Confounding Film Ratings (Part One)

 

Anyone can give a movie a rating in terms of a review, but a movie rating in terms of its certificate, which dictates the age of the audience members who are allowed to see it, is decided upon by certain organizations, and can have a big impact on the financial viability of a film when its distributed. Recently, I came across a movie that jumped out to me as an anomaly, in terms of its rating. When I was younger, I always thought of movie ratings as being part of a strict grading system, but over time, I’ve discovered there are numerous exceptions to the many rules and a plethora of oddball ratings for movies that, if the rules really were so strict, should have been rated differently.

I’ve written about movie ratings before, and I’m yet again coming back to the topic, but this time, it’s far more complicated. I’ve never before fully explained the rating system that I grew up with, which is different than the ones many others did, even within my own country. All the advertisements I saw for movies always had the epic trailer voice guy say “Rated PG” or “Rated PG-13” or, most severe and foreboding of all, “RATED R…” because those are standard in the United States set by the Motion Picture Association (MPA), but in Canada, ratings depend on the province you live in. For British Columbia, we have General (G), Parental Guidance (PG), 14 Accompaniment (14A), 18 Accompaniment (18A), Restricted (R), and Adult (A).

When I was a teenager, I started to discover there were movies people my same age couldn’t see in theatres in the US without their parents because they were rated differently. Many movies that are very violent, action-packed, and full of cursing will be rated R in the US but only 14-A in Canada. If you could pass for age 14 (not hard at 12 or 13 for many kids), no one questioned you seeing movies like The Matrix (1999) or The Conjuring (2013), or Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) with just your friends. I recall seeing a few 18-A movies with my mom or dad in accompaniment, but it was rare for any movies to ever be R-rated at our local theatre—R-rated in terms of the Canadian R, which is more restrictive than 18-A, comparable to the US’s NC-17.

Country and rating systems aside, there is usually consistent correlation between the way a movie gets rated in the US and Canada, but then there are some anomalies that, for whatever reason, the ratings board were laxer with. Case in point: The Martian (2015) is rated PG-13 (PG in BC), so the expectation is that it only has one use of the F-word at most and nothing too violent or crass. Matt Damon as main character Mark Watney utters a hearty “fuck” after doing gruesome surgery on himself to remove a metal spike from his abdomen in the first twenty minutes, then a couple scenes later he says, “Fuck you Mars” and I was completely taken aback. It wasn’t just because I hadn’t seen the movie in years (and happened to be showing it to a grade eight class, having forgotten how intense the first twenty minutes really were), but how did the MPA let this slip past? It’s been a well-known rule for years: any more than one F-word gets a movie an R-rating in the US, but The Martian is a rarity with two clearly spoken instances, plus the implication of many more when Watney sends some frustrated messages to NASA and the expletives are left unspecified.  In Canada, I’m not sure there is a specific number of F-bombs that can be dropped before 14-A turns into 18-A.

I both love it and hate it when movies get to break the rating rules—love it because it often comes as a surprise when you’re watching and perhaps enhances the film, and hate it because it reminds me of how arbitrary, contradictory, and often pointless the rating system ultimately is. When I was a kid, I didn’t think it was a big deal to get to sit down with the family and watch The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) for the first time. I didn’t know what it was rated, and my parents didn’t seem to care. It was a western with some shooting violence, and I grew to appreciate the movie far more when I was older, but at the time, it felt pretty tame, especially compared to something like Aliens (1986), which I watched for the first time around the same time.

My younger cousin later pointed out to me that The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had an R-rating, which seemed a bit extreme to me, but it gets even more confusing. The two-disc special edition DVD has a 14-A rating, but the Blu-ray says both R and 14-A on the back. Historically, it was given an M certificate in 1969 (meaning for Mature Audiences only: part of the earliest version of the MPA’s rating system), then it was re-certified and given an R-rating in 1989. For the time it was made, sure, I guess I get it, but nowadays, it would get the frequently used PG-13 at most. It used to be that movies like Jaws (1975), Poltergeist (1982), and Gremlins (1984) pushed the limits of PG (which led to the creation of PG-13), but now PG-13 pushes the limits of what often leads to an R-rating. There’s a phenomenon called “ratings creep” which highlights how movies are generally more violent and explicit than they used to be, and people are becoming desensitized by it all as more and more movies rated for younger audiences are becoming more intense than movies from the past.  

A prime example of PG-13 pushing the boundary is 2004’s Alien vs. Predator. The prior Alien and Predator films had all been rated R, and AVP could have (and should have) easily been given the same rating, but the studio wanted to ensure a higher box office gross, so two main tactics were employed: show minimal human blood and have minimal cursing. We get the singular, impactful use of the F-bomb from main character Alexa Woods (Saana Lathan) after she realizes the last surviving Predator intends to blow up the alien horde: “Well, I hope it kills every fucking one of 'em!” But then, a little later, she tries to quote Arnie from the original Predator (1987), only isn’t allowed to quite say the whole line. “You are one ugly motherfu—” and then the blast of her gun cuts off the rest.

More recently, we’ve had Predator: Badlands (2025) bring the franchise back to PG-13 for the first time since AVP, however it felt less neutered in comparison given that there were no human characters to be maimed and killed, and like AVP, the creature-on-creature action is still incredibly violent and unrestrained. Violence has always been a point of contention for people who take movie ratings seriously; how come young viewers can be exposed to blood and dismemberment but saying the F-word more than once constitutes increased adult guidance? Red human blood in particular will result in a more restrictive rating if the quantity is great enough, which is why films like AVP, Badlands, and even more intense horror examples like Evil Dead 2 (1987) and From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) will use different colours for blood so the censors won’t come down as hard on them.

There are plenty more mystifying ratings for movies, including a whole other topic that I haven’t even touched on yet as far as what influences a movie’s certificate, so stay tuned for more, because this is going to be a two-parter!

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.