Flasz On Film

Having read all his three novels, I think I am equipped well enough to say that I like the idea of Andy Weir as a novelist more than I like his work. In a way, his career trajectory offers quite a lot of promise to anyone who has been chugging away on the side, writing stories or essays and posting them online while also working full time and hoping that one day they would be able to support themselves just from writing alone. But the problems start when you pick up Weir’s books and read them.

Well, that’s not entirely correct because problems actually begin when you’ve read one and then move on to another one he wrote. This is where you might realize that they all feel alike, as though they were populated with the same characters with the same voice, who apply the same cold-hearted logic to “science the shit out of their predicaments” and emerge victorious at the end of the story. If you just read The Martian, you might not see it as irksome because the combination of the book’s epistolary format, the incredible attention to scientific detail (that’s at least solid enough to pass Neil deGrasse Tyson’s sniff test) and the in media res inner monologue carrying the reader through the thought process of a botanist stranded on Mars as he’s trying to engineer a way to contact Earth and make his way home is fresh enough to furnish an entertaining experience. In fact, it goes for both the book and the Ridley Scott-directed adaptation.

However, when you decide to pick up Artemis and/or Project Hail Mary (the latter of which I finished reading literally as I was walking to the cinema to watch the film) you might quickly realize that something’s amiss. That the voice, the logic and the storytelling strategy together with a central character who happens to be good at everything are essentially the same. What’s different is the setting and the intrigue but both Artemis and Project Hail Mary are otherwise stylistically, tonally, and in terms of character development essentially indistinguishable from one another. This is most certainly a product of the author’s focus being firmly placed on the science, whose detail, depth of research and veracity his works pride themselves on. The story and everything else comes second.

And it creates a problem because making a movie out of Project Hail Mary without having it look like a derivative of The Martian is therefore physically impossible. And I think that Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who directed the movie) and Drew Goddard (who wrote the screenplay based on Weir’s book) knew it and decided to make a handful of targeted changes to the narrative to make sure their work would be able to stand on its own without having to live in the shadow of Scott’s adaptation of The Martian.

The movie stars Ryan Gosling who plays Ryland Grace, a man who wakes up in deep space with partial amnesia and slowly works his way towards remembering that he was sent to a different solar system with a mission to figure out why the Sun is dying, and it essentially follows the book in terms of structure. Grace’s problem-solving antics are interchanged strategically with flashbacks designed to trickle down expository information as to why he’s there to begin with and to also position a handful of tactical nuggets of information to dissuade the viewer from realizing—perhaps against their better judgment—that Grace just happens to be an expert in everything. And it all works towards a mid-section surprise and a science-based climax.

However, in contrast to the book, the movie almost completely dispenses with the novel’s ever-present running commentary delivered in the form of first-person narration that frequently punctures the fourth wall. What The Martian kept in the form of Matt Damon’s video diary entries, Project Hail Mary keeps to a minimum and deploys this narrative device mostly for comedic effect. This works rather well to flesh out the dynamic between Grace and his unlikely partner in problem-solving whose existence the film’s marketing didn’t keep secret at all. But because most of the book’s core “sciencing-the-shit-out-of-things” is contained in Weir’s first-person self-aware and linguistically sanitized narration full of gosh-darn-its and heck-yeahs (as though to make sure that parents wouldn’t have problems recommending the book to their twelve-year-old offspring), it leaves the movie chock-full of logical leaps that only viewers who did take the time to read the novel have a chance of fully comprehending.

Which means that the movie, as far as the narrative goes, is essentially unfixable. You can either make it look like a minor cousin of The Martian or cross your fingers that the audience wouldn’t mind that Grace and Rocky (his space companion voiced by James Ortiz) essentially save the universe with the use of completely unforeshadowed a-ha moments and logical leaps that (1) assume the viewer read the book, (2) doesn’t care about the science of it all (and Weir’s fanbase does care as far as I can understand it) and (2) relies on complete suspension of disbelief and taking at face value the assumption that scientists tend to display incredible cross-domain expertise. Which they don’t, actually. Anyone who has ever spent any meaningful time among scientists would notice the Dunning-Kruger at work, which manifests in their midst as a progressive shortage of confidence with increased expertise. These are people who do know what they are talking about when it comes to their domain and yet they are acutely aware of how much they have to learn. Additionally, they also realize how little they know about other domains and scientific disciplines; which means that a molecular biologist who also happens to be great at chemistry, microbiology, astrophysics, quantum physics, relativity and material science is a problem-solving unicorn and acknowledging his existence requires a lot of squinting.

As a tinfoil hat side note, this might be a unique outgrowth of Weir’s own optics because there are people out there who are more likely than others to think that cross-domain mastery is well within their grasp: software engineers. Specifically of the junior type. Or even more specifically—computer science students. Because their unique skillset is a combination of problem-solving (which computer programming is in essence) and communication (which programming requires as it uses specific language solutions), it’s not uncommon to find among inexperienced adepts of engineering and computer science a non-insignificant subset of confident smarty-pantses who believe it is fundamentally easy to master relativistic physics in appreciable depth only because they wrote a few programs capable of performing some elegant calculations in this space. So, as far as I was concerned, Ryland Grace was less a gifted polymath and more a reflection of the kind of people the author might have spent a lot of time mingling with when he was younger. But equally, you might be able to excuse this logical conflict between literal adherence to making sure that scientific detail would make Neil deGrasse Tyson give his seal of approval and an assumption that a guy like Ryland Grace could in fact exist because he is an avatar for completely fantastical wish fulfillment—an evocation of a dream that many young scientists have about saving their world using their cognitive horsepower alone. Competence porn on steroids.

And this is something the film seems both aware of and in need of active mitigation. You can’t completely extricate Weir’s magical problem-solving from the narrative because it is its beating heart while you also can’t fully lean into it because it would make the movie look unoriginal. Hence, Project Hail Mary makes an attempt on two fronts, neither of which the book truly pays attention to: tactile visual spectacle reliant on strategic deployment of eye-candy and Ryland Grace’s archetypal journey from a coward disguising his shortcomings with scientific swagger to a genuine hero capable of putting himself in danger to save others. In fact, this is the dramatic core of the entire narrative… which only surfaces halfway through the film.

It must be acknowledged that Lord and Miller successfully imbued this movie with nuggets of visual awe that a piece of hard science-fiction requires to remain memorable. The film’s attention to physical set design, practical effects and optical illusion truly shines through when it matters, which successfully—even if only temporarily—distracts from problem-solving deus ex machinae and other convenient shorthand resulting from near-complete excision of Weir’s narration.

The sequence in which Grace and Rocky must put their ship at a weird angle (obnoxiously detailed in the book with calculations made to look like child’s play) to collect a sample of atmosphere of a newly-encountered exoplanet and a brief moment when the camera flips between visible light and IR when they traverse through what’s called a Petrova line are particularly awesome standouts.
Additionally, Grace’s evolution into an unlikely hero is developed with fundamental awareness of dramatic prowess this arc would entail. However, on this front—because Weir spends precious little time developing his characters into something more than ventriloquist’s dummies suffering from a main character syndrome because his attention is occupied with making sure that the phrase “mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell” could be used in proper context—the depth of character work is comparable to something you’d find in a Michael Bay movie. In fact, Project Hail Mary seems specifically positioned to work as though it was stylistically and tonally related to Armageddon, only with strong emphasis on scientific verisimilitude. But as far as everything else goes, it’s all broad strokes, generalizations and stereotypes.

But generalizations do work in principle. It’s impossible not to feel anything for a character undergoing an archetypal change into a hero and stepping up to the plate. At the same time, much like many Michael Bay stints, Project Hail Mary also suffers from similar bloat issues. The movie takes way longer than it needs to get going, distracts itself with broad jokes every now and again and also takes forever to drive its point home. Therefore, it adds up to an uneven experience that is almost as satisfying as it annoying and tiring. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have taken much cutting to trim at least twenty minutes of its running time to make things leaner and more focused.

Overall though, Project Hail Mary balances somewhere on the edge of genuine visual brilliance as it is equally hamstrung by the shortcomings of its source material to which it is moored. It’s one of those blockbuster experiences that owes a lot to the chemistry between its leads, one of whom is a space rock spider who also happens to be an engineering know-it-all, and the occasional whiffs of visual inspiration. But underneath it all it is a superficially slick bloat-buster that tries to stuff so much into its narrative tortilla that it can’t help but burst at the seams and eventually become a messy meal to consume in public.