On your recommendation of this film I took the wife to go see it and we were not disappointed. Once I had seen the movie I finished your review and it is a bit insidious the way that they got the utilitarian medicine down with the sugar of a genuinely heartwarming film and played it off as forced soul building instead of forced suicide (that only failed by the sheer grace of God). But it's still a great movie.
Yes, very well put! "Forced soul-building" is exactly the phrase, though no one in the film has any Christian vocabulary for it (that's being supplied by Christians, very irritatingly). It's like an extremely dark version of the old running Calvin and Hobbes gag where Calvin's dad forces them to do unpleasant things that "build character."
I still don't quite get how they were able to shape this so differently from the book given how involved Weir was with the production. Granted, Grace still does feel like he was a coward, but Stratt sure doesn't get any sympathy!
I went last week with moderate expectations and WOW. It got started slow and I was afraid my expectations were too high. My wife was almost ready to leave as it was looking like a rather so so sci-fi. But it took off and captured your heart. Reading your review and hearing a few other comments I think i must get the book for the additional color it offers.
Hey - and have you seen "A Great Awakening"? About the intercourse between B Franklin and Rev G Whitefield. It is really amazing. So well filmed and written. You have to see it.
You and some other Christian writers on my feed have written a post about this film. Since all the 'cool kids' are seeing it, I had to too and I'm very glad I did!
I'm one of those Christians who didn't get the moral nuance of Grace's arrest and forced mission since I'd gladly volunteer to do it if the opportunity arose. You really made me think deeper about the moral dilemma involved.
I think the scenario would have been different had there been enough supplies provided to last the crew until natural death. That way there would have been no ethical sticky wicket around their cheerfully bleak planned suicides. As it is, though the impulse to volunteer may be noble, I don't think it would morally fall to the ruling authorities to play God in that way.
Great review. I loved the book and liked the movie (as did my wife, even though she generally hates SciFi). By misrepresentation or omission, the movie distorted a several major characteristics of Rocky and his people. The movie imagined his spaceship as an ethereal work of art by a highly advanced race instead of brute-force engineering. It neglected to explain that Rocky’s shipmates died due to their scientific ignorance of cosmic radiation, a product of their literal blindness, as well as how their ignorance of Einsteinian relativity lead to Rocky’s superabundance of fuel, allowing him to offer Grace a way home, life instead of suicide. Lastly, it omitted Rocky’s plea for Grace to watch him sleep, and why that request reflected a huge cultural difference between Rocky’s civilization and ours. I’m sure that further reflection on these themes in the book would lead to theological insights.
I’ll see it again, but since my wife, who is my ride, will not want to see it in the theater again, my next time will likely be when I stream it at home. I’ll watch closely for the “watch me sleep” scene(s).
In Rocky’s culture interdependence was a given and choosing to be a loner was inconceivable. Grace, on the other hand, was a loner who needed Rocky to teach him what it meant to be dependent on others, in fellowship with them as God intended.
The Babylon Bee today headlined, "Made to Entertain People," with an utterly baffled studio executive pondering why people are flocking to see a movie, Project Hail Mary, made to entertain people!
If you grew up on PBS Nature and its beautifully filmed nature documentaries, or even if you weren't paying much attention in science class, you'd be forgiven for misunderstanding how evolution "works". It was always described to us with the cart before the horse -- organisms saw environmental change and adapted.
The reality is that if there is a correlation between organism's constant change -- or mutation -- it is that organisms are coded to change in order to survive unspecified environmental change. Those that changed in a manner fortuitous enough to survive the next environmental change did so without volition. The changes appear random. The coding does not.
The book uses the same language of volition to explain how a microbe survives via evolution. It isn't explained wrongly, exactly. The author just falls into the same habit of making it sound like Taumoeba somehow WILL their way toward nitrogen immunity. At the most, what could be said is that: 1. Taumoeba (and by extension, living things) are somehow coded in such a manner that the constant mutations that occur, do so, not exactly randomly, but with a predisposition toward survival. 2. Evolutionary adaptation is then a subtractive process. Everything the cell(s) -- considered collectively -- needed for survival was already present in their genetic makeup (perhaps, but unexplained, in the "junk" DNA). Nothing came from nothing.
Still as explanations go in fictional works, it was a good one.
I suspect that when we all read, listen, or view books or movies we do so in light of our current circumstances -- our current thinking, philosophies, world views. For the past few years now, things that I've thought about Christianity for most of my life, but that I kept at bay in the same manner most Christians do -- with as good and honest and thoughtful a scholarship as I'm able to apply. Still, many of the same things niggle at me.
Twenty years ago when Christian Smith described American Christianity unflatteringly as "moralistic, therapeutic, deism", I was among the many from the more reformed tradition who felt as though Smith had really put a finger on a glaring flaw. We (American Christians) appeared to lack sound doctrine. We appeared to be adrift in a new "religion" of our own device.
And he wasn't completely wrong. But he was also engaging in both a false dichotomy (that the extremes he found examples of were truly exemplary), and fairly loose definitions of the three tenets he claims of us -- moralism, therapy, and deism.
But I might suggest that there's nothing wrong and everything right in acknowledging the Christian life as living by a moral code. And I might suggest that there's nothing wrong and everything right in finding the proper solace both in the comforting words of the Bible, and its hope and promise of a greater meaning than the material world, the promise of an afterlife, and even the comforting of one another in Christian community.
But the deism thing?
Well, I remember when I was in Junior High and we were talking about our "Founding Fathers". I went to a Christian School so when we discussed our founding, we were taught about the enlightenment, the philosophical underpinnings of our founding, and ultimately that some of our founders were "Deists". We were given the rudimentary description of Deism -- that they believed in God, but believed that that God created the world and then stood aside and allowed it to progress however it was going to progress.
Clearly, if that was the definition of Deism, then Deism is not scriptural. God clearly steps into the workings of his creation. And he stepped into it in the biggest of ways through incarnation.
That notwithstanding. Deism is understandable. It is, for the most part, objectively observable. That is: The presence of God is not obvious without special interpretation of circumstances and events. And trying to live as though God is present may be a great exercise in keeping one's behavior moral, but it's a terrible exercise in survival.
That didn't make much sense, I suppose. What I mean is that, just as Christianity fails at science when it presumes the "God of the gaps" in order to explain anything it cannot explain, the Christian life has too often become a practice in the "God of the rescue" as we somehow have come to interpret the Bible as leading us to a passive life of assuming God's care, or, and worse, taking little responsibility for wise life choices because we suppose God's intervention in those choices.
And God's intervention is so erratic, unpredictable, and capricious (supposing that such intervention is even there) that we spend much of our time comforting each other with rationalizations like "Well, "no" is an answer" (when our prayers appear to go unheeded). We would rather go to our graves failed and stupid .... but defending God for keeping promises that he never made.
How is this about Project: Hail Mary?
Only a Christian with a modicum of Deist sense would ever face the impending doom described in the book in the manner in which the book details. Only a Deist would take full responsibility for his and his planet's survival. And, still, a Deist would say that that's how God saved his world.
I do think it would be possible for a Christian with a facility for sci-fi to come up with the story, albeit without some of Weir’s more overt bits of evo theory propaganda. (I was amused by the forays into “panspermia.”)
Regarding the innate Deism of the piece, on one hand I see what you mean, on the other hand the reason I thought it might be helpful to put the book slightly in conversation with A Canticle for Leibowitz is that book is by no means assuming God will intervene to fix everything. On the contrary, the assumption is that whatever can go wrong inevitably will, and the Christian’s job is to suffer as Christianly as one can through it.
It isn’t intrinsically unChristian to try to save the world, however a Christian ethic will place limits on the measures one can take. I’ve argued the Hail Mary project is unethical in its conception, meaning it really would be more moral to do nothing rather than sell the world’s collective soul by functionally murdering these astronauts.
On your recommendation of this film I took the wife to go see it and we were not disappointed. Once I had seen the movie I finished your review and it is a bit insidious the way that they got the utilitarian medicine down with the sugar of a genuinely heartwarming film and played it off as forced soul building instead of forced suicide (that only failed by the sheer grace of God). But it's still a great movie.
Yes, very well put! "Forced soul-building" is exactly the phrase, though no one in the film has any Christian vocabulary for it (that's being supplied by Christians, very irritatingly). It's like an extremely dark version of the old running Calvin and Hobbes gag where Calvin's dad forces them to do unpleasant things that "build character."
I still don't quite get how they were able to shape this so differently from the book given how involved Weir was with the production. Granted, Grace still does feel like he was a coward, but Stratt sure doesn't get any sympathy!
I went last week with moderate expectations and WOW. It got started slow and I was afraid my expectations were too high. My wife was almost ready to leave as it was looking like a rather so so sci-fi. But it took off and captured your heart. Reading your review and hearing a few other comments I think i must get the book for the additional color it offers.
Hey - and have you seen "A Great Awakening"? About the intercourse between B Franklin and Rev G Whitefield. It is really amazing. So well filmed and written. You have to see it.
Some movie adaptations are like that. They don't change much but what they do change is really annoying.
You and some other Christian writers on my feed have written a post about this film. Since all the 'cool kids' are seeing it, I had to too and I'm very glad I did!
I'm one of those Christians who didn't get the moral nuance of Grace's arrest and forced mission since I'd gladly volunteer to do it if the opportunity arose. You really made me think deeper about the moral dilemma involved.
Very glad to have stimulated your thinking!
I think the scenario would have been different had there been enough supplies provided to last the crew until natural death. That way there would have been no ethical sticky wicket around their cheerfully bleak planned suicides. As it is, though the impulse to volunteer may be noble, I don't think it would morally fall to the ruling authorities to play God in that way.
Great review. I loved the book and liked the movie (as did my wife, even though she generally hates SciFi). By misrepresentation or omission, the movie distorted a several major characteristics of Rocky and his people. The movie imagined his spaceship as an ethereal work of art by a highly advanced race instead of brute-force engineering. It neglected to explain that Rocky’s shipmates died due to their scientific ignorance of cosmic radiation, a product of their literal blindness, as well as how their ignorance of Einsteinian relativity lead to Rocky’s superabundance of fuel, allowing him to offer Grace a way home, life instead of suicide. Lastly, it omitted Rocky’s plea for Grace to watch him sleep, and why that request reflected a huge cultural difference between Rocky’s civilization and ours. I’m sure that further reflection on these themes in the book would lead to theological insights.
Hmm, the "watch me sleep" point is definitely brought out and emphasized in the movie.
Ah, I didn’t remember that. And I don’t remember the corollary, Rocky’s insistence that Grace enable Rocky to watch him sleep.
Time to see it again in IMAX, clearly. :)
I’ll see it again, but since my wife, who is my ride, will not want to see it in the theater again, my next time will likely be when I stream it at home. I’ll watch closely for the “watch me sleep” scene(s).
To amplify on the “Watch me sleep” point...
In Rocky’s culture interdependence was a given and choosing to be a loner was inconceivable. Grace, on the other hand, was a loner who needed Rocky to teach him what it meant to be dependent on others, in fellowship with them as God intended.
The Babylon Bee today headlined, "Made to Entertain People," with an utterly baffled studio executive pondering why people are flocking to see a movie, Project Hail Mary, made to entertain people!
If you grew up on PBS Nature and its beautifully filmed nature documentaries, or even if you weren't paying much attention in science class, you'd be forgiven for misunderstanding how evolution "works". It was always described to us with the cart before the horse -- organisms saw environmental change and adapted.
The reality is that if there is a correlation between organism's constant change -- or mutation -- it is that organisms are coded to change in order to survive unspecified environmental change. Those that changed in a manner fortuitous enough to survive the next environmental change did so without volition. The changes appear random. The coding does not.
The book uses the same language of volition to explain how a microbe survives via evolution. It isn't explained wrongly, exactly. The author just falls into the same habit of making it sound like Taumoeba somehow WILL their way toward nitrogen immunity. At the most, what could be said is that: 1. Taumoeba (and by extension, living things) are somehow coded in such a manner that the constant mutations that occur, do so, not exactly randomly, but with a predisposition toward survival. 2. Evolutionary adaptation is then a subtractive process. Everything the cell(s) -- considered collectively -- needed for survival was already present in their genetic makeup (perhaps, but unexplained, in the "junk" DNA). Nothing came from nothing.
Still as explanations go in fictional works, it was a good one.
I suspect that when we all read, listen, or view books or movies we do so in light of our current circumstances -- our current thinking, philosophies, world views. For the past few years now, things that I've thought about Christianity for most of my life, but that I kept at bay in the same manner most Christians do -- with as good and honest and thoughtful a scholarship as I'm able to apply. Still, many of the same things niggle at me.
Twenty years ago when Christian Smith described American Christianity unflatteringly as "moralistic, therapeutic, deism", I was among the many from the more reformed tradition who felt as though Smith had really put a finger on a glaring flaw. We (American Christians) appeared to lack sound doctrine. We appeared to be adrift in a new "religion" of our own device.
And he wasn't completely wrong. But he was also engaging in both a false dichotomy (that the extremes he found examples of were truly exemplary), and fairly loose definitions of the three tenets he claims of us -- moralism, therapy, and deism.
But I might suggest that there's nothing wrong and everything right in acknowledging the Christian life as living by a moral code. And I might suggest that there's nothing wrong and everything right in finding the proper solace both in the comforting words of the Bible, and its hope and promise of a greater meaning than the material world, the promise of an afterlife, and even the comforting of one another in Christian community.
But the deism thing?
Well, I remember when I was in Junior High and we were talking about our "Founding Fathers". I went to a Christian School so when we discussed our founding, we were taught about the enlightenment, the philosophical underpinnings of our founding, and ultimately that some of our founders were "Deists". We were given the rudimentary description of Deism -- that they believed in God, but believed that that God created the world and then stood aside and allowed it to progress however it was going to progress.
Clearly, if that was the definition of Deism, then Deism is not scriptural. God clearly steps into the workings of his creation. And he stepped into it in the biggest of ways through incarnation.
That notwithstanding. Deism is understandable. It is, for the most part, objectively observable. That is: The presence of God is not obvious without special interpretation of circumstances and events. And trying to live as though God is present may be a great exercise in keeping one's behavior moral, but it's a terrible exercise in survival.
That didn't make much sense, I suppose. What I mean is that, just as Christianity fails at science when it presumes the "God of the gaps" in order to explain anything it cannot explain, the Christian life has too often become a practice in the "God of the rescue" as we somehow have come to interpret the Bible as leading us to a passive life of assuming God's care, or, and worse, taking little responsibility for wise life choices because we suppose God's intervention in those choices.
And God's intervention is so erratic, unpredictable, and capricious (supposing that such intervention is even there) that we spend much of our time comforting each other with rationalizations like "Well, "no" is an answer" (when our prayers appear to go unheeded). We would rather go to our graves failed and stupid .... but defending God for keeping promises that he never made.
How is this about Project: Hail Mary?
Only a Christian with a modicum of Deist sense would ever face the impending doom described in the book in the manner in which the book details. Only a Deist would take full responsibility for his and his planet's survival. And, still, a Deist would say that that's how God saved his world.
I do think it would be possible for a Christian with a facility for sci-fi to come up with the story, albeit without some of Weir’s more overt bits of evo theory propaganda. (I was amused by the forays into “panspermia.”)
Regarding the innate Deism of the piece, on one hand I see what you mean, on the other hand the reason I thought it might be helpful to put the book slightly in conversation with A Canticle for Leibowitz is that book is by no means assuming God will intervene to fix everything. On the contrary, the assumption is that whatever can go wrong inevitably will, and the Christian’s job is to suffer as Christianly as one can through it.
It isn’t intrinsically unChristian to try to save the world, however a Christian ethic will place limits on the measures one can take. I’ve argued the Hail Mary project is unethical in its conception, meaning it really would be more moral to do nothing rather than sell the world’s collective soul by functionally murdering these astronauts.
Haven't seen it! Assuming there are spoilers?