saw the project hail mary movie. i enjoyed it but perhaps controversially i preferred the book a lot more. spoilers and ranting under cut
it had some marked improvements on the book, many things were changed because of medium differences that I liked or approved of. The pacing of the beginning and the flashbacks is better. Carl is a good adaptation addition, he's a face for the muscle/military side of the big betrayal and he's someone for Grace to bounce off of during initial research. The Hail Mary is a beautiful practical set and the Adrian atmospheric collection scene was fantastic, loved seeing the invisible plume of the ship igniting the gas of the upper atmosphere. Seeing the spin drive working was very fun. Loved the color and compositional choices for the film. Gosling is too Hollywood sexy but otherwise does a great job portraying Grace as intelligent and sympathetic, but also an awkward corny cowardly loser. Just like the book Eridian grammar is way too one-to-one with English but I liked that an effort was made to make Rocky's noises and signs consistent and not just gibberish (the "question" particle is a sign... two taps).
But it was also worse in ways that matter to me a lot. Hated Rocky's fantasy rock monster design, sorry. I like that it's a puppet and i think the puppeteers did a great job but I wish it was a different puppet. I suspect part of the reason he looks like that is to make him less scary to arachnophobes, which. like. is just a boring general-audience palatability decision, which i don't respect. The language barrier speedrun from the book is even more speedy, but it's on movie time, I understand, whatever. Did not like Rocky's unnatural intuition of human cultural stuff, like when him and Grace pick a synthesized voice and rocky seemed to know which human accents and vocal characters are "weird" or "funny." A lot of little things in that vein were inserted or removed that made Rocky feel less like a competent equal and a genuine foreigner to humanity and more like a funny mascot character. While I approved of the synthetic voice as an adaptation change I wish it was actually synthetic, so much of it was really obviously voiceacted for emotional tone and. Idk maybe it's just me but I would find an awkward stilted toneless generated voice more poignant in a stressful scene, especially if the untranslated Rocky speech has an obvious emotional tone.
The scene where they were reunited was also a huge downgrade from the book for me but I honestly don't know how to change that because the book scene's impact was contingent on Grace understanding Rocky without translation and bunch of other context that would be difficult to communicate without being in Grace's head. Dunno. Also I vastly prefer the book scene where Rocky leaves his atmosphere to save Grace and then grace has to haul him back to the airlock but I.... understand what the movie was doing: Rocky saves Grace, so Grace has an emotional debt, so it's resolved when he turns around to save Rocky in the end. I just. Didn't like it as much. I liked the book scene because it's a very tactile demonstration of how incompatible humans and Eridians are. Rocky is incredibly heavy, incredibly hot, and his atmosphere is highly pressurized poison. The movie actually seemed to not... really address much of anything other than the ammonia, no mention of the pressure difference, no mention of the gravity difference, and the only bit where heat is addressed that i recall is Rocky's hand burning Grace. Which I did like that. Hand shaped burn scar is an excellent change. Extremely romantic. But Rocky busting into the control room through his xenonite wall like the koolaid man (dumb...) should have fried grace to a crisp with chemical burns and heat.
Eva Stratt is interesting. The movie definitely makes more attempts to humanize her than the book, and kinda softens her "temporary dictator of Earth" status by making her obviously a high level administrator but leaving everything else to implication. Nothing about paving the Sahara or nuking Antarctica. She is in many ways a different character than book Stratt. I liked movie Stratt's straightforward refusal to engage with humor, that was cute trait. I kind of miss the book version's thorns and unapologetic single-minded ruthlessness, I rarely see that personality in female characters, but I don't think I'd fault anyone for preferring movie Stratt. Also I have more.... thoughts.... about book Stratt I'm cooking on for a different post.
What else... the ending of the movie removed a lot of bittersweet ambiguity that I liked in the book ending. I enjoyed that Erid's gravity is kinda slowly destroying Grace, and all we get to know is that some space-capable group on Earth received and implemented the solution Grace sent them. Returning home is a gamble, but staying on Erid is slowly grinding him down. There is no comfortable return after all that's happened to him. the movie also excised a loooot of engineering and science process stuff that i enjoyed in the book. I expected this, those would pace horribly in a movie, but it made the parts I think were lacking in the movie hit worse because they had less to lean on.
so. i dunno. the book was better for me even with its grating humor and quippiness and many inadequacies because i mostly care about the alien and the science mystery and the movie sanded the edges off both of those
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