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One of the most exciting voices to enter the Science Fiction genre in the 21st century has been author Andy Weir, whose writing style and approach have developed an avenue for the genre that is mainstream, accessible, and never dumbs down the “science” aspect of sci-fi. It all started with The Martian, which became a bestseller and then the Oscar-nominated blockbuster. Next week will see the second adaptation of Weir’s work arrive on the big screen with Project Hail Mary, another bestselling novel already being hailed as a masterpiece. What film fans may not realize is that there’s a third project too.
Though Weir’s literary works are not connected, there’s connectivity between them being by the same author and in the same genre. As a result, an unofficial sci-fi trilogy already exists on bookshelves with The Martian, Project Hail Mary, and Artemis, but film fans have been waiting on an adaptation of the latter for years now. Speaking in an interview with Screen Rant, Project Hail Mary directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord (who are also attached to develop Artemis) finally had an update. “We are still actively developing it, and there’ll be more to come,” Miller said, prompting Lord to offer the real reason why the Artemis movie is taking so long.
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Artemis, like Weir’s other titles, is largely set against the backdrop of space travel and, rather than being set on Earth, is actually set on the Moon. The lunar landscape has presented a unique problem for bringing Artemis to the screen, and it’s all about the difference in gravity on the lunar body and on Earth. The good news is that making Project Hail Mary has given Lord and Miller the opportunity to figure out how they might address that problem in production.
“The trick on that was the moon’s gravity, which is 1/6th Earth’s gravity,” Lord said. “It is a really tricky thing to shoot in a practical way. One of the great things about this movie is that we were able to really shoot that type of stuff. We figured out a way that we think we would be able to shoot moon gravity in a way that wouldn’t cost a billion dollars.”
With Artemis being set entirely on the moon, one might assume the quick fix is “well, just say there’s artificial gravity on the base,” which would be easy, but would remove a lot of the charm and fun out of Artemis‘ narrative. Central to the story is the fact that “Artemis” is the only base on the moon, which has made it a major tourist attraction for Earth’s elites. Between the tourism (in particular the naughty kind) and the fact that a larger plot is about committing crimes on the moon, maintaining that gravity change is a must for the live-action adaptation.
There’s also another lingering element of Weir’s work that connects this unofficial trilogy of sci-fi movies and separates it from others: the realism. Weir has long been about maintaining both believability and drama in his work, and a major element of that is making a note of quite literally anything that can go wrong in space, on another planet, or when you’re just trying to solve any kind of scientific problem. That Lord & Miller are committed to making that work in Artemis is a great sign for it as an adaptation, and hopefully means we won’t have to wait too long for this trilogy to end.
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