Skep Doesn’t Do Movies
I don’t talk about movies very often. Film is a medium I have largely abandoned in my adulthood, mostly because it has never catered to me. The late ’00s really leaned heavily into a gritty aesthetic I did not handle well, featuring violence so visceral, gory, and random that these scenes still float into my mind and make me ill, long after the rest of the movie has been forgotten. Following that, it’s basically been nothing but superhero franchises and biopics for the last fifteen years, neither of which I can scrounge up any sort of interest for whatsoever. For reference, the last movie I saw in theaters was Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022; and I’m pretty sure the most recently-released movie I’d seen was 2023’s Barbie.
(So long as we’re not counting Hallmark-style Christmas movies, anyway, which I do tend to enjoy—partly because it’s fun to point out all the flaws and poor writing and partly because I don’t have to worry about watching somebody’s brains get splattered all over the wall)
But last night, we rented Project Hail Mary since we’d both heard it was supposed to be good. At a runtime of 2 hours and 36 minutes, another reason why I don’t go to the movie theater very often occurred to me: after you factor in 30 minutes of trailers at the beginning, we have to be able to commit at least three hours to being at the theater. That’s not “pop out for something to do” time, that’s “commit half the day to this activity” time.
Well of course I’m going to wait until I can watch it at home then, because I can pause the movie when I need to use the bathroom, and I can refill my drink while I’m at it, too. Y’all made movies too long to make going out to see them convenient, and now you’re trying to pull me back into the theater by asking me to buy a limited edition popcorn bucket tie-in, a product that is so useless and wasteful that I’m legitimately more mad about its continued existence than I am about having to look up parental guides on IMDB despite not being a parent. It feels like literally everything about the film industry is designed to be anti-Skep.
Anyway Project Hail Mary was pretty mid.