Having read or listened to the Andy Weir book about our sun dying, and what the world does about it, about a half dozen times, I was looking forward to the movie.
As usual with books I loved, and what someone decides to do with them in film, I was concerned.
The best translation of book to movie, in my experience, was the great Tolkien Middle-earth books.
Project Hail Mary Movie v. Book
It is hard to pick the worst, but Project Hail Mary, currently streaming on MGM+, is right up there in my view.
Project Hail Mary Loses Its Humanity
I think the best way I can explain my disappointment is not the usual one, which is a script totally divorced from the “science” in science fiction books.
The movie version navigates that hurdle by simply skipping most of the science.
It is hard to get it wrong when you simply ignore it.
I am OK with that too.
What soured me was the way the movie deleted any semblance of humanity in the script.
Rocky, the alien, is far more human than the human scientist.
From the movie, I bet a lot of people come away feeling a connection with the alien, which could have been created by the late, great Ray Harryhausen, the undisputed king of stop-motion animation.
The book spends about a third of its story humanizing the scientist, the dictatorial Stratt, and even the children.
The movie ignores the kids, who play an important psychological part in goading the scientist to work on the problem.
It also leaves out any real attempt to make Stratt more than a wooden “boss” of everything.
Even worse, it makes little attempt to turn the scientist at the center of the book into a person anyone could care about.
That matters, because much of the book involves his motivation and his worry about impending death.
You may enjoy the movie.
But if so, I doubt you would read the book.
And vice versa.
