Hello! I just watched the Project Hail Mary movie as someone who finished the book 24 hours ago and here is my literature and film nerd review of the film! (Spoilers for both book and film below)
So, overall the film was amazing. The visuals were stunning and you can really tell the love and effort put into each part of it to make it as full of life as the books descriptions. Ryland Grace's character was perfectly executed; his sarcasm, mannerisms and personality were beautifully shown and it really felt like the character from the book had simply bred dragged out of the pages and possessed Ryan Gosling. Similarly, Rocky was also presented in this fashion that made him feel so incredibly real and life-like, the dialogue written between the two was incredible and made for two very strong leading characters.
However, I do think there were some issues with the other characters in the movie especially compared to the book.
The film is just short of 3 hours long, which is pretty lengthy for a film but I do understand certain things need to be cut from the book in order to keep the film being shorter than 6 hours (not every book can have a trilogy adaptation like The Hobbit). However, the book is about Grace: he is the protagonist, it is *his* story that is being told, and how other characters affect *his* story. There wasn't that sense in the film. It felt incredibly focused on Rocky and Grace as protagonists rather than being centred on Grace himself which I thought took away valuable screen time from other characters who were just as important.
Stratt in the book is just as important as Rocky but in the film has a fraction of the screen time and most of her personality stripped away from her. You learn to love her which is why her betrayal ends up stinging so much in the end. There is none of her sass or how she can command anyone and everyone around her and what her character represented (desperate times call for desperate measures) is simply not there until she forces Grace onto the mission. I felt her character deserved more screen time and that her characterisation should have been as clear as Grace and Rocky's.
Similarly, Yao, Ilyukhina and Dubois all needed more depth which the book gave them and the movie really didn't. The people I was watching it with who had never read the book really didn't end up caring about them whilst I was sobbing seeing them dead for the first time again. They barely speak and their personalities just aren't there.
Again, this seems to be the running issue; whilst Rocky got all the love and attention from the movie as he deserved, no other character did. It's a story about human choices and how humanity acts both individually and as a collective but the focus was on the cute rock alien. (Fair enough, Rocky is the absolute best but still).
It was a good film at the end of the day, it still hits you right in the feels, and no film will ever be better than the original. I think it's amazing what was done for it but there were things I would have done differently at least in my own interpretation. I do think there should have been a much stronger focus on the human characters and the lengths they were going to to save humanity as well as the Hail Mary, but I do understand the interpretation of focussing on Grace's experience in space, particularly with Rocky.
All that being said, go read the book and then watch the film, it's an incredible story that has altered my entire soul!
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