re: Project Hail Mary Discussion thread, Box Office. Spoilers Allowed. Crosses 400 mil

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Ryan Gosling got hold of Andy Weir’s manuscript before the novel was even published and called Lord and Miller directly. 

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Animal. Gosling clearly loved this story, and Miller and Lord were phenomenal on their choices. Love seeing this kind of very difficult vision brought to life.

And because it was puppetry and practical effects, none of it looked cheap, CGI, or chintzy. I can only hope that real effects start to make a comeback. CGI just can't hold a candle.

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It made 3/4 of it's net production budget on it's opening weekend You love to see it

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Normally I don’t really care about movies making money and getting all caught up in that (if I like I movie, I like it) but this is a scenario where you want Hollywood to get the message that optimistic Human stories will get butts in seats.

Hell, Matt Walsh (a curmudgeon) wrote a glowing review of it. If you get that a-hole encouraging your movie, you know you have struck a chord.

Saw it last night with wife and daughter. I thought it was great and read the book. My wife liked it and she hadn’t read the book. My 11 year old daughter thought it was too long and fell asleep

Saw it last night in IMAX and really dug it. Haven’t read the book, felt the science stuff was just the right mix of not too complex to bore you but not completely nonsense to keep the plot moving


My only real gripe for lack of a better word are there are a couple of emotional notes that they could’ve just let breathe better. There would be like 2-3 gosling quips in a scene where the emotion is really swelling and I think they were scared to bask in that long enough for it to give it the full weight it should’ve had

Went into this movie having little clue to what it was about but ending up loving it

I'm watching it tonight as well. Very excited

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My only real gripe for lack of a better word are there are a couple of emotional notes that they could’ve just let breathe better. There would be like 2-3 gosling quips in a scene where the emotion is really swelling and I think they were scared to bask in that long enough for it to give it the full weight it should’ve had.

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For someone who didn't read the book, IMO you nailed the biggest problem with the movie. I say that because if you don't know the story, you are overwhelmed keeping up with the details of the plot and could easily miss emotional beats that book readers expect.

For those lamenting specific details left out of the movie, I like hearing what they missed, because everyone has different ideas of what would have been better to keep in the story. But the movie is obviously a different beast, and they had to focus on the part of the story that they knew the biggest audience would resonate with.

The problem I had with the movie is that they indeed included the biggest revelations of the reluctant hero's journey to redemption, but glossed over them for some reason. At the start of the story, Grace has profound memory loss. In the book he doesn't even know his name, and doesn't even know that he's in space for a while. In the movie he has lost a lot of memory but knew his name immediately and (understandably) discovers that he is in space and starts working on why he's in space sooner. A very subtle difference but it affects how we perceive the biggest revelation of all near the end of the story. In the book, when he finally remembers why he had profound memory loss, that he had to be dragged (drugged) onto the ship kicking and screaming like the little bitch coward that he was, it was quite jarring for the reader to realize that our hero was such a coward that he couldn't sacrifice himself to help the survival of mankind. In the movie, I'm glad they revealed this and didn't gloss over the facts of the case, but his reaction to finally remembering this is like two seconds of him curled in a ball looking distressed, and then they just moved on from there. I think that was a big miss. One thing I noticed about the storytelling is that there were a bunch of places where they could have had better exposition of the story by having Grace narrate some of his inner thoughts (during existing scenes, no increase in runtime), but it was just silence.

I can't remember if a detail from the book on his redemption journey was left out of the movie. When he decided to forego the trip back home in order to save Rocky and Erid, I think it was obvious that he probably would never get back home, but in the book it was clear that if he went to help Rocky, he expected to starve to death in 3-4 years because Eridian food was too toxic for humans. This made his decision even more heroic, but I can't remember if they played down in the movie how quickly he expected to die.

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I can't remember if a detail from the book on his redemption journey was left out of the movie. When he decided to forego the trip back home in order to save Rocky and Erid, I think it was obvious that he probably would never get back home, but in the book it was clear that if he went to help Rocky, he expected to starve to death in 3-4 years because Eridian food was too toxic for humans. This made his decision even more heroic, but I can't remember if they played down in the movie how quickly he expected to die.

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They didn’t touch on this or the Me Burger in the movie.

For non book readers, they take a sample of his tissue/DNA and create a food source

Amaze. I knew WOM would help this one.

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with repeat biz also kicking in

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Guilty.