Interstellar. I don't have an exact space-themed-buddy-comedy comparison lined up for what it is that we got instead, but I completely disagree with any description of the movie that doesn't classify it as more comedic than dramatic, and I don't think I need to go any further than highlighting how the movie takes a brilliant scientist and turns him into a clown.
You've heard of "show, don't tell", and I don't really think there was ever a point in the movie where we were ever shown, instead of told, that Grace is extremely intelligent - or, hell, fundamentally competent.
We see Grace do a bunch of fancy math on a whiteboard, and Stratt introduces him to the astronauts as "the foremost expert on Astrophage" or however it was phrased. That's what we're told. What we're shown is that every. last. idea, solution, and "a-ha!" moment comes from someone else. Not from Grace.
Carl has the idea to "put the box in another box." Rocky comes up with the idea of making the chain and the Taumoeba collector. The Taumoeba farms are not just hand-waved, but hand-waved as this great idea Rocky came up with, way back when, off-camera.
In the book, there's a paragraph about how Grace instinctively remembers all of his training with the EVA suit and knows exactly what to do and how to use it. In the movie, he makes an utter fool of himself nearly every time he leaves the spacecraft.
In the book, we get the entire (brilliant!) opening sequence in the medbay, where Grace methodically walks through his thought processes about his surroundings, and deduces that he's not on Earth. In the movie, we get fifteen minutes of Grace comically stumbling and flailing around the Hail Mary, doing his best impression of the "WHAT YEAR IS IT" meme, and going ahead and getting drunk on Ilyukhina's vodka at the beginning of the movie because it's just funnier that way. He finds out he's in space by looking out a fucking window.
In the book, the Blip-A throws the canister at the Hail Mary at precisely the slow speed that Grace has maneuvered at; Grace recognizes what exactly it just did, and why, and it's a major factor in his decision to retrieve the canister and treat the ship as an ally. In the movie, the Blip-A throws an extra canister at the Hail Mary just so that Grace can not go get it, can see how slow the second canister is, and can then verbally explain to the audience that the aliens think he's a moron.
In the book, Grace walks into the Project Hail Mary conference with no idea what's going on, but quickly cottons on, and is providing original ideas by the end of it. In the movie, Stratt has the entire room of scientists and generals yell "WE DON'T KNOW" at Grace, like the fucking idiot he's shown to be.
And this all matters, because it totally changes the vibe of the book/movie. In the book, you get this feeling of Grace throwing his full intellectual weight at a problem, inventing solutions, devising workarounds, and making the most of resources. In the movie, it feels like Grace gets carried by everyone around him, stumbling through problems, and being the comic relief of the movie, rather than a recognizable protagonist.
In broad strokes, I went from a book with a main character whose thoughts you're racing to keep up with, to a movie with a main character you're laughing at. I resent this.
(The particularly irritating part, to me, is that I feel like many of these issues could have been resolved by just adding narration! I went into the movie thinking that "okay, it's a really cerebral and internal-dialogue-y book, but that's addressable by having Grace voice-over his thought processes, so that we still get all of that information." They did basically none of this, and the only times we ever get anything remotely like it are Grace's video logs, which are basically always just played for laughs and used to demonstrate how smart/incredible Rocky is.)
I thought the movie cut a criminal amount of stuff that was crucial to establishing the core feelings and themes I got when I was reading the book. We don't just lose Grace's thought processes (and basic competence), but we also lose a ton of the vignettes from Earth that were crucial to the raw bleakness, helplessness, and desperation I felt like Weir was trying to convey.
In the book, Astrophage is presented as not just existentially dangerous, but just... impossibly advanced. By the end of the book, we understand it - how it moves, how it stores energy, how it reproduces, how it spreads - but we never lose the sense of helpless awe at it. It's going to kill everything on Earth. It's already killed everything on countless other star systems. But it's not even sentient enough to be aware of that fact, let alone care about it. It's just quietly inserted itself into our understanding of the universe to add in the small note that because of it, everyone in the world is going to die.
The book lingers long enough on Astrophage, and talks about it in enough contexts, to really convey the existential dread induced by the black dots in the microscope. The movie was too much of a comedy to ever deliver that. Honestly, I felt like there were so many back-to-back gags and general silliness that the entire Hail Mary project just felt like "okay, Earth, we've got a BIG PROBLEM, but we're all gonna WORK TOGETHER and SOLVE it! now let's all build us a spaceship!"
I thought the vignettes from Earth - Stratt's court scene; the discussion about blackpanels; Stratt press-ganging scientist after scientist into the project; nuking the fucking ice caps (how did you think you could cut this?!) - these vignettes were so, so important to underlining this sense of global dread and desperation, underlining the greater and greater lengths humanity was willing to go to in the face of an uncaring, inexorable threat, and underlining the tiny thread of hope Grace represented. Those vignettes grounded the whole story, and continually reinforced the stakes; their absence in the movie stripped away the stakes and focused the movie on Grace's and Rocky's personal survival, rather than what they represent to the fate of their entire planets.
I was excited about the extra scene with Stratt at the end of the movie that I'd heard people talking about, and to be honest, it felt like, if anything, it reinforced how low the stakes seemed to be, that "oh yeah, the world's a lot colder now, but it's all good, we got the probes, no worries - no global population die-off, no rebellion in the streets, no resource wars, we just believed in the Hail Mary!" Stratt's totally fine, not a martyr on trial for commandeering all of humanity on something that who knows if it'll work (like she herself wonders about in the book, which I thought was brutal, realistic, and perfect).
Edit: The next few paragraphs came from me misunderstanding a couple of scenes in a way that has been explicitly disavowed by Weir and the actors; see the link below from Glanzwulf. I take this part back.
And on the topic of Stratt, I thought the way the Grace/Stratt relationship was handled in the movie was... at minimum, weird, and at times almost uncomfortable. In the book, there's not any mention of Grace having had any kind of romantic relationship; I don't know if it was just me, but I got the impression that he was aromantic and/or asexual, and that his students were "his" kids, in place of biological or adopted children with a partner.
Not only does the movie cast "Adrian" as a prior romance (in the book, he comes up with the name "Adrian" arbitrarily, and in fact explicitly talks about how he needed to just come up with a name from scratch), but, like... am I the only one who got "weird romantic tension" between Grace and Stratt on the bridge and in the karaoke scene? I- why?! Why do we need this?
Hell, in the book, duBois tells Grace that everyone thinks he and Stratt are lowkey a couple, and Grace's reaction is "oh HELL no" - and I get the distinct impression that Weir writes this conversation to definitively shut the door on a romance arc. Instead, the book talks about the complicated, non-romantic bond that Grace and Stratt do end up with, as a vehicle to show the reader a glimpse of how Stratt actually feels about the horrifying choices she has to make on a daily basis. In the movie, Stratt not only never seems that horrified or grim about the choices she has to make, but I got whiplash from what felt like to me was the movie teasing romance for no apparent benefit to the story.
There's also scenes/sequences that introduce plot holes or just... don't make sense in the movie because of how much of the book was discarded. Nathan/Wyngs have already talked about the sequence with the Taumoeba collector, but also:
- The vignette about the guy who designed the beetles got cut, so is putting John/Paul/George/Ringo on the
beetles"probes" really an Easter egg, or just a "...what? why?" moment? (I do appreciate that they set the probe-deployment scene to a Beatles song.) - In the book, the scene where they melt the block of metal is because they're using it to test the spin drive; in the movie, they clearly already know it works and they're just demonstrating it for the astronauts... so why the hell do they need to do this expensive, destructive test all over again? (Other than the fact that the VFX department already developed the CGI for this shot and it looks really cool?) (Which, yes, it does.)
- If we're never going to talk about Rocky making the multi-surfaced wall with all of the different triangles that conduct different qualities of sound, and only by chance did one of them happen to allow light through... what's the point of the first sequence with the mostly-opaque wall?
And yes, I know the rebuttal to this is that "the movie was already 2.5+ hours; are you really expecting them to shoot the entire book scene-for-scene?", but my honest-to-god opinion is that I would legitimately love to watch a six-hour movie, if the filmmaker felt that six hours were needed to do the book justice. Interstellar was thirteen minutes longer than Project Hail Mary, and from what I recall, people thought that yeah, it was a long movie, but every minute of screen time had a purpose. Imagine what Project Hail Mary could have done with thirteen more minutes of content from the book.
I refuse to be satisfied with the idea that "a movie will always have to cut a ton from the book, that's just how it goes". If the only way you can make a movie from a book is to keep the basic plot while throwing away most of its real content, then you haven't adapted the book, you've castrated it.
I do have to reiterate that I think the visual effects in this movie are absolutely incredible. I think Ryan Gosling did a great job at executing what the writers and directors asked him to do. And as much as I was irritated by the volume of the jokes, I thought many of them landed. But in my opinion, Project Hail Mary's "real content" is the research, discovery, and problem solving in Grace's thought processes, and I came away from the movie feeling like they cut every scrap of that out.
As a movie, in a vacuum, I think it's an amazing piece of work. But I feel like it completely failed the book. I just don't think it stands up to the material that it's based on, and knowing that you could read the book instead, I find myself hard-pressed to like, or recommend, the movie.
[Okay, done.]
past cradle
so regardng the romance which was the main thing i picked up on here, i also read this today: https://www.polygon.com/project-hail-mary-movie-romance-relationship/
ngl i did NOT read it like that at all in the movie, i didn't think of it all until i saw people mention it, i just saw it as... you know... two people of opposite sex and nothing much of it
tepid merlin
Okay, that's really good to hear actually, and I'm glad I just misunderstood it. I'm glad to see that Weir was just as explicitly "hell no" as I thought he was trying to be in the book.
past cradle
See but that's the thing, you're not the only one who also saw it that way. It's one thing i've noticed a bit here and there in social media, and was actually meaning to talk about that too. Because to me it just seemed like your average office interaction. That karaoke scene for me was like convincing your boss to do something silly with the team for morale 
tepid merlin
I think it was the way it was shot and edited, really
There weren't ever any spoken words that said anything like that, but the cinematography in (especially) the karaoke scene seemed reminiscent to me of a stereotypical "loving gaze from across the room" shot, and I think having her look him in the eyes while singing "we gotta get away from here" did not help lol