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[–] 38 points 1 year ago (5 children)

This was a fun book. Solid narrator on the audiobook. (Ray Porter)

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Fucking love the audiobook. Listen to it so far four times. Plan on reading the novel this year (finally picked up a copy.) My worry is they will fuck this up like they did the Martain. Great novel, and also solid audiobook, listening to it now for like the 20th time. But didn't care for that PG13 movie.

    Spoiler but the first sentence in the book got the word fuck in it. And Annie cursed up a storm in the book.

    Edit: They better do Rocky I swear.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    The botched comical farce ending that he makes fun of in the book becoming the movie ending was offensive... I loved so much of the pieces but talk about a slap in the face.

    Also, removing the detail of Pathfinder failure so you have months of mental health issues... Damon did spectacular at emoting the strain in the moment he regains contact with the crew, but it felt disjointed without the context of zero contact and the desperation.

    Many of the actors were amazing, but Ridley screwed up bad.

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  • Matt Damon did a fantastic job portraying Mark Watney, though I'll definitely say movie!Watney had it a lot easier than book!Watney. He didn't kill Pathfinder, basically the entire long haul to ARES IV was "he did it, he drove to ARES IV", no sandstorm, no figuring out which way to go, no rolling the rover.

    They pussed out on a lot of the mission control characters as well, Annie wasn't a no nonsense ballbuster, I don't even remember Mindy the meek satellite girl who grew a pair, and Vince unilaterally sending the Rich Purnell maneuver in defiance of orders and daring them to fire him over it...

    Some of that would have been cut for run time; what works in the span of a novel doesn't work in the span of a film. I think to fully capture the entire scope of the book you'd need a 6-8 hour miniseries. If I want to revisit The Martian, I'm going to play my copy of the audiobook narrated by R. C. Bray.

    Look: Boobies! ( . Y . )

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Hoping they pull a switcheroo and gosling plays Rocky

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    ...I figured Rocky would be voiced by an array of theremins.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Right but Hollywood so gosling does mocap and the voice is his but heavily vocodered thru the theremins.

    In all seriousness I would love to be wrong about this but I doubt hwood will allow rocky and the other eridians to have musical verbal language. That means subtitles, and Hollywood fucking hates subtitles.

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I feel like Any Weir's name should be on this poster. He's a bigger draw than Gosling in my book.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    Damn, I kept putting off reading it and they're already making it into a movie. At least now I have a deadline.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just listen to the audio book. It's read by ray porter and he nails it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Seconded. Read it on my own first, ended up reading half of it out loud to my wife just because I was so tickled by it, then put it on for the whole family on a road trip. Such a great story, everyone loved it.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago

    Fist my bump!

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (4 children)

    That was a fun, very light sci fi novel. I hope they don't fuck it up too bad. I hope Gosling plays Rocky, bwahaha

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    That's an incredible poster. Hope they do it justice.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    Cautiously hopeful.

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Amaze!! Amaze!!

    …I’m excited for this film, but so scared that it will be another enshitified movie of a great book with the story twisted and warped by producers and other interests.

    Like Ready Player One turned out to be; utter garbage.

    Ungh….

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I actually like the movie. It made the best out of the book, which is meh at best.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago

    I agree wholeheartedly. The book and movies are just vehicles for delivering nostalgic references, but while in the book 80% of those references were just listing off one thing after another, in the movie I could see and hear them, which makes it much better for that nostalgia.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Wait this is gonna be a movie?!?!

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    That's a pretty ambitious book to turn into a movie. Hope they don't go too "Hollywood" on it, and respect the source material.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    The Martian was almost entirely internal monologue and they did a faithful job adapting it. It wasn’t as good as the book, but still great.

    I can definitely see some difficult moments to adapt on the big screen, but I have faith

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    They already had to cut out a big chunk from the middle of The Martian (which then broke the I've got no radio, so no one can give me permission to board, so I'm now the first space pirate joke, which they decided to keep anyway), and Project Hail Mary is a much longer book - it's about as thick as Dune, which became two movies and still cut loads. Something major will have to change if they're going to give it an acceptable runtime.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (4 children)
    1. No it isn't, Hail Mary is 180 pages shorter than Dune
    2. Dune is way more dense than Hail Mary, Weir very clearly writes his books to become movies. Way more dialog, much simpler problems, and clearly defined acts translate much easier to the screen
    3. They'll obviously have to cut some parts, but having read/seen The Martian I don't think anything of major importance was lost
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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I said they're similar thicknesses because they're right by each other on my bookshelf and are similar thicknesses. I just looked inside for the page counts, and excluding appendices, maps and diagrams of spacecraft, my copy of Project Hail Mary (the original paperback, starting on page 3 and ending on page 476) is just 55 pages shorter than my copy of Dune (50th anniversary paperback, starting on page 1 and ending on 529). Having 10% fewer pages seems pretty reasonable for about as thick. If yours are different by 180 pages, then you've clearly got a different edition of at least one of the books to me with a different font or page size, which is pretty likely given how long Dune's been in print. Given that I didn't even mention page count or word count or the complexity of the prose, just thickness, which could have simply been because of thicker paper, I think your response is unreasonably harsh.

    Obviously, I don't disagree that Dune's a more complicated book, but regardless of that, The Martian is much shorter than either, and to turn it into a film, a lot of detail had to go, and a whole act had to be turned into a montage and condensed to Watney modifies a rover and drives to another site, then takes apart a rocket that's waiting for him there. I don't think there's anything simultaneously as large and expendable in Project Hail Mary, yet they obviously need to cut more.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I used goodreads because different editions are presented differently. It puts Dune at 658 and PHM at 476. If you want to truly go apples to apples the kindle edition of both, which I assume has consistent font/margins/spacing/etc has Dune at 883 and PHM at 482 for a 400 page difference on an eReader. Comparing the task of turning a vacation book into a movie vs adaptating a legendary book into movie (which was so difficult to do, that this is the third attempt and the first commercially successful one) is a false equivalence

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I never said that it was the same, just that more would have to be cut than The Martian as the book was much longer, and gave an example of the most similarly wide sci fi novel on my shelf that's successfully been turned into a movie. You're the one that made the leap that the thickness of a book is a definitive measure of anything and wanted the comparisons to be apples-to-apples, which it never was as one book's becoming one movie, whereas the other became two.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's nowhere near as complicated as dune though. They can cut out a lot of the flashbacks.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If they cut too many of the flashbacks, it gets rid of, or at least erodes, the WTF? Where am I and how did I get here and why? part of the book, which is a pretty major part of it.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    "jazz hands"

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    That would be a great mobile wallpaper without the text.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    I love this book! I was hoping they'd try to adapt it into a movie! I hope it'll be good. Very exciting!

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Gosling is not a grace... really hope they do great but knowing hollywood they're gonna turn grace into some hero that was always a hero vs what he was in the book a scared scientist that just loved knowledge.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    I thought the same thing but on my last run through the book. Grace describes himself as being super buff, like really buffed. So guess it tracks. But I do hope they stick to how he really was. I am more interested in the Stratt character will be portrayed?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Naa he says in the beginning he has muscle tone still, not buff at all. He's wondering why he has muscle when he first wakes up. The dude is a teacher and a self described coward. Plus spoilers at the end of the book I won't say here.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The book is so good, I don't know if I wanna see the movie.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    if you want to have a proper imax experience, you need to shoot a movie with that intent.

    That's what they are saying here.

    Other releases will have a very different screen ratio and viewing experience.

    It does suggest that the space scenes will be quite glorious

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Everyone working on this behind the scenes has a really fantastic track record. Cant wait.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    This guy is a billionaire btw

    Edit: I don't want movies and don't know the difference between Ryan Gosling and Ryan Reynolds.

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