The Martian, in print and on the screen

posted by Jeff | Sunday, January 31, 2016, 5:17 PM | comments: 0

A few days ago, I finished reading The Martian. I had been meaning to read it for some time, after hearing about it on a tech podcast, but after more than a year, my dad fixed that problem when he sent it as a gift. I don't read a lot of fiction, but knowing that it was sciencey, and that it would be a Matt Damon movie, I wanted to read the book before seeing the movie. Now I've done both.

I loved the book. The science stuff is all reasonably straight forward, in that it's the kind of stuff you would learn in high school for biology, chemistry and physics. The narrative is largely told by way of journal entries by Mark Watney, stranded on Mars, interspersed with more conventional storytelling on Earth. It works pretty well, and I think it was necessary in large part because it would be pretty dull to see the character's actions described without his own personality injected. I mean, a lot of his time is spent sitting around, when not having to "science the shit" out of his problems.

The film made a lot of concessions in the plot and detail, and as much as I'd like to be a purist about the book, I admit that for visual storytelling they were necessary changes. Interestingly, they left a lot of stuff out entirely. To an extent I felt like he got off easy in the movie by comparison. Major road blocks to him being rescued were simply left out. There was one change that really bothered me, and that was the final scene in space (the book ends with him en route with crew, not on Earth, as the movie showed it). They added a lot of drama that didn't need to be there if they would have let it play out as it did in the book. There were some minor science things they got wrong too, in particular the patching of the Hab (it wouldn't blow around with external wind, and he used excess canvas, not what appeared to be plastic wrap, which would not hold that pressure difference).

The casting was generally pretty good. Damon as Mark was perfect, as was Jeff Daniels as Teddy, the director of NASA, and Kristen Wiig as the smart-ass PR boss. I'm not entirely sure why they cast an African guy in the part of the Indian character who runs the Ares program. He had some great lines in the book about being Hindu and praying to more gods than others for the safe return of Watney. In my mind I had cast the dude who played the InGen CEO in Jurassic World. They did cast a few roles too young, including Mindy the satellite operator and Rich the astrodynamics guy. But you know, movies.

Still, I did enjoy the movie, and the book did pretty well in the suspense department. I can't be too hard on the movie for some of its choices. It didn't quite reach a "pander to stupid people" level, and I can live with that.


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