I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. There are choices that always have to be made when turning a book that requires several hours to read into a much, much shorter movie. In this one, they trimmed out some of the relationships and a lot of the more detailed explanations for things. That was probably the right choice, though it did make a lot of it feel much more superficial.
I assume they called it Project Hail Mary because actually crafting a well written story out of a basically new/unknown IP is the actual last thing that anyone in Hollywood would contemplate as the basis of a movie.
I enjoyed the movie, but I don’t think it was that much of a gamble. The Martian set a pretty decent expectation for success.
The Martian came out in 2015.
11 years ago.
In 11 years… how many well known IPs were rebooted or continued or reimagined, as major movies?
How many times did Hollywood release another version of Skyrim?
It based on the book of the same name.
Please let this usher in a new era of non-reboot or sequel high budget films
Just got back from the movies. Loved it. And I’m relieved that they didn’t stray too far from the book. My 14 y.o. son also loved it, and he never read the book. He’s got ADHD and I’ve never seen him complete such a long movie, let alone in one sitting, before.
10/10, would recommend
I really appreciate how they didn’t try to use too much bullshit science. One of my biggest complaints with movies or shows is their use of science that is just completely wrong. Xenonite is quite flakey but I think that’s the worst thing
It helps that Andy weir basically comes up with all the science before writing a story around it
I felt like the author was winking at us when he namee it xenonite and made it a miracle material. “Heres the McGuffin!”
With such a high rating, would you recommend watch the movie or reading the book first? I’ve never even hear of it until recently and never seen a trailer so completely blind about what it’s about.
The book is just a nice read. If movies spoil books for you, definitely read the book first. But the movie is true to the story and both are great.
Super happy for Weir. Great writer and now two great adaptations.
It was an amazing movie. There are definitely scenes that I missed that were in the book and I feel should have been in the movie, but I understand they had a lot to get through.
Well to be fair, if they included everything it would have been a 5 hour movie.
I think the adaptation was pretty good.
Apparently the directors cut was 4hrs
Maybe we’ll get that on a separate release later.
I come back from the movie. I loved it, my wife less so. I guess I hyped it up too much, and she is expecting a masterpiece, not entertainments.
We both agree the scene, narrative, and music are great, I like the story and charactor arc, but she feels the plot holes are too distracting in the story.
But we both agree there are too many plot holes,
complain 2
and the whole “lone wolf genius” plot line is very annoying and cliche: science progresses mostly through collaboration and sharing. There are lone geniuses, but the work of most scientists, including many considered geniuses, are not irreplaceable. It is very rare for a genius to out perform a coordinated group of scientist when they are working towards the same goal. Good thing they didn’t spend too much time on it.
I guess the biggest plot hole is
!!! SPOILERS !!!
potential plot hole
Why didn’t they use the super advanced rocky ship to collect the predator, when it can instantly create environment that are livable for humans; instead, they used the super fragile tiny human ship?
Perhaps that ship was incapable of approaching the atmosphere for reasons that weren’t discussed.
Yeah, I feel it is the only reason, but it feels very werid that an alien in a much more advanced ship seeking to save their entire planet don’t have ability to a approach planet at their destination.
Or rocky is a way worse pilot than Grace.
They talked about it in the book. The hail Mary has way better tech/science on it than the blip A. Basically the blip A is iridians first spaceship. It’s bare bones and the shit for even collecting astrophage doesn’t work. Plus rocky was literally stuck in space wondering around by himself for 40+ years and still couldn’t get the stuff to work.
As to your second issue: one ship had a science person and a bunch of equipment that they’d need built to operate in that science person’s environment.
But the collection process doesn’t need a science person and is extremely dangerous. One ship has a fabrication person (basically can build and repair structures instantly) with robot arm and prob. It doesn’t seem like a science person’s job to “space walk” (atmosphere walk, really) on a completely unknown planet’s atmosphere.
After the collection, they can bring the sample in the lab to test and breed, which is exactly what they did.
There are a lot more details in the book
But it basically boils down to, that the hail Mary is more capable
Plus, navigating would be a two person job due to the complexity, and grace can’t get on board of the blip a (the scene with him in the xenonite suit is movie-only)
Part of the book is that everything is slower, it took them weeks to get to the planet from where they met, and Rocky had already spent time retro fitting graces ship to let him live there. (they did not go to the planet with the intention of sampling it, they were just going to sample the line and orbit the planet as an easy way to get close to the line)
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but I think they considered the danger relatively low for the ship with their plan to stay high up and were more focused on “maybe we’ll lose the bucket risks” and didn’t want to go back to rocky ship until they were done because travel time and stuff.
