Last night we attended a screening of Project Hail Mary and here are some of our initial thoughts. SPOILERS for both book and movie.

When you consider that the audiobook runs 16 hours and 10 minutes and the movie runs 156 minutes, you realize that adapting the book for film involves cutting out five-sixths of the content. Despite this challenge, the movie does a remarkable job of hitting the emotional beats and, in particular, the relationship between Ryland and Rocky. So what was removed to enable this?

Firstly, our cast of supporting characters is greatly reduced in number, and those who remain have very few lines. Virtually none of the additional scientist characters appear in the film, and film-only viewers may not get a good sense of who DuBois and Shapiro are. Even Yáo and Ilyukhina have no more than a handful of lines. On a related note, Yáo is somehow fun now! The only human character with significant lines (aside from Ryland and Stratt) is our new friend Carl, who did not appear in the novel.

Secondly, there is very little of the DIY science that makes an Andy Weir novel an Andy Weir novel. That’s not to say there’s no science. Much of the science is simply implied by the plot and is assumed to have occurred off-screen. We don’t get the abundance of step-by-step problem solving that pervades the book (although the language bits are well done). Rather than experiencing Ryland’s slow realization of his identity and the reason that he’s at Tau Ceti, we speed up this process and merely get glimpses of a whiteboard on which he has posed questions about himself.

Despite the changes and omissions from the Earth timeline, no major plot points are missing from the space timeline. Again, the Rocky and Ryland relationship is portrayed perfectly and our faces leaked at all of the expected moments from the book.

The production design, cinematography and visual effects are stunning and we were completely sold on Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, and James Ortiz’s voice and puppetry as Rocky. We totally recommend the movie for book readers and would be intrigued to know what the experience was like for non-readers.