Project Hail Mary. Not a bad movie, mainly because I like the dude-in-space genre and first-contact genre. But among the ones I've enjoyed over the last decade or so (Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, Arrival, others I'm forgetting) it was the most frustrating for me. It really smacks of modern dumbing-down of films, and I found it very predictable — as someone who tries not to predict what will happen next in a story. The physical nitpicks I had over Gravity, and the linguistic nitpicks of Arrival, are absolutely nothing in comparison to the eye-rolling I did with Project Hail Mary, which is only important in a sci-fi movie. It also felt at odds with itself in terms of what it actually wanted to be: Is it a movie about saving the world, or a movie about a guy finding something worth sacrificing for? A personal journey, or an epic of stakes? Because it sure seemed like it wanted to be an epic of stakes in the beginning, but we're only ever told about the stakes, we're never shown them.
Not saying I didn't enjoy the movie, but I couldn't help but notice these trends: the telling-not-showing, and the sci-fi-without-the-sci.
