I went to see the movie “The Martian” about a week ago and was impressed. I thought it well done, well-acted within limits, and all around a good show. I’m not ready to add it to my list of favorite movies (which you can access on this blogsite), but I liked it. Some reviewers have said they felt Matt Damon was miscast as the astronaut Mark Watney stranded on Mars when all his buddies leave the surface because of a tremendous wind and sand storm that threatens to blow over their ascent vehicle, but I disagree. I felt he did a good job. To continue the plot line, his comrades have to make a decision whether to go or not. If they don’t , the vehicle could be tipped over and everyone will be stranded. So the thrust of the story is to get the one stranded astronaut off the surface alive, and get him back to Earth. An interesting concept.
I’m putting aside here the one glaring mistake in the movie (and in the book) that a wind/sand storm on Mars could blow over a spaceship. In reality, it wouldn’t have enough force to do that because the atmosphere is so thin that even at one hundred miles an hour, there’s too little air to move. If you suspend belief in that one fact, the movie becomes logical and reasonable, and I highly recommend it. What I want to focus on for the sake of this post is the relationship between the book and the movie.
During the movie, I found myself thinking about the detail in the book that wasn’t in the movie. Movies are great, as I’ve stated before, for doing special effects. And “The Martian” was no different. I was impressed by the spaceships, the habitat on the Martian surface, the Martian landscape, and so forth. But the book is so much more detailed than the movie. Many things that were just glossed over in the movie were treated in considerable detail in the book. The author, Andy Weir, goes into a lot of detail in many places. Especially, I remember, about how Watney was going to travel from the habitat where he’d been living, to an ascent vehicle that would get him off the surface. He had to travel several hundred kilometers and Weir went into considerable detail about the trip, working out the details, how much energy it would take, loading the rover vehicle that would take him there, and so forth. In the movie, Watney simply did it, and left much to the viewers to figure out for themselves. It works, and you can handle the situation that way, but the book is better.
Additionally, Watney in the book expresses himself more. Rarely does Watney in the movie lose his cool, yet he did several times in the book. This, I feel, is the one real drawback to the movie. Watney is almost too cool.
All this reveals the real drawbacks about translating a book onto the screen. Detail can be lost, and this kept bothering me. Perhaps it’s my scientific training, but I would have liked to hear more about what Watney was going to do as the movie went along. I realize, of course, that that would make the movie horribly long, and the producers had to cut something. As it was, the movie was 141 minutes anyway. That’s 2 hours and 21 minutes, long for a movie. Any more detail would certainly have been boring and interminable, and the producers did the best they could. If you want detail, read the book. This is another reason why I feel that if any of my sci-fi books ever get published I will not let a movie be made from them (assuming someone wants to in the first place). Books are more detailed, and in that detail lies the essentials of the plot. Read the book. Make up your own mind. Savor the detail. That’s what a book is for.