Project Hail Mary: Page to Screen

This isn’t really a movie review, but rather a more specific look at Project Hail Mary, which I will start off by saying I highly recommend seeing, especially in IMAX if you get the chance, because while it is still early in the year, it is already one of my favourites, and will be a tough act to top in the coming months. It might just end up being my favourite movie of 2026. It’s a unique film for me because I read the book mere weeks before it came out—hence this specific examination.

I haven’t read an anticipated film’s novel source material prior to release since Dune in 2021, and I’ve never experienced seeing scenes from a book play out on screen nearly exactly how I had pictured them as I read them until now. This isn’t going to be strictly a compare and contrast between the book and the movie adaptation, either. I would call Project Hail Mary an extremely faithful adaptation, with some elements simplified, diminished, or skimmed over, but nothing major lost from page to screen. I’m going to use some shorthand from this point on. If I’m talking about Project Hail Mary the film, it’s PHM: F. If it’s Project Hail Mary the book, it’s PHM: B. If it’s the book version of the protagonist I’ll say Book Grace, and if it’s Ryan Gosling, I’ll say Movie Grace.

A microscopic alien organism called Astrophage is depleting the sun, so a project (“What you Americans would call ‘long shot’”) is fast-tracked to send three astronauts to a distant star called Tau Ceti. For some reason, it’s the only nearby star that hasn’t been affected by Astrophage, and when the Hail Mary gets there, schoolteacher Ryland Grace is the only one still alive. “Why is a schoolteacher in space, question?” This is just one of many questions the amnesic Grace has, but a question he answers pretty early on is whether or not we are the only intelligent life forms in the universe. A strange alien from the planet 40 Eridani has also come to solve the Astrophage problem, but instead of a hostile rivalry, the two species work together to save their worlds—and kind of become best friends in the process.

For all its scientific and technical details, the book is not overly complicated, nor is it excessively descriptive. Ryland Grace provides first person present tense narration, and it was clear from the beginning that a charismatic actor was needed for the lead role in order for the film to capture the essence of the narrator and also carry the film for the majority of the runtime. I think Ryan Gosling deserves an Oscar nomination because he is Ryland Grace. He somehow managed to pull off being funny in the exact way that Book Grace is funny while also bringing genuine emotion to key moments and keeping every scene engaging even when it was just him floating around the ship or talking to the screen. He shows his full range as an actor and makes you care about his mission to save humanity. I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the perfect casting of Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt: the anchor to the earth parts of the story. It is as if she walked off the page and onto the screen.

I think it’s impressive directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, along with screenwriter Drew Goddard (who also adapted author Andy Weir’s first big novel, The Martian, and was nominated for the Oscar for best adapted screenplay), were able to keep the film entirely from Grace’s perspective without having him narrate the film, which is an easy method film adaptations often default to. He records some video logs (mainly in the second act) as a way to capture some of that narration from the book, but there’s an effective balance of him talking to himself, talking to the ship, video logs, and talking to the other most important character, who doesn’t even have a face.

I was curious about how the alien Grace calls Rocky would be realized on screen and how they would handle the communication between the characters, but two key creative decisions around this were significant reasons why the film worked so well for me. Grace translates Rocky’s sounds in what I would call “movie time” (meaning very fast, like probably way too fast—even in the book it comes off as pretty easy for them to learn how to understand each other) and for a time the audience has to read the text of Rocky’s translations with Grace, then Grace cycles through some voice modulations until settling on a voice for Rocky, and by the end we get a few subtitles because Grace and Rocky can understand each other’s languages. It was every version of how I had hypothesized they would adapt this aspect of the book. Rocky was also mainly a practical effect, which looked great and moved quite realistically for how outlandish his design is.

One change which I found curious was to Rocky’s background. In the book, he’s described as an engineer, and in the movie, Grace calls him a mechanic. I’m not sure why this change was made, but in the book it’s clear how he’s able to create everything for Grace without much trouble and why he survived the trip to Tau Ceti while the rest of his crew perished. Speaking of perishing crew members, in the book it’s much clearer why Grace is the sole survivor of the Hail Mary and the details around why he ends up on the ship in the first place also have more clarity. Had I not read it before seeing it, I suspect I would’ve rated PHM: F a little lower, but these missing details didn’t bother me since I already knew them, and nothing is changed, plot-wise.

Some of the specificity around Movie Grace’s doled out memory recall is a little unclear in the later stretches of PHM: F, but I think the important narrative part (without spoiling it) is captured for the emotional impact to hit at the end, which is what matters the most. PHM: B is a lot clearer about what he can and cannot remember, and when specific memories come back to him as the narrative unfolds. I can imagine that was a tough aspect to capture in a visual medium without bogging down the runtime. There weren’t many big changes or additions to PHM: F that I picked up on, but a few details Gosling added in to his performance I appreciated. I don’t recall Book Grace ever casually referring to the ship itself as “Mary” but I like that Movie Grace does this a few times. It reminds me of other famous sci-fi ships like MU/TH/UR in Alien and Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Speaking of those films, PHM: F makes some nice references and tips of its cap to other space films without being too blatant. Some critics have pointed out how unoriginal itis, but even a few of those critics admit it puts a fresh spin on familiar concepts.

I can see how some of PHM: F might seem familiar for those unfamiliar with the source material, but I found the book quite refreshing for how it takes a science-based approach to a doomsday scenario through the eyes of a character who is definitely not someone who considers himself a hero despite his intellect and problem-solving abilities, and couples it with first contact in a way that’s realistically optimistic without it being too cutesy. The hopefulness of the story is very compelling, and the film captures this, but also does something different I didn’t experience in the book: makes space feel fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I didn’t expect to feel total existential dread and genuine emotional turmoil over the same span of time in which a little rock guy makes the whole audience laugh for saying “fist my bump” more than once. The concept for the alien life (not just Rocky but also Astrophage) is highly original. I would now have to consider Rocky one of the all-time greatest cinematic aliens, and that is a significant feat considering all the incredible examples to come before him, but he’s unlike any other alien in any movie I’ve ever seen.

Project Hail Mary models why I love books and movies for different reasons. PHM: B moves at a different pace, handles the amnesia trope pretty effectively, and provides ample detail to make the whole thing feel grounded despite the nature of the plot. PHM: M has a version of Ryland Grace I like slightly more, is well paced despite being over two-and-a-half hours long, and has a far more moving ending (for me) that still ties directly into the source material and maintains the themes from the book. Both are extremely funny, in some similar ways, but also in different ways. Despite both telling the same story, they provide different ways of experiencing that story. This is why I can’t definitively say “the book was better” as is often the cliché spoken of a film adaptation of an enjoyable novel. Both have unique strengths over one another and share many of them as well.

What I would recommend is seeing the movie first, and then if you even remotely enjoyed it, go read the book after. I do not regret reading it so close to seeing the movie for the first time, but I actually do envy those who got to (or will get to) experience the big emotional moments on the big screen without knowing what was coming or how certain events were going to play out. Reading the book will be like getting a written director’s cut that builds on all the details the movie didn’t have time to delve into (or didn’t necessarily need to) in order to tell the story. Conversely, I found the movie rewarding to readers for including subtle hints and details from parts of the book that viewers who haven’t read the book probably wouldn’t notice or pick up on in terms of significance. Despite what my blog may make it seem, I’ve always been even more of a book guy than a movie guy, but when a story like Project Hail Mary brings the two storytelling methods together with such synergy? That, for me, is peak.  

Dinosaur Planet: A Retrospective Review

 

Dinosaur Planet (2003) Miniseries Review

Dinosaur docudramas have experienced a resurgence in recent years, with Apple TV’s three seasons of Prehistoric Planet, BBC’s “reboot” of Walking with Dinosaurs (in name only), and two shows from Netflix: Life on Our Planet, and, most recently, The Dinosaurs. When I was a kid, the two main TV networks in the business of dino docs were BBC and Discovery Channel, with a clear difference in quality and style between them. BBC made hit after hit, but Discovery was more hit or miss. One of their early 2000s triumphs, though, was a four-episode miniseries advertised as an epic primeval drama to rival even BBC’s Walking With…shows, originally airing in the US around Christmas in 2003 and the following year in Canada, when I first saw it. Dinosaur Planet, though a relic of an earlier period in paleo-TV, is still interesting to look back on, and at the time, it was one of the best of its kind.

Each episode focuses on a different dinosaur protagonist in a different place and time, though all of them occur during varying points in the Cretaceous period. “White Tip’s Journey” follows a female Velociraptor in the Mongolian desert trying to join a new pack and raise her young. “Little Das’ Hunt” is about an adolescent Daspletosaurus and his pack following a herd of Maiasaura living among many other species on the Elkhorn Range as a volcano threatens to erupt. “Alpha’s Egg” shows the hatching and maturing of a South American longneck Saltasaurus in tandem with her primary predator, an Aucasaurus called Dragonfly. Finally, in “Pod’s Travels” a Pyroraptor gets stranded at sea and washes up on a European island with dwarf versions of the species he’s used to living with, making the usually small hunter a giant outcast.

I think it’s telling of the show’s quality that many fans cite different episodes as their favourites; there doesn’t seem to be any clear consensus on what the best episode is. I remember the specific order in which they aired in Canada because I recorded each episode on VHS and watched them over and over again before I ever bought the DVD. First was the White Tip episode, which I think is the most well-rounded in terms of storytelling, environmental depiction, and dinosaur interactions, then Das’ episode, which was my favourite as a kid, then Alpha’s episode, which used to be my least favourite, and Pod’s episode last, which is not the best in terms of environmental depiction, but does have perhaps the most sympathetic “character” of them all.

One of Dinosaur Planet’s biggest scientific and aesthetic triumphs over its contemporaries was its depiction of feathered theropods. I remember being shocked and taken aback when I first saw White Tip because it was the first time I had seen a full motion Velociraptor on my TV screen that didn’t look like the lanky reptilian design copied repeatedly from Jurassic Park. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first, but once I watched the episode, I bought into this far more realistic version, and it started a mind shift for me, in terms of how I viewed these particular dinos. By the time I saw “Pod’s Travels” I had accepted feathered dinosaurs, but it would be quite a long time before people who were not nearly as obsessed with dinosaurs as I was got with the program…and then Jurassic World did the paleontology community no favours by bringing back the same featherless, inaccurate raptor designs from the first three movies. Some of the Dinosaur Planet CGI is a bit iffy at times, but it’s pretty visually consistent, and a few shots from certain episodes are actually quite impressive. The one I distinctly remember being used in the advertisements was the shot of the Tarascosaurus from Pod’s episode roaring as blood seeps from its jaws.

For all its scientific accuracy and bold creative choices, though, it still gets a lot of things wrong that could have been avoided even with the scientific knowledge of the time, and the series as a whole is emblematic of a running fault through all of Discovery’s dino docs. No, I’m not even talking about how the predators are always roaring and chasing after anything that moves and battling purely for dramatic spectacle, I’m talking about cutting away from the ancient recreations to feature a person talking about them. I find it less distracting in Dinosaur Planet compared to other Discovery documentaries like this from around the same time, but it still frequently interrupts the pace of the show and feels tonally dissonant. BBC’s dino docs always stayed in the setting of the prehistoric world and worked the science in through narration alone, relying more on visual storytelling and education, but Discovery Channel never committed to that same format. Even as a kid, that was why I found Walking with Dinosaurs superior, and BBC documentaries in general far more interesting and rewatchable compared to American ones.

Some of the scientific inaccuracies range from postures and movements to names and designs for certain species, with some creature models being recycled between episodes. The one error that used to really bug me (and still does) is the presence of grass, particularly in Pod’s episode. In the behind-the-scenes documentary included on the Walking with Dinosaurs DVD, it’s explained that grass hadn’t evolved yet during the Mesozoic era, so the filmmakers were careful to choose real world locations that closely resembled prehistoric conditions, with the most accurate plant-life possible. The Dinosaur Planet creators did not have the same eye for detail, and while many of the locations are quite impressive, it’s more akin to Jurassic Park with choosing plants, to quote Ellie Sattler, “because they look good.” It may have also been a budgetary issue; sometimes CGI was used to alter the environments, as well, which can make some shots look overly artificial. Of course, these relatively small details aren’t going to bother the majority of viewers (especially in 2003), but a lack of exciting dinosaur action and interesting interactions would have, and they didn’t skimp on those parts of the show in the least.

To get into each episode a bit more, one of the reasons “Alpha’s Egg” was not my favourite was because of how slow it often felt compared to the other episodes, given the main dinosaur is a plodding sauropod. It has one of the slowest chases I’ve ever seen in a show like this: two carcharadonotsaurs pursuing Alpha’s herd across the plains. It also comes off as a little hokey to have one particular predator growing up alongside one particular prey animal and building up to their inevitable clash as adults as a form of tension. It just didn’t feel that believable to me, even as a kid, but when I look back on this episode now, I find it actually has a lot of highlights, such as the horrific massacre of the baby saltasaurs early in the episode and the final clash between Alpha and Dragonfly at the end. While the intermingling of Alpha and Dragonfly may be a bit manufactured, I do kind of like the parallel stories as a way to alternate between seeing two different species in the same environment.

Even though Alpha’s wasn’t a favourite, I still enjoyed every episode of Dinosaur Planet as a kid, but now, “Little Das’ Hunt” doesn’t thrill me the same way on a repeat viewing. I loved seeing all the new Cretaceous species, including Daspletosaurus, which was a tyrannosaurid that lived before the more famous T. rex. On that note: I like that Dinosaur Planet gives a sampling of some very popular dinos like Velociraptor and Iguanodon throughout but mainly showcases species that were far less known at the time. Little Das is an inexperienced hunter and, like in “Alpha’s Egg”, his story is tied to someone else's: Buck and Blaze, two inexperienced young duckbills. The episode has some other supporting roles with the flying Quetzalcoatlus and a pack of Troodon, but it’s mainly focused on the stop-and-start pursuit of Daspletosaurus hunting the mixed herd of duckbilled Maiasaura and ceratopsian Einiosaurus.

While I do still enjoy this episode, especially with the devastating volcanic eruption in the climax wiping out everything on the Elkhorn Range, there are a few silly moments throughout, mainly from Das being clueless, and it’s a bit tedious, with the pursuit drawn out for nearly the entire runtime. This episode has some of the best visual effects, though, with the Daspletosaurus looking nearly as good as the T. rex from Jurassic Park in some medium daytime shots. The Troodon designs look kind of cursed, though, and of all the dino protagonists from the show, Das gets highly anthropomorphized and isn’t as endearing, comparatively, to White Tip or Alpha or Pod. All of the show’s predatory leads are given excessive humanistic qualities, really, which I think makes the show work better for younger viewers, though it doesn’t shy away from some of the bloody violence, which newer dino docs seem to be averse to showing.

There’s something very charming about Pod’s episode with the way it almost becomes a prehistoric version of Gulliver’s Travels. We see him in his normal environment before a tsunami wipes out his family and home and he washes up on a new island that he must explore and figure out, taking the audience along on the adventure. There’s an animatronic puppet used for when Pod is clinging to life on a log adrift at sea, which is one of the only moments where practical effects were used over CGI, and it’s quite noticeable because he looks so different from the computer model. This is another area where Walking with Dinosaurs had a major leg up over even the best of Discovery Channel’s dinosaur recreations. BBC consistently used an effective blend of computer animation and practical effects to bring creatures to life, whereas Discovery relied primarily on CGI, which never quite reached the same quality or believability. Though the effects in Pod’s episode are not among the best, the pacing, variety of species, and interactions are all great, making it one of the most consistently entertaining episodes.  

I can’t finish this review off without addressing one last majorly notable trait of Dinosaur Planet: the narration. The paleontologist it cuts to before commercial breaks is Scott Sampson, and he provides some fairly interesting insights in each story, but the dramatic recreations are narrated by American actor Christian Slater, who has some rather memorable lines in a couple episodes. I wouldn’t say he does a bad job, but sometimes what he says kind of shatters the illusion of being back in the Cretaceous and sounds unintentionally cheesy or silly. In the White Tip episode, after a male Oviraptor tries to win over a female, Christian chimes in to say, “Gotta give him credit for trying!” It’s quirky narration, but not always unwelcome. It almost makes it feel like he’s watching alongside the viewer and making commentary, such as in the Das episode when Das loses track of his mother and sisters. “Hunting for your family is a major pain. How could they run off like that?” Auditorily speaking, the soundtrack and sound effects are the best parts, with some roars reused from the earlier Discovery show When Dinosaurs Roamed America, but many of the roars I heard for the first time in this show, and would recognize in numerous other shows to follow as Discovery recycled them to no end.

Dinosaur Planet is a pretty epic dinosaur docudrama, yet it’s almost more intimate at times than the original Walking with Dinosaurs or other more contemporary shows like it, with its close focus on four well-characterized dinosaurs and their struggles to survive. It gets a bit fantastical in some respects and obviously looks dated in comparison to the visual designs and animation quality of newer shows, but I find it’s still worth coming back to in the same way that Walking with Dinosaurs still is, too, despite not carrying the same gravitas. The episodes are a bit longer with a bit more filler, but the blending of science with focused storytelling gave Dinosaur Planet a unique enough angle that it still stands out as an accessible, compelling prehistoric miniseries in its own right. 

 

Related - Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) Review: 

https://cccmovies.blogspot.com/2019/08/walking-with-dinosaurs-1999-review.html