The Martian (2015)

They just gave us a DVD release date.

January 12th, 2016.

Picked it up digitally last night. Really good movie. Have not read the book or listened to the audio book. Felt at times maybe a bit draggy but at the same time like 4 hours was cut from it. Something like this could have easily been made into a tv series and lasted a season + from what was covered in the movie.

Yeah, the entire 3rd act of the book went into details of Watney's drive from his location to the other launcher, could have easily done another 60-90 minutes on that alone. Obviously you get a bunch more details all around in the book and if you enjoyed the movie you will love the book, worth picking it up.

I finally got around to watching this; I was leery of another space flick after Gravity's explosion fest of a story (yeah lynch me) but this was pretty good. A little dull at times and predictable but overall a decent feel good movie with some enjoyable humor, character and tension. I especially enjoyed the understated use of CGI and the expansive, natural looking landscape scenes and in the end felt like it could have benefited from a longer run time to further flesh out the experience. My only gripe is that I feel they devoted too much time to the cast on Earth and not enough spent with Damon's character; his 50 some day drive to the launch site went by with barely a mention in the film and that seemed really odd (haven't read the book) and it stood out.

Yeah, it is definitely further touched on in the book when he is riding for the last bit.

If you audiobook it or do the paper (or digital!) read version, you really should enjoy the written text. It honestly just makes the movie better. You'll hate that it did a better job (lawl, what book-movie translation doesn't?) but really love what they -were- able to cram into the movie. I'm legit on a precipice between this and Hateful Eight as second best non-Fury Road movie of the year. Both were incredibly good watches. I mean, not Fury Road watches. That goes without saying. Even though I said it.

Cad said:

Why didn't the mav have extendable stabilizing bars?

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The engineers understood that the atmosphere on Mars wasn't thick enough to tip it over.

Cad said:

Clearly their understanding was incorrect, at least in movie physics terms.

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I think the author has said it's his only real regret with the book, is that after he went to so much trouble crowd-sourcing all the other science to get it right he went with something physically impossible for the crisis that sets up the core plot.

Gavinmad said:

I think the author has said it's his only real regret with the book, is that after he went to so much trouble crowd-sourcing all the other science to get it right he went with something physically impossible for the crisis that sets up the core plot.

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I mean he was aware of there not being enough atmosphere for the storm to be a real issue, but he thought it was more interesting than some kind of mechanical failure or something to cause the abort. Movie gets enough science right that having some stuff changed for story reasons is understandable. He talks about how the movie leaves out a lot of the stuff from the actual rover move to the other site. The actual storm thing from the book and flipping the rover.

If tip overs could occur they would not be sending MAVs ahead of time. Hell just having it sit there for years on a planet with any weather and expecting it to work is asking for stranding situations to occur for the whole crew.

Parts of the movie do fall apart under scrutiny. Pre-supply missions seem realistic, but more likely they'd be kept in orbit until needed rather than sitting on the surface.

Wasn't one of the purposes of the early prepositioning to extract fuel from the atmosphere or something like that?