vocaloid guy

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Maybe something's off on my end (pirated copy) but wow, Project Hail Mary is hard for me to watch accessibility-wise. I keep having to pause and take breaks to decompress a little, or rewind the same scene 5 times trying to make sense of it. I think it's a combination of:

1. The exploration scenes being several straight minutes in the dark or poor lighting.

2. Many unclear or quick shots of relevant items being prepared, discovered, or signs of life being found, especially paired with slow crawling or confused staring that doesn't seem important.

3. No or very little dialogue in the several exploration scenes, to help figure out what in the world is happening. Again with quick cuts.

Which sucks when they're exploring in space, because I often can't infer from context clues what's supposed to be going on. All that made it really hard for me to watch the first 45 minutes-ish of the movie. Again, maybe its my poor vision and shit sensory processing, but jeez, I almost gave up on it from frustration because I was rewinding so much.

Which sucks!! Because the plot is great! I love Rocky!! I love his sensory play and different ways of communicating. It really resonated with me! And stories worth telling shouldn't be weighed down by alienating part of the audience for no reason.

Starting the second half of the movie, I'm having a seperate problem where I have to interpret the stimuli of the scene and read fast, non-voiced text from rocky. When this comes to creatures who are alien to each other communicating, well.. maybe my issue right now is trying to read two characters of different species' body language, which I'm already not good at, and Rocky's actual speech appearing on-screen (..on another, handheld screen) at the same time. I'm enjoying the story but damn this is kinda rough accesibility wise. Pretty overstimulating when I feel slowing down a tiny bit or adding a TTS type voice for Rocky would do wonders.

My entire feed has been flooded with shitposts related to this movie. It was pretty inescapable. So when I finally turn it on and it opens with (not too harsh, but still) flashing lights, it was a bit surprising. This website is usually really good with warnings for stuff like that. I've seen movies that blow up on here have many people warning about a scene or two. Rightfully so. But with all that leaked onto my dash, I hadn't seen anything about flashing lights or the other processing issues. That kind of sucks. It's a good movie so far, I'm just.. really struggling to process it. Feels slightly alienating. (lol)