Project Hail Mary is weirdly Von Tririan?
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
Project Hail Mary is one of those few movies, which I read in the book form before watching. The book by Andy Weir in an absolute banger of a read. The plotting is awesome. The detail the book goes into is insane. Basically Andy Weir is one of the best contemporary writers living today. And Hollywood wanting to adopt Weir is and always will be bound to happen. ↩ Reply
Weir is kind of a search-engine scientist. His books are full of actual science. Correct math for everything. And so on and so forth. If you want to read a book where every 2 paragraphs you stop to check the math and constantly be astounded by the fact that the math actually works, well, you need to read Andy Weir. ↩ Reply
The previous installment into the Andy Weir cinematic universe was the 2015 Ridley Scott film The Matian, nominated for the best picture Oscar. If you seen the Martian, and expect to see a similar movie going into Project Hail Mary, don't. It is as funny. It is as sciency. I mean both were written by Weir and adopted to screen by Drew Goddard, but Ridley Scott ( who directed such classics as Alien and Blade Runner ) is a different sort of director to Project Hail Mary's Phil Lord and Christopher Miller ( the directors of 2014 The Lego Movie and 2018 Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse ). Yet... still... somehow Project Hail Mary is different from both The Lego Movie and Spiderverse. ↩ Reply
In a way it seems like Lord and Miller were trying to capture this essence of a little Christopher Nolan film called Interstellar with this film. The majority of the space scenes are shot in 16:9 aspect ratio. And the scenes on earth are shot in a wider aspect ratio, mimicking the editing style of Nolan. There is a lot of anamorphic lens stuff going on. Sometimes even in the 16:9 parts of the film. Based on the direction of some of the lens flares ( and confirmed by Wikipedia ) they rotated the anamorphic lens 90 degrees for some of the scenes. Which is just wild. WTF is this cinematography? The only problem is, Nolan would have shot it on film, and would have mastered it on film. Lord and Miller decided to shoot digitally. The movie is still very good. But if you were trying to capture Nolan, you probably had to also do it on film. ↩ Reply
In a way with the digital cinematography and those weird shot decisions, combined with what seems like quite arbitrary camera-work, which I believe still was inspired by Interstellar, it feels almost like a Lars Von Trier picture. Not in tone. In tone it is a goofball comedy with science. But the feel of the camera. The constant hand held nature of it all. The slight confusion of what is where and so on and so forth, feels to me like they improvised a lot of the shots. Which is the kind of thing you learn to expect from Lars Von Trier. ↩ Reply
In a way, Interstellar is similarly Von Tririan. So maybe they were just trying to rip on Interstellar as much as possible. But it seems like Nolan did this, whatever this is, less, on Interstellar. While Lord and Miller went fully into this Von Tririan aesthetic. ↩ Reply
Some of the stuff I have issues with, are stuff missing from the movie, that were in the book. For example, the way Ryan Gosling's character Grace learns that he is in space, is somewhat lazy, compared to the book's version. The book tries to establish the fact that it is a very sciency book. So Grace in the book does a science experiment to figure out that he is in space. He falls down a bit too hardly and notices that he is heavier than usual. So he drops an object multiple times and as it falls he times the fall with a stopwatch to calculate gravity and calculates that the gravity of the place he is in must be stronger than 9.8 meters per second squared ( the gravity of Earth ). He must be in something that is rapidly accelerating upwards. Therefor he is probably in a space-ship. In the movie he just stumbles upon a window. Ah... yeah... ↩ Reply
In a way most of the science from the book was "simplified" for the movie version. I was going in, expecting a Nolan-esque picture, not just in its aesthetic. I wanted to get my brains turning. I wanted to do some math with Grace and Rocky. But well... I suppose I got to laugh a lot instead, which is also fun, I guess. ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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