For a bit of context, I watched the movie back when it was first released without any context of what it was about. I didn’t even know it was based on a book until after I had watched it. Nonetheless, it quickly shot up to my second favorite move of all time, and I’ve since watched it four times in total.

I couldn’t help but compare the two in my head while reading, and what really stuck out to me was the differences in artistic mediums and how they play into the character choices and writing styles. In the book, there’s a lot of written out science-y equations to show that Grace is in space, but in the movie it was easier to just do a wide shot of the window showing the stars outside. Similarly, it makes sense that Grace would eventually get used to this new language (IYKYK) and not need to look at the computer, so Weir could just write out the translations to the sentences; however, in the movie, it wouldn’t make sense to do this so it was better to have Grace reference the computer’s text-to-speech the entire time.

I could go on and on about the differences in the movie vs book, but ultimately, as well written and thought out as this book was, I have to say I preferred the movie better. I think the science-y explanations sometimes went on for a little too long and got confusing at times, and the dialogue needed actual audial tone to make me LOL at the jokes. I will say though, I really liked that the book actually explained why certain things in the story were the way they were (no spoilers, but for example, why ammonia is such a big deal in the atmosphere) and I wish we had more of that in the movie.

Would highly recommend this if you watched PHM and want to go more in depth on why the project is like this and how it came to be. Basically, if you want to see the blueprints. If you’re not one of those people, or you haven’t watched it but don’t like stories with lots of math and science, do not read this because it’ll hurt your brain.