snow white

Its theatric run over in 1 month, Project Hail Mary arrived on the hard drive in short order.   After running the Michael Jackson movie for just a week, the IMAX theater now seems to be derelict.  They could be reserving it for private screenings or it could be too expensive to operate.

It's a growing number of movies which won't be available in blu ray.  Lions continued to be perplexed by the inferior quality of webrips.  

 

 Skimming through it, the resemblance to 80's depictions of the future was striking.

 

 

 

 

It was a time when the future was painted white & noodled.  Sometimes you have to go back to go forward.

 

Moving on, they made every effort to pack as much of the book in a 2:30 screening time as possible.  The shots are all very quick.  It was like watching normal movies at 2x.  The book being intended from the start to be a movie definitely helped.

 

Computer animated exterior shots really popped, despite all being in darkness of course. Lions pondered if the real stars were shown.

 

 Then we get the stunning visuals from the book, the line of living organisms stretching between the planets, the alien spaceship, the spacewalk.

 

 

 

 

 User interfaces in modern movies don't get a lot of lion attention because they're not the feats of poke statements they were 40 years ago, but this one intrigued.  Movies & internet posts have always done a bad job depicting celestial navigation but in this case, lions could almost believe it was showing a readable 3D representation of all the stars in the local cluster.  

 

 

 The way past movies did it & the current maps are turds in comparison.

 

The german was a bit less robotic than the book.

 True to Weir form, women don't exist.  They still didn't exist in Artemis, which had a female lead.  It was a smart move for an author who spent his younger career in silicon valley.

 

 With Rocky's introduction at 57 minutes, introductions were complete.  By this time, the alien introduction began to get tedious & it wasn't engaging enough to finish in 1 day.  There have been a lot of alien introduction movies by lion age.  Lions can only imagine it was more fascinating in IMAX or to someone who didn't read the book.

Noted he wasn't documenting the alien at all, typical for every alien encounter.  Maybe his helmet cam was running. 

1 disappointment in the book was any real alien encountered on such a journey would probably be a humanoid.  It was a bit implausible for something like rocky to make it to space.

 

 There was an interesting development of an alien, robot, human family.

 Noted how slow things got after 1 hour.  That was disappointing, considering how much was glossed over.  No antarctica nuke.

 

They glossed over the use of astrophage centrifuges for propulsion.  Forgot why they stuck with complicated photonic propulsion instead of detonating the astrophage in a delavalle nozzle.  It seemed to be more efficient.

Played the musical interlude at 2x.  They spent a lot more time on the german than the book.  

 

That was a dud scene, considering what was coming.

 

 

 

 The spacewalk scene was definitely meant to impress on the large screen. Not sure how well that worked, 20 years after the 3D craze.  Forgot why they couldn't fire up the engines while he was still outside or before the scoop was retracted.

 

 

 

 

 Clear shots of the alien were scarce.  Vaguely remember our man fashioning underwear to cover its private part after the eating scene.  Suspect an army of home made replicas are coming.

 The voice was not the bullwinkle voice lions imagined.  Helas, only generation X imagines that voice, but we can actually simulate it nowadays.

 

 

 The realization of the alien ship interior was quite a visual, obviously intended for the big screen only.  There were some elements of superman's lair.  It would have been a popular movie still 3 years ago, but all such novelties have been replaced by AI recombinations of past garbage.

 

 How they would realize the kidnapping for the space voyage was a big question.  Once again, the german got a much more simpathetic treatment than in the book.  Fortunately, they didn't dwell on his whining as much as the book.

 

 Don't remember any note about cutting xenonite in the book.

 

The probes were finally realized.  They emphasized the ship being built in Russia, quite the opposite of where it would be built now.

 The movie expanded on the novel with the german living to see the probes return, revealing our man could have returned in their lifetime & a lot of his generation would have still been alive.  Then the realization of the man cave on the alien planet was presumably advised by the author.

 

 

It really was a man cave built into a mountain, with no privacy.

 

 Like Shaw shank redemption & The crate, the happy ending was a bromance.  Pondered if a flexible enclosure made of rigid triangles could actually work.  It would eliminate the pinch points of limbed robots.

The open ended questions remaned of how they would preserve astrophage for its propulsion applications, preserve taomoeba as an antidote, prevent astrophage from becoming immune & destroying Earth again, whether a legion of humans would come to study the rock planet, whether our man would be called upon to save Earth again.  They didn't hide how the book was intended to be a movie.

1 missing detail was how quickly all the gadgets he brought from Earth would stop working, especially the laptops.  The aliens had no technology to replace it.