Project Hail Mary is fantastic hard sci-fi with a compelling story. It’s easy to see why it’s a bestseller.
Project Hail Mary
By Andy Weir
Ballantine Books
May 2021
The premise, without spoilers: the sun is dimming, and scientists learn an alien life form is causing it. They find a star light-years away that isn’t dimming, and he goes there to figure out why and solve the problem. There, he meets a being from another planet who’s in the exact same boat, thinking the exact same way.
So, movie vs. book? Both are really good, and the movie is an excellent adaptation. It isn’t 100% accurate. A two-and-a-half-hour movie can’t cover a six-to-eight-hour read without taking shortcuts. But it does a fantastic job of staying true to the source, which a lot of adaptations don’t. Too many just slap the book’s name on their own story.
Take World War Z. The book was outstanding, quite dark, and builds to a real solution near the end. The Brad Pitt movie is a by-the-book action film with an all-too-smart hero that basically just bought the name. Project Hail Mary is the opposite: the movie actually feels like the book.
I love it, just like The Martian. Really well made, on the page and on the screen.
