In the case of Project Hail Mary they have an “answer” as to why. The book directly explains it and the movie nods at it in a scene where he writes “Muscles?” on the white board, but its the coma robot, Armindo. It was meant to work their limbs and apply electrical stimulation so they wouldn’t atrophy on the trip.
Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Not only that, but when the main character wakes up at the start of the book, he is baffled as to why he’s so muscular. I guess the problem with the movie is that he wasn’t visibly skinnier during the classroom flashback scenes.
zerodawn@leaf.dance 1 week ago
The problem is they had a seven-ish hour pre cut, a four and a half hour directors cut, and the two and a half hour theatrical release. The original pass on the movie probably explains everything. If I’m being honest I’d gladly give up the karaoke scene for the 10 or so 30 second explanation scenes we could have had in it’s place.
Initech_vs_Initrode@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Yeah, I enjoyed the movie and thought it was a pretty decent adaptation, but it’s still an adaptation of a hard sci-fi book for general audiences. The start of the book, where he’s coming up with ways to figure out where he is, using Newtonian physics and common objects, was a ton of fun for nerds like me, but would be boring af for regular audiences.
It reminds me a bit of Contact. The book is amazing. Sagan explains how one might communicate with an alien intelligence, starting from the basics of detecting signals, to communicating basic logic and mathematics, to communicating engineering diagrams. Pretty much none of that was covered in the movie, but it was still a good adaptation.