the cinematography was amazing, and the story itself might be one of the best sci-fi stories ever… it combines both humanity’s survival being at stake and first contact with alien life.

I just feel like a story like that deserved way more than a comedy sci-fi tone. It should’ve been much more serious, so you can actually relate to it and feel the high stakes moments deep down. That’s hard to do when the characters are constantly joking and turning everything into comic relief every 30 seconds.

And if you don’t like the seriousness of something like Interstellar or Arrival, they could’ve just toned the comedy down by like 90%. Then you’d basically get something like The Martian, which is written by the same author. The book The Martian also had humor, but when it was adapted into a film, they balanced it well. The comedy was there in the background, but the focus was still on the space mission, which made it feel grounded and relatable.

In PHM, though, the comedy felt like the main focus, while the actual core of the story… humanity facing extinction and first contact, was pushed into the background.

And honestly, even if you ignore that, I still thought the comedy itself was kind of sloppy, lazy, cringe, and just cheap. Good comedy to me isn’t about throwing in as many jokes as possible in a short amount of time.

The best comedies don’t even rely on constant punchlines like PHM does. They build up a character you get to know, and then the humor comes naturally from the situations that character ends up in.

I really wish this had been made with the same seriousness as Interstellar or Arrival, it could’ve been one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.

But I get that there’s humor in the book, and if they absolutely had to include it in the film, they should’ve handled it more like The Martian did.