Project Hail Mary
PROJECT HAIL MARY. Loving books just as much as movies and credibly accused of being a formalist, I am generally skeptical of adaptations for the screen. I suppose I find works of literary creation something like sacrosanct and will always bristle at the notion that there aren’t enough original ideas being developed as screenplays to produce something cinematically viable. But popular novels are as much a part of movie history as the camera itself, so my contrarianism, once again, amounts to little more than stewing in silence.
Reactionary as I may be, I must admit there is nothing inherently wrong with transposing a work of invention from one medium to another. Some of my favorite movies are based on books; my hypocrisy knows no bounds. And, at its best, adaptation can both liberate a novel from the constraints of the page, rendering it accessible to another audience and allowing one version of its constructed reality to achieve new, vibrant life. It’s a fickle business, though, as faithful readers can have just as big a problem with “unfaithful” reinvention as I have with the fundamental notion of the practice. Acolytes of a book, more often than not, want the movie version to play out as it appeared on the screen in their minds, every grace note and minute detail intact, absent only the glyphs themselves. Dorks like me, on the other hand, want to see something we haven’t yet: an expansion or distillation of exciting ideas made new (and more exciting) by the opportunities presented by the grandness and flexibility of the movies. There’s no pleasing everyone.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s Oscar-winning work with One Battle After Another inarguably contains the chromosomes of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. Anderson found a crucial center in that sprawling (but also uncharacteristically concise) novel and, recontextualizing it for our troubled decade, rendered it both new and recognizable — same-same, but different. It’s a truly fine example of the practice at its best: the work of one master of a medium filtered through another. We can be sure its detractors have more to say than I do in praise, but saying one “liked the book better” becomes a specious argument in light of the brilliance of its reimagining. And that, to me, is adaptation at its best.
Which is not to say that Drew Goddard’s screenplay for Project Hail Mary, taken almost verbatim from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel about the potential end of the world (well, worlds) is not an impressive work. A friend urged me to read Project Hail Mary, probably too recently, and I did, with pleasure. While the book does not enjoy residence beside the dark, fatalistic tomes that mostly populate my bookcases, it is an effective space adventure, heavier on the science than the fiction. Admittedly, that might be a harsh reaction, as the story is indeed well-plotted and page-turning. But, having read only this one, Weir strikes me as a science writer with some fun story ideas, rather than a novelist in the tortured, hidebound mode I tend to prefer. (In fairness, that is a reflection of my intractable bias.) Project Hail Mary is every bit the sort of novel that suggests a movie version and, even in this embattled era, so shall we have one.
Directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who were fired from their last sci-fi project (2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story, which ended up directed by Ron Howard and is probably just fine), have made a career of saving modern comedy from itself, infusing their movies with a vivacity and weirdness generally absent from a genre that Hollywood seems intent on rendering obsolete, if not extinct. Most excitingly, they approach comedy with a keenly cinematic sense of its execution, using techniques beyond the ken of convention to enliven and enlarge their joke machines. While Project Hail Mary isn’t exactly high comedy, at least on the page, it is characterized by an abiding sense of fun and discovery (even if it is frequently drowned out by procedural fanaticism). Knowing those things, and Goddard’s formidable CV (from Buffy to The Cabin in the Woods), I was prepared for this to be an effective if unsurprising adaptation, which is precisely what it is.
The movie makes smart choices in streamlining some of the more laborious scientific DIY of the source material, and Ryan Gosling (if you don’t like him, we have nothing to talk about) is every bit the conflicted everyman genius the story requires. PG13. 156M. BROADWAY, MINOR.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in On the Matter of Censure.