Hot take: Randeveouz with Rama was boring af

I heard that Dennis Villeneuve would be directing RwR once done with the Dune movies and jumped on the book.

Compared to his Dune movies and sci-fi novels I like, RwR was so boring. It was essentially a slow-paced overly cautious sightseeing tour, a museum visit. The amount of time spent explaining details about the descent of the crew down the stairs into Rama was just exhausting. The pacing was slow, I think I was 2/3 into the book the crew was still discussing vague landscape images of Rama and speculated whether what the structures they were looking at were.

Zero character development - we pretty much get linear characters, with give or take the same personality, traits and morals at the beginning and end of the book. To be honest characters did not have much chemistry, no conflicts, only somewhat interesting trait was their team play. Commander Norton is a very unexciting character and serves more more as plot device. He's your cliche idealised character of an officer in command. No depth, backstory doesn't really make him more interesting either.

No satisfying resolution at the end - and it doesn't seem the latter books in the series are worth reading.

There were no real conflicts, other than pacing against time and managing the laws of physics.

The alien aspects were massively under-developed and somewhat simplistic. There was minimal explorations of "first contact" themes.

To be honest, a movie directly depicting the book would feel like a documentary, and a bad one that doesn't give you the answers you're looking for. No Hans Zimmer music can help.

Perhaps this is what sci-fi was capable of in the 1970s, and maybe at that time it truly was groundbreaking, but today it feels very overhyped.

Edits: typos