Matt Haig

Shared this as a story and got swamped. Easier as a post.

But I am good at arm wrestling so there

I wrote a book and it is out next month

We all arrive here crying

Well. Project Hail Mary is an incredible film. Funny, clever, sentimental, and a heart so big it extends 11.9 light years away. Like ET this is the purest kind of love story. The love of unlikely friends. Science teacher who can’t drive and rocky alien who can’t breathe air. It’s a film that fuses hard astrophysics and hard microbiology and even hard chemistry while simultaneously making you cry. It made me feel every emotion. Including jealousy at Andy Weir for being able to make subplots about solid state gases and exothermic oxidation absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking. This is a wonderful film. I read a review that said it was too backwards looking to be the future of cinema as it has a feel of a movie from 1979. This is MISSING THE POINT. Cinema is fundamentally nostalgic. Indiana Jones is nostalgic for the Saturday matinees of the 1950s. Same with Star Wars. Even in the 1930s cinema was always looking back to the Wild West or the civil war. And here the nostalgia adds to it. It’s a film about homesickness and time and cherishing what we have so it makes sense this film pays homage to Close Encounters and ET and Rocky and 2001 and waxes on about the value of love and music and ramen noodles. It is coming at the right time. It’s a film about rescuing the earth and in its own way seems to try and do the same thing. It is doing the biggest job of art: making us see ourselves as human beings. And to see the hidden hero inside even the most reluctant of us. It is the opposite of a side of social media that wants us to see the worst in each other. It makes you want to save the world. And in doing so, save yourself. I didn’t get on as well with The Martian so never read the book. Oh and it’s funny. And Sandra Hüller will win an Oscar next year. And Ryan Gosling is a proper old school Jimmy Stewart movie star now. It is a film that makes you realise that where there is life there is love. It is about bravery and it is brave in its sentimentality. It could save cinema. It could save you. It could save the world, via the Beatles and cardigans. Five bright unfaded stars.

My mum just sent me a pic of my books in Newark Waterstones, the very newest Waterstones in the country. I grew up here after my parents moved from Sheffield for work. But it didn’t have a bookshop then. As a teenager books saved me. I am not just saying that. I was lost. And the local library was how it began to turn around. Quite surreal to see this especially because on that street in 1991 I was arrested for shoplifting.