It’s weird for me sometimes to think about the state of science fiction in movies. Back when I was a kid, making an SF movie was difficult, and mostly people didn’t bother. There was the towering achievement of 2001 from years before I was born, there was Star Wars from when I was a baby, and there was Star Trek from both before I was born (the show) and when I was a toddler (the movie), and… not a whole lot else.[1]

Today, though, it’s all over the place, to the point that I wanted to describe this movie as amiable but undistinguished. Which, in the context of modernity, it is. It’s fine! Decent enough! Above average, even!

But… dang, if this movie had come out forty years ago, it would have been a fucking legendary movie. I mean, one of my big knocks on old-timey science fiction movies is that they were mostly just action movies with a science fiction theme — that certainly describes Star Wars, and it even describes Wrath of Khan (one of my least favorite Star Trek movies). Part of what made 2001 such a big deal is that it was a real science fiction movie, based on a story by a real science fiction writer.

And so is this one. Andy Weir isn’t a brilliant writer, but he’s definitely writing in the classic SF mold, creating technical problems that characters need to solve by being clever and thinking hard. I’ve described the book this movie is based on as the literary equivalent of a text adventure, just a stream of puzzles to be solved; and the movie is a surprisingly faithful adaptation that improves on its source material, keeping the fun bits of the plot while sanding away the unpolished prose style and the annoying first-person narration. Getting such a faithful adaptation of a hard SF novel back forty years ago would have given me a movie I’d cherish to this day.

But alas for all concerned, Project Hail Mary came out in the present. And in the present, cinematic SF is not in short supply. Here, the faithfulness of its adaptation ends up maybe being a negative: Unlike 2001, this isn’t a movie that takes its source material and turns it into brilliant cinema; this is a movie that takes its source, and puts it onscreen in a competent but essentially straightforward way.

In fact, as I describe it that way, I realize that a movie like this did exist forty years ago: It’s not 2001 that this should be reminding me of, it’s 2010 — a perfectly competent adaptation of a pretty good SF novel that isn’t anything more than that. And sure enough, I loved 2010 back then and still quote lines from it to this day, whereas I doubt I’ll remember Project Hail Mary at all in a year.

But it really is pretty good! If you like this kind of movie — perhaps you’re a fan of The Martian, Weir’s other hard SF novel to get a competent film adaptation[2] — it delivers what you’re looking for.

  1. Yeah, yeah, there were other things — Alien and Blade Runner and probably also movies not made by Ridley Scott. But in terms of straight non-horror outer space stuff, the pickings were a lot slimmer. ↩︎

  2. So after writing this entry, I went back and read that linked review of The Martian and whoops, turned out I made all the same points there that I just made here. If I were more dedicated to these write-ups, I’d crumple up this draft and start over with a write-up framed around the idea that movie adaptations of Weir’s novels are total throwbacks and always make me think of ’80s SF, because clearly that’s true. But I’m too lazy to do that, so you’ll have to put up with this slightly repetitive entry. Look, it’s 2026, just be grateful you’re not getting a wall of Claude — even if Claude’s copy-edits are load-bearing for me. ↩︎