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Project Hail Mary movie
We went and saw Project Hail Mary this afternoon. It was terrific. I loved it.
You can read my (positive and spoilery) reactions to the Project Hail Mary book at this post from 2024.
If spoilers matter to you, I recommend very strongly going in as unspoiled as possible, including not watching the trailer.
That is one of the most gorgeous movies I've seen in years. It was visually beautiful and just so incredibly interesting to look at. I wasn't expecting this much visual loveliness from a movie that takes place almost entirely on a spaceship made with our current level of technology (so on the ISS, basically) but they did fantastic things with lighting and color and shade, as well as capturing the immensity and vertigo of space in a really stunning way - that scene when Ryland tries to spacewalk for the first time and recoils from the immensity of space is so good. The scenes in the planet's upper atmosphere are gorgeous (the whole action sequence taking place in the middle of an aurora as seen from space!) and the alien spaceship is probably one of the most truly original and stunningly alien-looking designs that I've seen in film sci-fi.
The music was also fantastic, both the original score and the choices of recorded songs that were moodier and felt a bit different from typical action/SF movie pop hits. If this movie doesn't get Oscar nominations for cinematography and score, they were robbed.
One thing I kept thinking as I watched it is that this is a movie I could very easily see being someone's all-time, favorite-ever movie. It's just really nicely done - it's a movie with a lot of beautiful lingering shots, it's paced just atypically enough from most modern blockbusters to feel surprising and different, it's funny and emotional, and the space physics are really well done. The zero gee shots are great, I loved the way that the spaceship converts and spins, and there are a lot of really nice realistic touches like no sound in space (you either hear nothing, or the sounds inside the protagonist's helmet), even something like the ship's final voyage (to Rocky's ship) when you see it flip partway through the multi-week journey to start burning in the opposite direction to slow down. It's a movie that I could see anyone watching with their family, but it's not kiddified or dumbed down, aside from a few concessions to making a book which consists largely of internal narration work in a visual medium.
The movie follows the book to a really impressive degree, and this includes obscuring the actual premise (that it's an alien first contact story) until about a third of the way into it, as well as the atypical pacing of the ending. Watching it in movie form made me think about how there were a few places where it felt like there was an obvious movie cliche lurking in there somewhere, that it veers around because it sticks, in the broad strokes, to the book - in particular, the karaoke scene in the flashbacks is like that (where the low-hanging cliche fruit would be a romantic scene between Ryland and the German lady, but instead there's that moment of human connection in the bar and then they go off in their own directions again). I had a worried moment when I thought they were going to soften the book's slightly more bittersweet ending and have Ryland go home, and thank goodness they didn't do that, because it would have undercut everything from Ryland's final sacrifice to the (delightful!) school scene at the end. I also really liked that they kept the reveal that Ryland didn't want to be there and had to be forced to go to space at all, and also that we get this reveal very late, after we've seen a lot more of his heroism and his connection with Rocky.
In fact I felt like the least effective part of the movie was actually the opening scenes, which were sillier and more slapstick than the equivalent part of the book, and don't really have enough gravitas for someone waking up stranded on a spaceship with amnesia, surrounded by dead people. (The book also has a chatty/breezy tone, but not nearly to that extent.) And it's not quite in tone with the rest of the movie, which can be funny and silly, but not like that. I think if I'd been watching it at home, it's possible I would have drifted off to something else without sticking through it until it got to be more to my taste. But that's a relatively small quibble about a movie I generally, overall liked a lot!
You can read my (positive and spoilery) reactions to the Project Hail Mary book at this post from 2024.
If spoilers matter to you, I recommend very strongly going in as unspoiled as possible, including not watching the trailer.
That is one of the most gorgeous movies I've seen in years. It was visually beautiful and just so incredibly interesting to look at. I wasn't expecting this much visual loveliness from a movie that takes place almost entirely on a spaceship made with our current level of technology (so on the ISS, basically) but they did fantastic things with lighting and color and shade, as well as capturing the immensity and vertigo of space in a really stunning way - that scene when Ryland tries to spacewalk for the first time and recoils from the immensity of space is so good. The scenes in the planet's upper atmosphere are gorgeous (the whole action sequence taking place in the middle of an aurora as seen from space!) and the alien spaceship is probably one of the most truly original and stunningly alien-looking designs that I've seen in film sci-fi.
The music was also fantastic, both the original score and the choices of recorded songs that were moodier and felt a bit different from typical action/SF movie pop hits. If this movie doesn't get Oscar nominations for cinematography and score, they were robbed.
One thing I kept thinking as I watched it is that this is a movie I could very easily see being someone's all-time, favorite-ever movie. It's just really nicely done - it's a movie with a lot of beautiful lingering shots, it's paced just atypically enough from most modern blockbusters to feel surprising and different, it's funny and emotional, and the space physics are really well done. The zero gee shots are great, I loved the way that the spaceship converts and spins, and there are a lot of really nice realistic touches like no sound in space (you either hear nothing, or the sounds inside the protagonist's helmet), even something like the ship's final voyage (to Rocky's ship) when you see it flip partway through the multi-week journey to start burning in the opposite direction to slow down. It's a movie that I could see anyone watching with their family, but it's not kiddified or dumbed down, aside from a few concessions to making a book which consists largely of internal narration work in a visual medium.
The movie follows the book to a really impressive degree, and this includes obscuring the actual premise (that it's an alien first contact story) until about a third of the way into it, as well as the atypical pacing of the ending. Watching it in movie form made me think about how there were a few places where it felt like there was an obvious movie cliche lurking in there somewhere, that it veers around because it sticks, in the broad strokes, to the book - in particular, the karaoke scene in the flashbacks is like that (where the low-hanging cliche fruit would be a romantic scene between Ryland and the German lady, but instead there's that moment of human connection in the bar and then they go off in their own directions again). I had a worried moment when I thought they were going to soften the book's slightly more bittersweet ending and have Ryland go home, and thank goodness they didn't do that, because it would have undercut everything from Ryland's final sacrifice to the (delightful!) school scene at the end. I also really liked that they kept the reveal that Ryland didn't want to be there and had to be forced to go to space at all, and also that we get this reveal very late, after we've seen a lot more of his heroism and his connection with Rocky.
In fact I felt like the least effective part of the movie was actually the opening scenes, which were sillier and more slapstick than the equivalent part of the book, and don't really have enough gravitas for someone waking up stranded on a spaceship with amnesia, surrounded by dead people. (The book also has a chatty/breezy tone, but not nearly to that extent.) And it's not quite in tone with the rest of the movie, which can be funny and silly, but not like that. I think if I'd been watching it at home, it's possible I would have drifted off to something else without sticking through it until it got to be more to my taste. But that's a relatively small quibble about a movie I generally, overall liked a lot!