This was a fun book. Solid narrator on the audiobook. (Ray Porter)
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Fucking love the audiobook. Listen to it so far four times. Plan on reading the novel this year (finally picked up a copy.) My worry is they will fuck this up like they did the Martain. Great novel, and also solid audiobook, listening to it now for like the 20th time. But didn't care for that PG13 movie.
Spoiler but the first sentence in the book got the word fuck in it. And Annie cursed up a storm in the book.
Edit: They better do Rocky I swear.
The botched comical farce ending that he makes fun of in the book becoming the movie ending was offensive... I loved so much of the pieces but talk about a slap in the face.
Also, removing the detail of Pathfinder failure so you have months of mental health issues... Damon did spectacular at emoting the strain in the moment he regains contact with the crew, but it felt disjointed without the context of zero contact and the desperation.
Many of the actors were amazing, but Ridley screwed up bad.
Matt Damon did a fantastic job portraying Mark Watney, though I'll definitely say movie!Watney had it a lot easier than book!Watney. He didn't kill Pathfinder, basically the entire long haul to ARES IV was "he did it, he drove to ARES IV", no sandstorm, no figuring out which way to go, no rolling the rover.
They pussed out on a lot of the mission control characters as well, Annie wasn't a no nonsense ballbuster, I don't even remember Mindy the meek satellite girl who grew a pair, and Vince unilaterally sending the Rich Purnell maneuver in defiance of orders and daring them to fire him over it...
Some of that would have been cut for run time; what works in the span of a novel doesn't work in the span of a film. I think to fully capture the entire scope of the book you'd need a 6-8 hour miniseries. If I want to revisit The Martian, I'm going to play my copy of the audiobook narrated by R. C. Bray.
Look: Boobies! ( . Y . )
Ray Porter stan checking in.
Hi Stan. I meant to write you sooner, but I've just been busy.
Amaze!! Amaze!!
…I’m excited for this film, but so scared that it will be another enshitified movie of a great book with the story twisted and warped by producers and other interests.
Like Ready Player One turned out to be; utter garbage.
Ungh….
great book
Ready Player One
uh
Admittedly the book is waaaaay better than the movie. Neither are great though.
I actually like the movie. It made the best out of the book, which is meh at best.
I agree wholeheartedly. The book and movies are just vehicles for delivering nostalgic references, but while in the book 80% of those references were just listing off one thing after another, in the movie I could see and hear them, which makes it much better for that nostalgia.
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Same worried they will fuck it up. But just saw The Life of Chuck and they did a decent job of sticking with the story.
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Hoping they pull a switcheroo and gosling plays Rocky
Sylvester Stallone has signed on to reprise his role as Rocky
...I figured Rocky would be voiced by an array of theremins.
Right but Hollywood so gosling does mocap and the voice is his but heavily vocodered thru the theremins.
In all seriousness I would love to be wrong about this but I doubt hwood will allow rocky and the other eridians to have musical verbal language. That means subtitles, and Hollywood fucking hates subtitles.
Yes! I had Jon Hamm in mind for the lead while I was reading it. But, Gosling surprised me as Ken in Barbie so maybe he’ll be great in this too.
IMO Gosling kinda reminds me of Brad Pitt in that he typically blends into his roles well.
Ok that would be funny.
I feel like Any Weir's name should be on this poster. He's a bigger draw than Gosling in my book.
Just Any ol' Weir?
Damn, I kept putting off reading it and they're already making it into a movie. At least now I have a deadline.
It’s a page turner and a pretty quick read!
I was so sad at how fast it was over. Only took me about 8 hours from start to finish.
Just listen to the audio book. It's read by ray porter and he nails it.
Seconded. Read it on my own first, ended up reading half of it out loud to my wife just because I was so tickled by it, then put it on for the whole family on a road trip. Such a great story, everyone loved it.
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Fist my bump!
That's a pretty ambitious book to turn into a movie. Hope they don't go too "Hollywood" on it, and respect the source material.
The Martian was almost entirely internal monologue and they did a faithful job adapting it. It wasn’t as good as the book, but still great.
I can definitely see some difficult moments to adapt on the big screen, but I have faith
They already had to cut out a big chunk from the middle of The Martian (which then broke the I've got no radio, so no one can give me permission to board, so I'm now the first space pirate joke, which they decided to keep anyway), and Project Hail Mary is a much longer book - it's about as thick as Dune, which became two movies and still cut loads. Something major will have to change if they're going to give it an acceptable runtime.
- No it isn't, Hail Mary is 180 pages shorter than Dune
- Dune is way more dense than Hail Mary, Weir very clearly writes his books to become movies. Way more dialog, much simpler problems, and clearly defined acts translate much easier to the screen
- They'll obviously have to cut some parts, but having read/seen The Martian I don't think anything of major importance was lost
Yeah, I can see most of the book easily converted to movie.
I said they're similar thicknesses because they're right by each other on my bookshelf and are similar thicknesses. I just looked inside for the page counts, and excluding appendices, maps and diagrams of spacecraft, my copy of Project Hail Mary (the original paperback, starting on page 3 and ending on page 476) is just 55 pages shorter than my copy of Dune (50th anniversary paperback, starting on page 1 and ending on 529). Having 10% fewer pages seems pretty reasonable for about as thick. If yours are different by 180 pages, then you've clearly got a different edition of at least one of the books to me with a different font or page size, which is pretty likely given how long Dune's been in print. Given that I didn't even mention page count or word count or the complexity of the prose, just thickness, which could have simply been because of thicker paper, I think your response is unreasonably harsh.
Obviously, I don't disagree that Dune's a more complicated book, but regardless of that, The Martian is much shorter than either, and to turn it into a film, a lot of detail had to go, and a whole act had to be turned into a montage and condensed to Watney modifies a rover and drives to another site, then takes apart a rocket that's waiting for him there. I don't think there's anything simultaneously as large and expendable in Project Hail Mary, yet they obviously need to cut more.
I used goodreads because different editions are presented differently. It puts Dune at 658 and PHM at 476. If you want to truly go apples to apples the kindle edition of both, which I assume has consistent font/margins/spacing/etc has Dune at 883 and PHM at 482 for a 400 page difference on an eReader. Comparing the task of turning a vacation book into a movie vs adaptating a legendary book into movie (which was so difficult to do, that this is the third attempt and the first commercially successful one) is a false equivalence
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It's nowhere near as complicated as dune though. They can cut out a lot of the flashbacks.
If they cut too many of the flashbacks, it gets rid of, or at least erodes, the WTF? Where am I and how did I get here and why? part of the book, which is a pretty major part of it.
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That was a fun, very light sci fi novel. I hope they don't fuck it up too bad. I hope Gosling plays Rocky, bwahaha
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Cautiously hopeful.
Wait this is gonna be a movie?!?!
"jazz hands"
Gosling is not a grace... really hope they do great but knowing hollywood they're gonna turn grace into some hero that was always a hero vs what he was in the book a scared scientist that just loved knowledge.
Gosling personally wanted to make this movie cause he loves the story. I don't think he's too far off, and rather have someone who cares.
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That would be a great mobile wallpaper without the text.
I love this book! I was hoping they'd try to adapt it into a movie! I hope it'll be good. Very exciting!
The book is so good, I don't know if I wanna see the movie.
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