📖 vs. 🎬 | Reviewed by LD | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ Full spoilers for both. Go experience one or both first — then come back.
Just looking for the book spoilers? FIND THAT HERE
Let’s Talk About This
I want to start by saying something: I almost always prefer the book. That is just the nature of what I do. Books give you more. Movies strip everything out and you’re left with a shadow of the story. That is usually my complaint.
Not this time.
The Book
Three stars. The story line is genuinely interesting — an astrophage problem eating the sun, a suicide mission to another star system, and an alien friendship that is honestly the best thing in the whole thing. But the book almost drowns it. Every thought Ryland Grace has is explained in full. Each and every equation. Every step of every decision. Every flashback that did not need to happen. By the time something actually happened, I had already spent twenty minutes listening to him reason his way through the math to get there.
Have you ever read a book and feel like you heard every single thought that character had — ever?? That is what this book feels like. Every thought they have, every move they make FULLY explained into exhaustion.
The story line deserved better pacing.
The Movie
The energy is completely different from the first frame. Grace wakes up and he can barely walk — he’s flailing around the med bay, accidentally bumps a button and a body slides out, asks the robot if he can speak to someone in charge, gets told the captain is deceased, asks who else is on the ship, and the robot gives him his name. That is the whole manifest. He is the only one alive.
That is Ryan Gosling doing what Ryan Gosling does — and it works. The book’s Grace is internal, analytical, exhausting. The movie’s Grace is spunky, a little chaotic, and genuinely fun to watch. I find that a lot of the time, scientific characters just don’t have personality. The movie fixed that. He’s off in the best way.
And then Rocky shows up at his ship in a glass ball and wreaks havoc. Like a little kid. A bossy little kid. I loved every second of it.
I also have to give credit to Carl — Grace’s driver/supervisor/government official something who slowly becomes his right-hand guy back on Earth while he is designing experiments. Carl as an addition, was the perfect fit because he was fun and goofy and turned a sciency movie into something enjoyable.
Where They Differ
Grace’s personality. This is the biggest one. The movie gave him life the book did not. The book kept him stuck in his own head. The movie let him be fun and quirky. I actually laughed in the movie — the book had no funny parts.
The taomeba escape. In the book, Grace smells something while he’s working and slowly, piece by piece, figures out what happened. In the movie, he is sleeping and an alarm goes off — contaminant detected. The amoeba evolved to escape the xenonite. Simple, clean, visual. I understood it immediately. In the book I was glossing over the explanation and hoping I’d catch up.
Rocky breaking free. In the movie, there’s a moment where Grace is in serious danger and Rocky breaks out of his own glass bubble — sacrificing himself outside his own atmosphere — to get Grace to the med bay. He watched all of his shipmates die and couldn’t do anything. He wasn’t going to watch Grace die too. It also happens in the book, though differently, and with much more detail that served more to confuse than to actually paint the picture.
The length. 2.5 hours versus 16 hours. And I want to be clear — it is not just the time. The 16-hour book FELT like 16 hours. The 2.5-hour movie felt like it was over too fast.
The Verdict
🎬 Movie wins. And it’s not even close.
Often times I actually prefer the book over the movie because they strip so much out. But in this case they really needed to — and stripping it down made the story line so much better. The filler was gone. The science was still there, but digestible. The friendship between Grace and Rocky hit the way it was supposed to. And Ryan Gosling made me care about a junior high science teacher stuck alone in space in a way the book never quite managed.
Read the book if you want the full story. Watch the movie if you want to actually enjoy it.
Two Questions I Still Have
Does Grace go back to Earth? In the book and movie he says he may consider it. Though at the end of the movie he hasn’t aged much. At the end of the book he is now in his 70s.
And why did the other two shipmates die and he didn’t? In the book both shipmates are right beside him and long gone, mummified as he explains. But it’s basically just tossed off as a luck of the draw. I thought maybe radiation, as they had explained that Rocky’s shipmates were killed by that, but it is never explained. In the movie it is also not explained.
Both the book and the movie left me with these. If you have answers, I need them.
Where to Get It
📖 Physical Book
Amazon CA | Amazon US | Bookshop.org
🎧 Audiobook
Audible CA | Audible US
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🎬 Movie
Watch on Prime Video
Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎬📖 | Genre: Hard Sci-Fi | Steam: 🔥
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