As part of my local book shops book club we recently read Project Hail Mary, which had of course just been turned into a movie starring Ryan Gosling. I had finished the book in time for the Early May Bank Holiday in the UK and the movie was still showing at a local cinema so I went along to see it.
A fan-made trailer for the 2000 movie.
Casting
In terms of the casting, many reviewers have criticised the movie for its casting of Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino as Gatsby and Daisy, with only Paul Rudd receiving praise as Nick Carraway and I have to admit I agree with them.
The only other movie I have seen Toby Stephens in is the Bond movie Die Another Day where he plays the villain, Gustav Graves and he has the same smirky face during his scenes as Gatsby in this movie that he has in the Bond movie. In turn it does make him feel somewhat unlikeable when he is meant to be the romantic hero of the movie but he comes across as the villain.
Similarly Mira Sorvino’s performance feels a bit disinterested and lacking much of the complex emotion required to play Daisy and also I didn’t really believe her relationship with Gatsby throughout the movie. However this could also be that some of Daisy’s emotional beats in the novel are skipped over in this adaptation, which means that she simply comes across as someone wanting to be back with Gatsby who suddenly changes her mind when actually confronted with the fact, whereas the novel shows that Daisy cares about her status and social standing as well which factored into her decision.
I did like Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway as I felt I mostly believed him as an observer of the events taking place and to me he also fits the right age and physical appearance of Nick from the novel.
In terms of the other casting, I admit I didn’t really write down anything of note about any of their performances that stood out. The one thing I did write about Myrtle, even though I don’t like judging actresses on their appearances, however the actress they chose to play Myrtle to me seemed quite plain looking which made me wonder why Tom would want to be with her, although she did fit the “faintly stout” description from the novel.
Plot
Dr. Ryland Grace is on a desperate mission from Earth to save the human race – the Earth’s sun is getting dimmer because a single cell organism called Astrophage is absorbing the sun’s heat. However Dr. Grace wakes up on a spaceship in 2032 with no memory of who he is or what he is doing there, with both of his crewmates dead. As his memories come back he recalls he was a schoolteacher who was swept into investigating Astrophage – due to a paper he wrote at university on whether water was needed by alien life to survive – for the mysterious Eva Stratt.
After investigating Astrophage and discovering how they breed, Grace was brought into Project Hail Mary – a plan to send a rocket to Tau Ceti, a sun 11 light years away which is unaffected by Astrophage. Back on the spaceship, Grace reaches his destination but discovers he is not alone and there is another spaceship there, with a possible ally to help him on his mission.
Changes to the novel
As with my previous reviews of movie adaptations, I will start with changes to the original novel and how accurate the movie is. Overall I felt the movie was pretty accurate with nothing from the original story being changed that much.
There are a few sections that were condensed down from the original novel. Grace’s initial investigations of Astrophage are much quicker in the movie, with him piercing them open in the same afternoon virtually whereas in the book this takes much longer. The next one occurs quite late so is in a spoiler box:
After recovering the Adrian sample globe, the Hail Mary begins to fall into the atmosphere, damaging the ship and knocking Grace out with the g-forces of the fall. Rocky breaks out of his globe and puts him in his coma box to save him, in a move that almost seemingly kills him.
This occurs in the movie as in the book, however following this in the book there are a quite a few situations such as the damaged hull resulting in Grace losing a lot of his Astrophage fuel, also Grace discovers the Taumoeba in Adrian’s atmosphere which kills the Astrophage but they equally destroy the remaining fuel in the Hail Mary, leading Rocky and Grace to utilise the beetles, satellites on the rocket designed to send data back to earth as mini engines to fly the rocket out of Adrian’s atmosphere and back to Rocky’s ship.
Also in the book we follow Grace and Rocky’s experiments with Taumoeba as he realises they are killed by nitrogen and he has to make them nitrogen resistant. However in the movie, Rocky stays knocked out and Grace does all of this off-screen and details it in a monologue, the story picks up with Taumoeba ready to be used and Rocky comes back around.
There are also a few additions to the book, mainly around Rocky and Grace’s relationship. The Hail Mary rocket has a “mental health” room that depicts Earth scenes so that Grace can take time out to pretend he is back home. He uses this to show Rocky his home planet (even though Rocky can only hear and not see), they also sing karaoke together. There is also a scene where the two of them choose a voice for Rocky in Grace’s translation program with voices like Meryl Streep being used. These scenes are fine and do show the relationship between the two characters growing fairly well and in a way that’s not as repetitive as the book.
There is however a flashback scene back on the naval cruiser leading up to the launch of the Hail Mary where Stratt sings Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times. This scene to me seems really out of place as it keeps cutting between Grace and Stratt, as if to me it was trying to imply some kind of romantic connection whereas in the book Stratt comes across as extremely focussed on the tasks at hand and is a fairly cold character.
Opinions on the film
Beginning with the casting of Ryan Gosling, I think he plays Ryland Grace really well and he does feel like a character who is a fish out of water at the start of the movie and as he has a large part of the movie on his own he does have to carry a lot of scenes which he does a fantastic job of.
The scene where Rocky offers Grace his Astrophage and Grace breaks down, Ryan Gosling really does hit the emotion just right in that scene and it was where I began to connect with the character in the movie.
I also really liked the depiction of Rocky who was voiced, played and puppeteered by James Ortiz. I did struggle to imagine Rocky during the books’ description, imagining a kind of octopus/spider type alien but the movie depicts the character visually really well and close to how I imagined him. I also thought the movie used CGI so it was nice to see they used an actual puppet which probably helped lend weight to the two characters and their relationship instead of relying on green screen. I also quite liked Sandra Hüller’s Stratt, although many of her scenes in the book are cut short and with the added bar scene it makes her character a bit more softer than the original book which was a much harder character.
Also I thought visually the film was really nice to look at, especially the space scenes and the scenes of Adrian.
Now unfortunately saying all of that, it also felt to me like the movie was missing something and it felt boring, especially during the first half. My main reasoning for this is perhaps the Astrophage threat wasn’t really established that well – the characters spoke about the sun getting dimmer and the consequences of it but none of it was really shown (until the very end). Considering the movie begins in 2032 with Grace on the rocket and assuming the sun was always getting dimmer all that time, I think the movie could have utilised some scenes to explain the threat back home, perhaps news reports of growing food shortages and having to blow up Antarctica to try to slow things down (which is also never mentioned in the movie).
Also sadly some of the books science dumping really feels more numbing here as a lot of it is explained through exposition and monologue. Whilst the movie does pick up in the final third or so, especially the sequence of getting the sample from Adrian and the travelling home, it sadly takes a long time to get there.
Overall if you enjoyed the book, I think the movie is enjoyable enough of an adaption, but I don’t think many casual fans will really enjoy this movie. If you have seen it, let me know in the comments down below your thoughts.
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