"Project Hail Mary"

Should you watch the movie first or read the novel first? Would a 10 hour TV show have been the ideal format?

I finally watched last Spring’s hit science fiction movie Project Hail Mary starring Ryan Gosling saving humanity from extraterrestrial “astrophages” that are eating the sun. And … yeah, it’s a good movie, just like everybody says. It’s fine hard sci-fi aimed at intelligent 13 years olds, in the tradition of Robert A. Heinlein’s 1956 juvenile novel Time For the Stars about an interstellar voyage to the same destination, Sol’s neighbor Tau Ceti.

I’d rank the movie as somewhat more enjoyable than The Odyssey: it’s at least as spectacular-looking, it’s much funnier, and Gosling is allowed to be more entertaining than poor Matt Damon.

Yet, I was starting to get exhausted by the end by the pace as the movie roars past a huge number of complex ideas.

For reasons like that, you might enjoy Andy Weir’s 2021 source novel of the same name more than the movie.

I haven’t read Weir’s recent novel, but I did read his debut book The Martian, which was made by Ridley Scott into a fairly successful movie starring Matt Damon as an astronaut stranded on Mars. The Martian’s shtick was that his Robinson Crusoe is constantly confronted with a life-or-death problem, which he ingeniously solves … only to find that his solution poses a new potentially fatal challenge. It’s a rather mechanical way to write a book — although if you are going to only use one gimmick all the way through, that’s a good one — but Weir is an excellent engineer, both literary and literally. He’s great at coming up with technical hurdles and then figuring out how to surmount them. Compared to Weir, Heinlein, an Annapolis engineering grad, was practically Ray Bradbury (of soft sci-fi fame).

(The one major shortfall of The Martian is that the precipitating incident — Matt Damon is stranded because the rest of his crew must suddenly launch back to Earth before a howling Martian wind topples their rocketship — is silly. Mars’ atmosphere is way too thin to blow anything over. I would have employed some kind of marsquake instead.)

Weir’s Project Hail Mary appears to be more sophisticated in construction than The Martian, but he’s still a tech guy first, man of letters second.

So, the question of whether you’d prefer the 496 page book or the 2 hour and 36 minute movie largely comes down to how much do you appreciate Weir’s amazing knack for coming up with sensible-sounding technical rationalizations for his plot twists.

Or do you prefer directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s high-velocity gloss-over of the rudiments of Weir’s plot?

I finished watching the movie with about 10 questions regarding the practicality of the plot twists, all of which AI informed me that Weir had tried to answer in his text. Only one of my questions — Why is the AI computer in Gosling’s starship so much dumber than HAL 9000 in 1968’s 2001? — is mostly because Weir needed his story to be like that so Gosling’s semi-amnesiac character couldn’t just ask the computer to explain how and why he is approaching Tau Ceti, 12 light years from earth.

Also, note that Project Hail Mary was published in 2021 and the astonishingly glib ChatGPT was released in late 2022. LLM AI really did happen vastly faster than even master sci-fi writers anticipated.

I suspect the invention of AI systems that can concoct an answer to almost any question the hero might ask will prove an even more awkward problem for screenwriters than did the invention of cell phones. (William Monahan’s screenplay for 2007’s The Departed was the first thriller plot to seem comfortable with cell phones.)

The rest of my questions about the movie had been answered much more elaborately in the book than the Because I Said So ruling out of informative AI.

On the other hand, Lord & Miller’s movie just rockets right past numerous reasonable questions you might have, using only a line or two of oblique dialog.

For example, zero effort is expended in the movie to explain the Einsteinian time dilation effect that is so central to the timelines in both Project Hail Mary and Heinlein’s Time for the Stars. Whereas Heinlein explained Einstein’s elegant theory of special relativity superbly, Lord & Miller merely have a middle school student mention that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. That’s it. That’s your only clue for figuring out Weir’s elaborate life-and-death timeline.

The worst problem of this sort with the movie is that soon after Gosling wakes up from an induced coma on the starship, he is shown doing a calculation involving traveling 12 light years, the distance from Earth to Tau Ceti (the same star system visited in Heinlein’s 1956 novel Time for the Stars). He stares tragically at his bottom line answer:

113.8 years

(The answer is a tribute to George Lucas’s first sci-fi movie: THX-1138.)

Assuming that was how long he was in artificial hibernation on his voyage to this relatively nearby solar system (and a 113.8 years is a pretty fast trip to go that incredibly far), I said to my wife, “Everybody he knows back on Earth is dead. No wonder he looks so sad.”

But two and a half hours later, we see his best friend back on Earth, the Emergency Dictator of the World (played by German actress Sandra Hüller), looking merely a couple of decades older. In the future, do lady dictators get first access to Super-Botox?

Only after watching the movie did I learn from Google Gemini that 113.8 years is not the time it took Gosling to get to Tau Ceti, but the time it would take Gosling to get back back to Earth with the amount of fuel he has left. And the movie doesn’t explain what the book does: that the induced coma doesn’t prevent aging the way artificial hibernation does in Alien and Interstellar. So, Gosling would die of old age before getting home.

But perhaps you’d prefer the movie’s slapdash attack? After all, do you really care enough about Weir’s clever solutions to problems that don’t actually exist yet (if they ever will) to spend 10 or 20 hours working your way through his book when Lord and Miller will give you the general gist of the story six or eight times faster, via a major movie star and a charming puppet?

The other meta-question is whether Project Hail Mary should have been brought to the screen as a feature film or as a ten hour television mini-series?

Paywall here.