The commenters here are persuasive. I
I loathed it.
Sorry.
The premise is garbage. Weir postulates an “astrophage,” a bacterium that harvests carbon from Venus and then streams to the sun, “eating” the sun, collecting vast amounts of energy, dimming the sun, and threatening humanity with extinction within decades. They send a probe to the line flowing between Venus and the Sun and collect the mysterious black particles, bring it back to Earth, and a middle school science teacher looks in a microscope and figures out that it’s an organism that harvests energy from stars.
Stop right there. I’d appreciate it if someone could justify that plot hook, which wouldn’t have been out of place in a 1950s hack disaster movie. It’s stupid.
Then astronomers notice that all the local stars are experiencing this same mysterious dimming. The “astrophage” must be infectious! Let’s not concern ourselves with the timing: we observe a rapid phenomenon occurring within the lifespan of a single human being simultaneously in a population of stars scattered over a volume 100 light years across. There’s a complete lack of awareness of space and time in this movie.
Humanity’s response is to quickly build a spaceship to fly to the one star, Tau Ceti, that isn’t exhibiting the mysterious dimming to see if they can find a “cure”. Fortunately, the “astrophages” also store such a tremendous amount of energy that they can form a fantastic, near-magical rocket fuel, enabling the construction of a starship that can travel at something near light-speed. This is the kind of exotic nonsensical space fuel you’d find in a 1930s pulp novel.
The plan is to send a small crew with one engineer, one pilot, and one scientist to a star 12 light years away, to collect information about how Tau Ceti was resisting the infection, and then return to Earth with a solution. That’s going to take at least 24 years round-trip, to deal with a crisis that’s going to doom Earth in 30 years. My problem was that my mental calendar was getting hopelessly lost by this time.
Then the scientist who is expected to lead this critical mission to stop human extinction was the middle school science teacher. This teacher is the charming, charismatic, appealing Ryan Gosling. We’re doomed if that is our selection criterion.
The ship takes off. Next thing we know, Ryan Gosling wakes up from an induced coma (that’s how humans can survive a 12 light-year trip?), the two other crew members have died — no explanation provided, but nice to know pilots and engineers are superfluous — and Gosling has amnesia.
That’s just the setup for the main part of the story, and it’s such radically nonsensical and unscientific garbage that I felt like walking out, and only stayed in my seat by virtue of Ryan Gosling’s charm and the curiosity and need to find out how the story would crawl out of this mass of sewage.
No spoilers. You’ll have to suffer as I did if you want the answers.
Short answer: Gosling finds a cute chatty alien who is there for the same purpose, and they team up. Don’t worry, there’s none of that complicated first-contact rigamarole to establish communication — they just point at things and say words and use a computer to compile a dictionary. Quickly. Mostly off-screen. Can’t let the whole alien complication that Weir has introduced get in the way of the whole star-eating space bacteria problem that Weir introduced!
Gosling also has a Weir staple: a white board that he can scribble on to solve science problems. For example, Gosling discovers a problem that will make the alien’s spaceship break down on the way to its home in 40 Eridani. So he scribbles some stuff on the white board and decides to fly off to the rescue, and somehow find this stranded spaceship somewhere between Tau Ceti and 40 Eridani. Are you surprised to learn that he does? Spaceships are easy! All you need for interstellar navigation is a white board and a collection of colored markers, and a pilot with no training who was hired on the basis of his entertaining middle-school science classes.
Ryan Gosling is a good actor who gave a great performance in an unbelievable role, and the alien (named Rocky) was amusing and somewhat original, but you will never, ever, ever, ever convince me to see another movie based on an Andy Weir book. He’s a hack.
Jesus christ, that movie was fucking stupid.
I stopped early. I could go on for much longer on the bad science in that movie.
Thanks for taking the metaphorical bullet on this one. Your summation backs my suspicion that this would be one of those movies that requires a leap to faith instead of just a willing suspension of disbelief.
Just read the plot synopsis. The aliens “are ignorant of relativity”? That’s almost as dumb as the super-advanced Puppeteers having no idea about tidal forces because their home planet doesn’t have a moon in Larry Niven’s Known Space.
So; they are taking along infectious agent to the one uninfected star they can find?
After having read the book, I had zero desire to see a movie based on it.
Then again, I read “Star Wars” 3? 6? months before the movie came out. Blurbed “soon to be a major motion picture!”. Yeah, right. Book was crap. Movie much more entertaining. Oh well.
Isn’t 40 Eridani Vulcan? Just having Vulcans already know English would make more sense than the rest of the film.
I don’t feel so bad now for liking The Martian as a contrast to this one. It at least showed the nice Matt Damon astronaut to juxtapose against the batshit Matt Damon astronaut in Interstellar who channeled both Colin Sullivan and Tom Ripley from previous movies.
I’m not a huge Adam Sandler fan, though Spaceman looked interesting. It has a talking spider. Has anyone seen it? Any good?
No enormous mutant star-goat???
Well, I never.
The original Star Wars story, published before it was likely to become a movie, was a very thick paperback book and the story was a lot of trashy rolicking space opera fun. You read the edited version, alas #5 @Snarki child of Loki.
Don’t repress yourself, PZ–tell us how you really feel about it
I enjoyed the book, but it’s certainly not on my “must read” recommendations… I doubt I’ll be watching the movie, since I know the ending already. And I suspect the movie is gonna be (as usual) worse than the book.
#8 Edited version? Wow. I recall the book as being rather thin. Still have it around somewhere, I’m pretty sure.
What did they do, edit out the good parts?
If you hated it that much then don’t, whatever you do, watch the 90s Travolta/Cage flick, Face/Off. Right about the time that the blood types became a plot point, the biology student I was sitting with began openly weeping. I had to invent new vocabulary just to describe how stupid it was.
@schweinhundt @2
Most of the good , even great, science fiction works have needed both leap of faith and a suspension of disbelief. People just like to pretend their subjective likes are somewhat better than the stuff other people like. (or to quote a certain author – This is an imaginary story , aren’t they all?)
@14 Deepak Shetty
Some people feel better about themselves if they can call what they are watching science fiction rather than fantasy.
Adventure – heavy (American) science fiction has never been interested in credibility.
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Three films whose backgrounds are based on very stupid science – The Matrix , Inception and Lucy – are nevertheless very entertaining.
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Try some of the less famous SF films. Pontypool (2008). Lifeforce from 1980 is a weird kind of high-budget science horror film.
Time travel: The Sticky Fingers of Time, Time After Time.
Siren (2013) has an interesting premise. 1962’s The Creation of the Humanoids is a hidden gem cult science fiction
2001 took the technology seriously. Kubrick’s symbolism made the audience scratch their heads.
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Destination Moon from 1950 takes science seriously, but is problematic in other ways.
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=ecCm6dZmsY
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Angel’s Egg, a very arty, weird Japanese animation. Try it for a bit of variety.
PZ, I have a question. Do you have the patience for an artsy, three-hour science fiction film with symbolism and slow pacing?
Alphaville from 1966 is a very different film from the usual slop.
face/off was so funny…
question. if the movie had primed the expectation it would have nonsense science, would that have made it forgivable? like nobody’s busting on le voyage dans le lune or starcrash for these things.
God’s balls, that’s an even stoopider plot than I’d previously heard.
And yes, lots of SF stories have crap science too (possibly including some stuff I’ve written); but there are limits to everyone’s ability to suspend disbelief, and this turkey went way beyond my threshold. I guess others have different thresholds here, since I’ve heard several people saying they really enjoyed both the book and the movie.
A story that has an impossible unexplained technology or event can be a very good story. But a story that depends on ‘science’ that simply is not true tends to suck. Science Fiction needs – by the definition embedded in its name – to have all of the science in it that is known be real science. If the story has [faster than light travel, etc.] the roles played by chemistry, physics, geology, astronomy, biology, and so on, be accurate. Fundamentally, the story needs to feel like it takes place in ‘the real world’. There is an awful lot of fantasy that gets marketed as science fiction, and it is very annoying.
On a previous thread I cited the Rush lyric
from the song Mystic Rhythms, a pearl from an off-putting era where Rush was in a synthpop doldrum. Anyway it echoes with this apt quote from Erin Morgenstern‘s book The Night Circus:
Penn Jillette might take some issue with that sentiment in this book largely about magic, but given it is fantasy I think it’s a bit self-referential and will not dump on the captivating story line. If a movie is made I’d be more concerned in how they render the book than whether magic is bogus. Fantasy can be better than bad attempts at scifi…there I said it.
birgerjohansson @16
I loved Inception. The Matrix was ok in the original but got a bit over the top in sequels and was more Plato’s cave than Baudrillard‘s hyperreal, despite name-dropping him. I admit to watching Resurrections out of morbid curiosity. There was a point where it mocked itself and Doogie Howser helped carry it along I guess. It was actually trans allegory as was I Saw the TV Glow, which I didn’t realize on first watch in either case. Sadly the red pill metaphor got co-opted by the worst of the worst people, typically misogynists and transphobes.
I never watched Lucy. The trailer invoked the “10% of our brain” myth and I demurred. Some things are unforgivable from the outset.
There’s a reason I don’t even attempt to watch a movie without first checking it out.
And I mean proper checking, not just reading blurb or reviews.
—
Reginald:
Some people can tell the difference.
(duh)
@ Hemidactylus
Gotta love Rush, even if Geddy Lee did sing:
“I set a course just east of Lyra
And northwest of Pegasus
Flew into the light of Deneb
Sailed across the Milky Way
On my ship, the Rocinante
Wheeling through the galaxies
Headed for the heart of Cygnus
Headlong into mystery”
@birgerjohansson:
Yes! Angel’s Egg is a bit of a forgotten gem, I found it by chance on YouTube a decade ago, then for some reason it was sanitized off – no DVDs or BRs available, it simply vanished. Imagine my surprise when I managed to catch it on a big screen some weeks ago here in Germany. Overjoyed I was, and there was a full house, so it’s not so unknown as I thought.
Warmly recommended, along with the other titles by Mamoru Oshii:
– Ghost in the shell
– Ghost in the Shell Innocence
– and even Beautiful Dreamer (part of the Urusei Yatsura series: a bit of a standout in that morass of juvenile dross).
Onegai… watashi no tamago nandemo shinaitte… yatsokushite.
@Hemidactylus #23:
Sure, but on the other hand: Luc Besson. Scarlett Johansson. So, you know…
Thats the problem with middle school science. It ruins 1950s hack science fiction movies
I’ve thrown the book down I’d disgust at twice now and I’m only on chapter 3. It doesn’t help that I’m reading Octavia Butler at the same time. Safe to say I’m not a fan of Weir’s wish fulfillment plot lines.
@Hemidactylus #23: You didn’t miss much with “Lucy.” The whole “we only use 10% of our brains” premise was BS to begin with — to the extent that it’s true, the other 90% isn’t just sitting around waiting to be called up or unlocked, it’s busy managing our various organ systems. And what they did with it was even more ridiculous. I did, however, really enjoy Lucy’s interaction with Prof. Norman (Morgan Freeman). Amr Waked was also kinda funny as the French cop who has to try to keep up with Lucy as she becomes a goddess and easily exterminates all the gangsters he’s trying to arrest. (And he’d almost surely get fired for having no plausible explanation for any of it after Lucy ascends to the heavens and leaves him to explain it all.)
Erlend Meyer @27
If I wanted to watch Scarlett Johansson in a throwaway movie I would go with The Island which had nothing to do with the also ridiculous Huxley book.
Also was there an unwritten rule that Morgan Freeman must star in every other movie released. If I want to see him in a movie I actually care about I’d go with Unforgiven and forego the what’s in the box question because reasons. The Bucket List was ok. And his role in the Bateman Batmans for sure! Didn’t he utter the 10% BS? Be more selective Morgan!
Pitch Black is a great adventure film, with a menacing character in a uniquely threatening environment.
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Unfortunately I see no way to make the physics of the eclipse work.
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The sequel Riddick – in an ecology that is as deadly as the one of the first film – was also great.
The early, pre-Matrix film with Keanu Reeves based on a William Gibson story?
Japanese anime are a very mixed bag… some are brilliant, but – as with ordinary films – the majority is Meh.
Ghost in the Machine has already been mentioned.
The film version of Cowboy Bebop deserves to be mentioned.
My memory is like a sieve, I cannot remember the other great ones when I need to recall them.
birgerjohansson&32
Katee Sackhoff who is scifi royalty (cite Big Bang Theory with her and George Takei in an awkwardly memorable episode) starred in one of the Riddick movies I vaguely recall. She also starred in a season of 24. But at least she was great in The Mandalorian too! Not sure where that’s going now with a pending movie. Grogu (not baby Yoda) is ubercute.
Hopefully everyone recalls what Sackhoff is best known for. She totally superseded Dirk Benedict.
“… it’s an organism that harvests energy from stars.”
Photosynthesis FTW!
(I mowed my star-energy harvesting organisms the other day)
I’m absolutely willing to forgive bad science in a sci-fi movie if it serves a good story or a powerful allegory… I’m rather partial to the idea of sci-fi being a genre “where the metaphorical becomes the literal” to paraphrase someone or another. Phillip K Dick, Harlan Ellison, and Ursula K Le Guin all leap to mind as great authors who never let the science get in the way of a compelling story.
I don’t know if Hail Mary would succeed on those terms for me or not, but it sounds kind of hollow from what I’ve heard, a bunch of sci-fi tropes marshalled in service of a story I’ve heard a million times before.
Perhaps unpopularly, I rather liked the movie. I have criticisms, especially about the pacing in the first ~third, and I think they portrayed Grace as more of an incompetent boob than merited at times, but I expected a comedy-SF drama with a “man vs environment” theme, and I got that.
Would watch again.
Could have done with a SPOILERS WARNING here PZ. Oh well.
it didn’t look that bad on the trailer & I did like The Martian and had been wondering about seeing it. Probly won’t now. Does sound pretty terrible. So ..thanks I guess?
@Reginald Selkirk @15
Most science fiction , including highly rated ones do involve fantasy. But it is truly a strange assertion that a book or a movie is a good one if it is called fantasy but not so much if it is labelled science fiction.
@39 StevoR — You aren’t familiar with PZ’s review style? I’m grateful he took a bullet for this obvious trash. I’m guessing the other two crew members died from shit asphyxiation given that coma does not stop metabolic processes. Maybe the pod overflow valves failed or something.
@26 outis — Major Kusanagi still fascinates me decades after the first GITS movie. Incredible character development.
I still enjoyed the movie. Everything you say about the science is absolutely true, and I even noticed all these things while watching the movie (I’m a scientist too!). I just didn’t care all that much that it was trash science.
What can I say? I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also enjoy Armageddon which is about as absurd as one can get on the science and physics front. (And I have physics and electrical engineering degrees and actually work at NASA.) Do I buy pretty much any of the premise of the movie? Of course not. It’s quite heavy on the “fiction” side of science fiction. Some movies require one to suspend disbelief on a couple fronts. Some require you to just shunt away knowledge of physics and biology (and whatever else might bug you) for 2.5 hours and just enjoy the show without trying to analyze any of it. After all, many of us like musicals but not a single person (I hope) believes that entire unplanned musical dance numbers just break out on a regular basis.
Pierre, Scott: It’s not about the fucking physics and the science; it’s about making sense within its own frame.
Trash storytelling also matters.
I’m going to see the movie tomorrow with my aerospace engineer daughter and my PhD geologist trophy wife.
I’m looking forward to Sesame Street in space and an up lifting experience.
that book was a hate read for me.
And, how did they not complete the “Hail Mary, Full of Grace” joke that seemed to be what half the story was setting up.
I thought “The Martian” was entertaining. “Artemis” was.. meh?, but after “Hail Mary” I will go out of my way to avoid anything associated with him. He should have stuck to modeling orbital mechanics and logistical issues, and stayed away from… well, pretty much everything touched on in Hail Mary.
@ 39 StevoR
Currently 95% on the “tomatometer” based on 298 reviews.
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/project_hail_mary/reviews
Don’t be soured by one person’s opinion. Make up your own mind.
(I haven’t seen it and probably won’t until I randomly come across it on telly in years to come. Just sayin’. Consider the data before forming a conclusion. PZ just taught us claims are not proof. X-D )
@ 17 birgerjohansson 2001 presented human technology as a stifling limit. As a test the Angel ( sorry Monolith ) set to trigger , once the humans reach the moon, God’s ( sorry those beyond’s ) plan for Humanity. A test humans are close to failing with their orbital nuclear platforms and misprogrammed AI. The plan seems to involve rebuilding the humans that reach Heaven as embryonic divine beings.
Yes Angels Egg explores the same themes.
@43 Scott Gries. What I heard from the review is one Normal Guy Saves The World. Everything in the story and the world building servers that one purpose. I am so tired of that trope. Even the last Superman movie had Superman need help from evertone from a dog to an alien. No we do not need another Hero with all the skills but no need of human interaction. Not even a nerd.
Here are some helpful aliens with a good sense of comedy.
Alien Super Show:
“Trump Forces Mike Johnson to Dox Congressman’s Confidential Medical Information”
.https://youtube.com/shorts/XOtYNWYKcF
BTW we will probably not find Earth 2.0 nearby.
“Is Alpha Centauri a disappointment?”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=xWWs2RBXMOQ
“Accretion safe” only out to 0.5 AU.
That is not in the habitable zone.
@ ^ birgerjohansson : saw that and Kyplanet is excellent but Inote dthat he stresssed how mcuh we don’;t know and isn’t certain about the Alpha centauri system here and that the existence of Alpha Centauri Ab if confirmed throws that modelling in serious doubt. This possible probly roughly saturn-mass candidate exoplanet on an eccentric orbit around the brightest & largest star in the system :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Centauri_Ab
It gets discussed in that linked Kyplanet clip including how the modelling that rules out other planets cannot explain it IF it does indeed exist.
So there’s a lot we’re still to discover so not giving up yet.
I’ve seen different previous modelling papers discussed saying that Alpha Centauri could (even should!) have small earth-mass rocky planets around it. Recall that reading somewhere on Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy blog and there was a brilliant Ken Croswell article in the April 1991 issue of Astronomy magazine on possible habitable planets for Alpha Cen too.
Yeah, the book wasn’t that good so I was going to skip the movie. Weir seems overly enamored by the “mission log” style story telling that worked in the Martian, which is not a good fit for this story.
The book at least takes place entirely after he wakes up with amnesia, with occasional flashbacks when he remembers something. Conveniently, the thing he remembers is always the thing that advances the plot. Also, the reason the “middle school science teacher” was chosen is that he was a rogue scientist that was kicked out of the establishment for proposing that life could exist without water (which seemed necessary for life that lives on the sun).
That’s not mentioning the other magic material in the book – a steel alloy of Xenon that the aliens use build everything because it can be sculpted like epoxy. That’s about the chemistry equivalent of the biological madness going on with the astrophage.
The book does give a reasonable explanation of the selective breeding they perform to adapt the astrophage’s “natural predator” so that it can live on Venus (though the timescale is horribly compressed).
I also thought the way he used the ship’s engine and telescope as a makeshift RADAR to find the broken down alien craft was kind of neat. And I don’t think navigating in open space is as hard as you imply. If you have a strong enough engine and don’t care about particularly fuel efficiency it’s mostly point and accelerate and unpoint and decelerate.
I didn’t buy that claim that the middle school science teacher was a “rogue scientist” kicked out for a crazy idea. That was one of the more unrealistic plot points.
I know people with PhDs and the potential for great science who are teaching in a grade school. It wasn’t because their theory was bad (although the example given is pretty bad…but it was just hypothetical BS), it’s because we churn out more graduates than the system can support.
Granted, finding a stranded spaceship is much easier if you have a magical engine that is super-powerful and you don’t care about fuel efficiency!
Science Fiction
Dan Simmons obituary .https://share.google/dvjcdfCWZEMN58zBE
Hey, PZ, you left out the part where Astrophage converts energy to mass and back again.
Neat trick. That’s how the Spin Drive works. Come on, man, SCIENCE UP THIS THING!
Amaze! Amaze!
But…but…Weir has a giant spreadsheet demonstrating his book’s scientific accuracy!
I read the book first and enjoyed it. I thought the movie was a decent adaptation of the story. While it has been awhile since I read the book,I treat it like most stories. i will give it a few premises and then let it go from there. The astrophage was one and metallic xenon was another. I could accept a fallen scientist becoming a high school teacher.
A lot of the problem is “do you go with it or not”? If you have started to turn from the movie, you will not. But if you are enjoying the story (as I did with the book), you are more likely to go with it. Like when Grace after the alien, I believe the book also explains it was not just a calculation, but he could follow the trail left behind. (Or maybe I misremembered that.) For the aliens not knowing relativity and radioactivity and us not knowing about metallic xenon is just a way to say that both species could benefit from knowledge sharing.
A lot of the story is about how we could communicate with another alien. I gave it a lot of points for not making a human looking alien that humans found beautiful. And I thoight PZ would give some points for a spider looking alien. I think the movie is best enjoyed if you rea dthe book and wait for some time for it not to be so freash in your mind and then see the movie.
I agree with Pierre le Fou. Science was bunk. Story was entertaining. Visuals were, at times, great.
It was a good movie. I haven’t read the book, but I gather much that the book fleshes out in more detail is, naturally, compressed or omitted for time in the (already long) movie.
Of course, some elements are unbelievable or unscientific, and you have to be willing to buy in to that as the entry fee. If you’re unwilling to suspend disbelief on the level of “there’s a strange phenomenon causing a disaster”, then certainly you should skip this. (This does not mean “it’s fun if you turn your brain off!”, as people can often misunderstand it. It’s fun if you engage your brain, but accept some impossibilities as given.)
Remembering discussion of The Martian here, I gather that PZ simply does not enjoy stories where smart people in difficult circumstances solve problems and succeed. That really seems to be the crux of the beef, which I don’t really understand. I don’t think The Martian would have been a better movie if it were about a guy accidentally stranded on Mars slowly dying of starvation. Nor would Project Hail Mary be improved by having humanity face an extinction event and see their desperate attempt to stave it off fail.
This is a really interesting example of how people who dislike something can Telephone it to the point of incoherence by describing what they don’t like about it.
It’s the story of a very smart guy brought in to contribute to a huge global effort to solve a world-ending problem, who by circumstances (which you can call contrivance or just, you know, plot) ends up as the one human in position to do the crucial work (which was never the plan, and which he was never the ideal or first choice to do). So he’s helped by a collaboration of elite geniuses from the entire world and a multi-government project to build and launch a space mission with the necessary tools, only a small part of which he actually contributes to. And then when he has to actually solve the problem at the crux, that too is a process of collaboration. “A Hero with all the skills but no need of human interaction” is essentially the opposite of both the text and theme of the film.
Five thumbs up! Great film, wonderful space romp, brilliant character development. I wore my “I am Kenough” t-shirt.
Amaze! Amaze! Fist my bump! It is time go! Rocky from Erid, not the movie. (wheeze wheeze wheeze!)
What is there not to like, question?
I refer you to the OP.
(Silly question gets silly answer)
Hemidactylus @35
“Katee Sackhoff who is scifi royalty…” Let’s not forget she got there by starring in a science fiction show where she ended up becoming an actual friggin’ angel.