Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
I liked The Martian for what it was - a web novel released chapter by chapter that got picked up by a major publisher. I appreciated starting with a possibly absurd premise and then logically going step by step over the challenges caused by that absurd premise in a way that mostly coheres to our current understanding of science. The voice of the narrator didn't matter as much, the puzzle was fun and seeing the math explained at a popular level was nice. I think I'd give it to a high schooler about to go into AP Physics to get them psyched up.
Project Hail Mary is kind of in the same vein, but without the advantages of being a first novel. It might help introduce a teenager to basic evolutionary concepts, the suspense was decent, there was legitimate pathos with the main characteronly acting brave because he thought he was the kind of person to volunteer for a suicidal mission and then remembered that he wasn't a volunteer after all. In that sense it was a better novel than The Martian but that wasn't enough to make it a good novel. The movie is a better movie even though I felt it didn't do enough to foreshadow/explain the problem at the climax - the book-over did it with the explanations, the movie under-did it in exchange for some nicer visuals.
Problem(s) plural ... I think. It's hard to give a movie a fair watch after reading the book, because you just naturally fill in the blanks yourself, so maybe I'm underestimating what the average movie-only audience would have picked up from the film alone.
It's minor but my biggest annoyancewas that Eridian weren't immediately putting together a massive mission to earth. I realize it was meant to be a plot point that Ryland wasn't in a hurry to go back to earth and it would have altered that plot point. But it just seemed glaringly obvious to me that the Eridian would have been putting a huge mission, arguably a aid mission, to earth as fast as possible. Wither they're long life span it makes sense to get get relations and trade going, even without a desire to help the planet of the man who saved their civilization.
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Nope, neither of those dilemmas were fully explained by the movie. My husband hadn't read the book and so I asked him about what he thought of the movie and he said he liked it until the end, where he was like, "I'm sure if I rewatch I'll catch what happened with Rocky's space ship, but right now I have no clue."
Towards the beginning he asks the computer how much fuel it has but I don't remember food really coming up as a constraint.
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