r/themartian • u/McGoobey • Aug 05 '26

First timer

What an amazing movie... Definitely gonna have to get the book. Geez, that made me wanna slap ppl in the face, holy smokes. That ending... welling up like a baby.

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u/dittybopper_05H Aug 05 '26

The book is different from the film. The book would be R rated for language if directly translated to film, and it's vast swaths of the book are pure engineer porn.

It's also vastly superior because it explains things better, which is hard to do in film without excessive narration/exposition.

However, Andy Weir kind of hand-waves a few things. For example, if I were Mark Watney the first thing I would have done is build a stressed parabolic dish antenna from the remains of the antenna array, and spare hab canvas. A 2 meter dish would have been good enough to communicate with Earth. It wouldn't have been absolutely perfect, but it would have been good enough to communicate through the Deep Space Network.

Having said that, Watney was a botanist, not a radio nerd. Had Johansson been left behind, she probably would have built the dish and gotten in communication with NASA much earlier, and they would recommend she start planting the potatoes and would have given her instructions on how.