phm movie #thoughts from someone who shotgunned the book last week, full spoilers ahead for both:
lotta stuff I really liked from the book hit the cutting room floor, and I don't begrudge it that, the movie's two and a half hours as is, but rip to the copyright infringement lawsuit and paving the sahara and nuking antarctica and dubois and shapiro's insane personalities and the "history used to be all about food" scene and rocky being a #proud scary space spider and the autocannibalism. generally the correct cuts to make in order to have a film people will actually Watch, but if they ever release that ninety minutes cut from the first test screening that would be really good for Me Specifically.
really visually nice overall, looked more like 60s-70s sublime scifi than 2010s maximalist scifi. which are genre terms I just made up but I think they convey the vibe, it was giving more 2001 than interstellar, the visual canvas had a lot of room to breathe.
stratt was quite different than the book, more emotional and less cutthroat, which I think objectively isn't Worse or anything I just personally have a real love for ruthless women so that was a loss for the Me Specifically community. I think my ideal unified stratt vision would have her doing some of her book atrocities without breaking a sweat And the karaoke scene And almost breaking down when she has to sic the guards on grace, the best of both worlds.
both grace and rocky got sillied up, and you win some and lose some with that so imo it's a net neutral, but for rocky this gave the added bonus of really making it clear that This Individual Is Not Well. this is someone who watched two dozen friends die and was completely alone for far too long afterwards, he's got not sense of boundaries and has recently acquired high level control freakism as a response to finally having another living being around and being completely unwilling to lose or be apart from him. but why grace and rocky have to be separate people question?
a few plot things got cut that I do think it makes less sense without, mainly a) that the amnesia was deliberately induced and b) that grace with choosing rocky and the rest of the eridians' lives over his own at the end. the movie conveyed that grace's decision to double back around was a choice to do something scary and embrace helping someone else at personal cost, but that cost was presented as not being able to go home, not that it was finally his real volitional sacrifice. which is a bit of a shame, movie rocky being so visibly An Individual Who Is Not Well would have reacted so beautifully to realizing grace had intended this rescue to be a suicide mission.
for a fun book-to-screen translation thing, we lost the little internal monologue bit about the ship making grace's coffee exactly how he likes it, but we see the same thing conveyed through all his clothing. the movie brings the fatal explosion down from nine days before launch to three, and stratt still packed all his stupid fucking science pun shirts to give him something he liked.
I'm finding it hard to put this one into words, but the movie gave me a much clearer sense of, like, embodiment and intimacy as the trade off for the book's internality, and I think the clearest example is the two versions of the scene where grace gets taken in against his will. I found the text version really affecting because it really conveyed that sudden feeling of fight-or-flight panic when you find yourself helpless and start reaching for any means of escape and already almost feel the pre-shame for what you're doing but not quite enough to stop you, and the film traded that for an attempt at physical flight that ends with grace getting pinned to the ground and forcibly drugged at his friends' behest. different but also very affecting flavor of panic and helplessness, and it really complemented the volitional intimacy with rocky.
yousharknotpass
prguitarman
amandla
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
