Project Hail Mary is adapted from a novel of the same name by Hard Science Fiction writer Andy Weir. Hard Science Fiction is an especially unforgiving genre. It presupposes that the futuristic technology presented in the book actually conforms to the laws of science. One false move and you are relegated to normal Science Fiction where everything is possible.
The novels of Andy Weir are great reads. I have read two of his three novels (The Martian and Project Hail Mary) and have already seen the adaptation of the former. It was made by Ridley Scott and starred Matt Damon. In my review of The Martian, I noted that the conflicts and drama in the story came from engineering/scientific problems, mainly exactly how Matt Damon is going to survive long enough on Mars in order to be rescued. Because the story was so knowledgeable about the problems and how to actually solve them, there wasn’t any need for further conflict or drama coming from the people. As a result, you had this unique story where all the humans were generally nice people working together towards the same goal. Also, Andy Weir is funny, and Matt Damon is charismatic and Ridley Scott knows what he is doing. It was a good experience. If only more engineers wrote screenplays and more movie producers had a base level of scientific knowledge, we could have more of this type of fun, scientifically literate, drama-less movies.
Project Hail Mary is a movie in this vein. It presents a science problem and has a lot of hard working generally caring people work towards solving it. But the story and the science is also far more complex than The Martian. The book Project Hail Mary, which I read before seeing the movie, really shows the maturation of Andy Weir as a storyteller in plot and character development. He is not simply just an engineer with a blog about how to survive on Mars. Project Hail Mary is a professional novel written by a seasoned writer.
Unfortunately, I don’t think a movie is the correct vehicle for this story. The Martian was simple enough that a feature length-movie could strip it down to its core elemental parts and make a blockbuster out of it without losing any really important details. Project Hail Mary just requires far more scientific explanation for its great moments to really be felt. And the movie, already 2 hours 36 minutes long, does not have enough time to get into it. Everyone who made the movie seems to be the right choices. It looks great and is well-directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and the casting is very good. More than anything else, the visuals and performances add much to a story that cannot be realized in a book setting. Ryan Gosling does great as hero Ryland Grace. Sandra Huller is the perfect casting choice for Eva Stratt, the no-nonsense mission leader. And we shouldn’t forget James Ortiz, the voice and puppeteer of Rocky, who gives a faceless creature plenty of personality.
Who is Rocky? Well, when the book came out it was a well-guarded spoiler that wasn’t addressed in the marketing materials. Instead, the book’s marketing focused on the book’s opening act which was Ryland Grace waking up from a coma in a spaceship nearing a star named Tau Ceti, over ten lights years away from Earth, with no memory of how he got there and finding that his two companions, who he can’t remember either, were dead. He had some sort of mission but doesn’t remember what it is? In the movie, this well-formed conceit is breathlessly zipped through in about five minutes. Why? Because the movie correctly intuits that the heart of the story is the buddy romance between Ryland Grace and an alien life form from the exoplanet Erid that seems to be composed of rocks (hence the name Rocky). Rocky’s companions from his planet’s mission also all died on the journey. He is an alien with an engineering background who needs this scientist human to solve the problem that is bedeviling both their solar systems, an invasive species of bacterium, called astrophage, that is feeding off of their respective stars, thereby dimming them and presenting an existential threat to their respective planets and species.
That is a lot to present. When you are reading a book, you have the ability to go 5-10 pages, set it down, and think about what you just read. You can’t do that in a movie. If the movie does not give the viewer the time and pace to contemplate the information and the problem-solving process, it can’t be done. One is reminded of the difference between reading The Da Vinci Code and watching the movie of the same name. When reading, the book would often present a riddle, and the reader was able to set the book down and try to solve it before moving onto the next page. In the movie The Da Vinci Code, because there isn’t enough time to do anything else, Tom Hanks would solve the puzzle before the viewer could even begin to think about it, thereby depriving the viewer of one of the main pleasures of the book.
It is debatable whether The Da Vinci Code could ever have been a good movie. Project Hail Mary, I think, had the potential because the problems in Project Hail Mary are not the type of problems (say like a riddle) that the viewer can actually solve on his own. They require scientific experimentation, which only the character on screen can perform. But just because the viewer won’t be able to figure it out on his own, he can very much enjoy watching a character go through the scientific process. At least I presume the viewer can, because I did so while reading the book. It just takes time, which this movie does not have enough of.
I think for Project Hail Mary to really work, it would need to be at least a six-hour mini-series. I mean, you could spend an entire hour on Ryland Grace waking up, slowly learning what his mission is, and figuring out how his spaceship works. The movie spends maybe 15 minutes on this, speeding along, trying to get to Rocky as soon as possible. I understand why and do not fault anyone. If all you had was 156 minutes, that is the correct move. Having said that, I really do wonder whether someone who hasn’t read the book will actually understand what is going on and the import of the conclusions the characters reach way too quickly. I already knew the same, so I probably had a better time watching Sandra Huller bust out some good Harry Styles karaoke, a scene not in the book. (I, for one, knew she could do it if only because I had seen Toni Erdmann). The movie didn’t waste any time doing that. Emotionally it makes sense, and in a movie, emotion is the overriding element of any cinematic story. But, boy, there was a lot that was left off the screen. Maybe, if the movie is really successful, it will get the Harry Potter treatment and become a season of TV sometime in the future. But probably not:(
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