Project Hail Mary

Rabbit_Games said:

Spoiler

It was obviously used up as fuel. Thus, the reason there could be no return trip until Rocky chose to give him more.
Unless I missed something?

As for the other point... I'm saying there are two simultaneous missions. One for sure, the other being other intelligent life showing up there to save their planet [a VERY real possibility]. The argument "WE are the proof of life in the universe" comes to mind. I'm saying they damn sure should have put some thought into it and had a plan.

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It's Andy Weir's "hard sci-fi" material, same as The Martian. It's somehow plausible if you're okay about flawed humans doing hero stuff. Both Sunshine, Interstellar and a load of other scifi flicks showed us how "flawed humans doing horrible stuff" could turn to.

Astronaut training is mostly to prepare them for lots of worst case scenarios and to make them adept in lots of things. The movie mentions he had been doing stuff along side the astronauts related to the science, so it’s not like they just plucked a random dude off the street day of launch

Just watched it with the wife, who listened to the audio book a few months ago. She really wanted me to listen to it, but I wasn't all that interested.

I really enjoyed the movie. Sounds like she did too, but she actually said she was disappointed because they left off a lot of the science. Which, for my wife to say, is pretty insane, because any time I start getting into the weeds on anything she zones out.

Supposedly the original runtime of the movie was a lot longer and they presumably went into more of the science - I wonder if they'll release an extended edition at some point

I actually thought the movie would have been a lot better and more dramatic if they had kept it mostly linear instead of the flashback style. I didn't care about the other astronauts or most of what happened in the flashbacks because I already knew their fates.

My friend that read the book said the flashbacks happened there, too, but there was more information about the other characters that made it more meaningful...that's fine. I'm sure it worked well in the book...and I even understand the film not wanting to wait 90 minutes to introduce Rocky, but I felt almost nothing during the movie until the karaoke scene.

With all of that said, it sounds like I'm hating on the movie when I'm really just nitpicking. I liked it overall. I don't think it's a movie I'll rewatch, but I don't regret seeing it in the theater.

I think the flashbacks worked well here because Grace is slowly remembering the real events: the other astronauts get shown as selfless and brave and he wants to bug out, which makes his choice to save Rocky at the possible cost of his own life much more meaningful

I finally got around to watching this tonight, and while I'd still call it a good movie overall, I genuinely don't understand the level of hype surrounding it. Going in, based on all the online buzz and reactions, I was expecting something groundbreaking or one of the best movies I had seen in years. Instead, I walked away thinking it was entertaining enough in the moment, but ultimately pretty lightweight and forgettable.

A lot of the emotional core of the movie seems to hinge on the Rocky storyline, and that's where the film really lost me. I know people are absolutely enamored with that character, but so much of it felt overly sentimental and almost cartoonish. The tone constantly bounced between hard sci-fi survival drama and what felt like a family-friendly buddy adventure. Maybe if I were 9-12 years old, the whole "unlikely alien friendship" angle would have landed harder for me, but as an adult it often came across as a little too cute and manufactured for the kind of movie it was trying to be.

That tonal inconsistency is probably my biggest issue with it. The movie wants to present itself as intelligent, grounded science fiction, but it also leans heavily into quirky humor and emotional manipulation in a way that undercuts all the tension. Compare that to The Martian, which I thought was a significantly stronger film despite its own flaws. The Martian at least maintained a more coherent identity throughout.

And again, I don't think it was bad at all. There's clearly a lot of craftsmanship behind it, the visuals were solid, and it's easy to see why mainstream audiences are eating it up. I just think the reaction online had me expecting a modern sci-fi masterpiece, and what I got instead was a fairly safe, emotionally engineered blockbuster that I'll probably barely remember in a year or two.

Maybe I'm just out of sync with what people want from sci-fi now, but I walked away from it feeling more confused by the overwhelming praise than impressed by the movie itself.

Kirun said:

Going in, based on all the online buzz and reactions, I was expecting something groundbreaking or one of the best movies I had seen in years.

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I took this as more of a comment on the movie industry than the movie itself. I can't think of a better movie in the past 3 or 4 years because movies are all shit these days.