Review: Project Hail Mary

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.5★

I wanted to get into this with the least information I could (which means I avoided the trailers till I was half way through the book), and I think that's the best thing you can do. So sorry to my friends I told the bare minimum (or fully spoiled) to.

I'm just gonna do a recap of the things I most liked and the few I didn't:

loved Rocky! (iykyk), specially the scenes connecting with each other and first contact. huge fan of that in general and I think it was done quite accordingly and culturally based, aka treating each other as companions rather than experiments.

found very fun to explore the story fragmented (gasped when I found out why), and to meet the scientists. my favorite were the panicked french and Ilyukhina, even if we had very few of them. Stratt was a very interesting character for me and I wished we had a conclusion to her arc.

let's admit it, the humor is on point. laughed at loud multiple times hehe.

the science was easy to follow and pretty educative in my humble humanity field study opinion.

Now, I admit I do understand why people complain about Andy's writing. it's blunt, straight to the point, very focused on internal thoughts and dialogue and barely uses literary resources and descriptions are rather bland. maybe it's me but I could tell he knew this was gonna get a movie adaptation. luckily his previous movie and this new one look stunning so all my respect to the visual and FX team!!

Also, something that I've seen complains about and that I agree, it's that it's a bit annoying how many times the MC excuses himself with "I'm American". I get it, you struggling converting inches to cm, that's a you problem buddy.

Unfortunately some characters seemed a bit plain and two dimensional to me, but given their limited time it's understandable and the cliches are sorta justified. I'm neither the nationalities represented so I can't dive into it that much but I'd love to hear people's insight on cultural representation.

To sum up, go read this if you want an easy and fun ride, a heartwarming friendship dynamic and go watch the movie when it comes out!! I'll review it on my letterboxd when I get the chance to watch it!!

soundtrack: tbh I watched movies and shows while reading that, more on letterboxd, and monthly playlist

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