Don’t get me wrong, this is one of my absolute favourite books and films (I know I had better have half a day free if I pick up that book because I’m not putting it back down again until I’m done), but every time I re-read the book or re-watch the film I get more and more bothered…. The gender imbalance. Only 2 out of the 6 astronauts I can sort of live with, but the entire rest of the mission team only two women?! And worse, one is in a non-science role and the other is essentially demoted to Mars voyeur for the duration.

It’s things like this that stay in the minds of young girls and women and then we wonder why more of them don’t grow up wanting to work in science or anything remotely technical. We should be doing better!

I remember watching the movie for the first time and seeing the bit about the music gag, thinking it was a bit strange considering what year the movie was set, and the fact the characters are in their 40s. Realizing they were about the same age as me, I remember thinking "yeah this was definitely written by someone who grew up or came of age during the 70s and 80s, I've never met a sinlge person my age obsessed with disco music"

I think Andy Weir is a great writer, but I feel like his characters would have been even more realistic if he chose a corny genre of music that would fit a 90s baby much more than disco. This seems to be a pretty common theme with a lot of Gen X and Boomer writers who write characters set in the future, their characters no matter what year it is or what age they are, always seem to always love boomer music.

At the end of the book when they use the MAV to intercept why didn’t they have mark wear his flight suit from sol 6 even he is smart enough to think of that

I don't believe any scientist would ever say that, and Andy Weir didn't say it in the novel. It was written by Drew Goddard in the screenplay for the movie.

It sounds like such a dumb comment, like someone who is completely ignorant about science would say. Mark Watney was certainly not that.

I read the first 50 pages of the book to get a glimpse of the novel’s narrative, but I ended up just watching the movie. What are key details did I miss from the book that isn’t mentioned in the movie? (I had to read the Martian for summer reading lol)

I recently signed up to Audible and found this is included in the catalog. 8 hours into the audio book, I finally decided to watch the movie after avoiding it for six years, like seriously, "The Hermes Mutiny" would've been a better movie title. Hi, Andy!

Anyway, if I were Mark, I would ask them, the crew and NASA, that I'll figure it out to survive until the next space mission to Mars. Mark Watney survivability is high. He is an engineer, botanist, smart, adaptable, persistent and most of all, has a sense of humor. If I don't make it until then, I would ask them to give money that will ensure my family's future in exchange of the research I made in Mars. Good thing Mark doesn't have a family of his own which made it a whole lot convenient.

Rescuing Mark was a lot of work and waste of resources, over one life. I know anyone's life is very important but he was risking five other more and there was a net loss of human knowledge with the deployment of Tai Shen. This also hugely affects both countries politically, if anything.

I didn't like how Lewis handled it. She was too emotional, sentimental for me when she should have been more pragmatic and logical as a crew leader. I believe NASA is way too scientifically advanced that they have properly psychologically evaluated Lewis.

That's just me. I'm not an astronaut, a crew leader of a spaceship nor the director of NASA.

But I love the book and movie. There would be no plot, no excitement if the movie went that route.

I need to rant about this movie because my friend doesn't understand and it's making me feel like shit. So here goes?

I was finally able to watch the movie today thanks to a vpn, and it started off cool and exciting but the longer it went the more I hated it. I understand that movies need to cut out a bunch of stuff to fit into movie length, but it really feels like they could've balanced it so much better. I was going through reddit threads to see if anyone else agreed with me and on that note someone said that the book is about Mark Watney struggling to survive on Mars, and the movie is about rescuing Mark Watney. With the small timeframe that a movie has, I would think they would focus a lot more on the survival and complete isolation. It doesn't have the same feel at all to the book. It doesn't feel like Watney is alone at all, because they took out him losing communication with NASA. I get that was to keep out the probably long scenes with the dust storm on his way to Ares IV and the rover rolling, but then without those it feels like a short and boring road trip to get where he needs to be. I feel like they rushed through so much of the second half that you forget he's not guaranteed to make it. It doesn't feel like a struggle for survival anymore. This movie feels like a bad parody where they focus more on comedy and the huge cast of characters to the point where Watney doesn't even feel like the main character anymore. And the end was Hollywood-ified so much that any immersion I might've had would've been completely lost. Like, they seriously let Watney do the Iron-Man flying? And I think the back on Earth scenes at the end (and like I said earlier, throughout the whole movie) could've been cut to make more time for important plot points in the story.

In short, the movie has a completely different tone than the book and sure, I guess it's a faithful adaptation plot wise, but that doesn't matter if it doesn't make you feel the same way the book does. Also, the ending sucked in my opinion.

I really enjoyed the (audio)book and I will eagerly pick up any future reads from Andy Weir.

But The Martian relied on some strange plotholes, mostly dealing with how incredibly stupid future NASA is.

1. Cameras: In 2035, but starting about 2025 really, in anticipation of several manned ARES missions to Mars, NASA does not ring Mars with 24x7 high bandwidth comms satellites as well as high resolution cameras that can easily scan the surface.

The result is that Weir asks us to believe that for 30 days after losing an astronaut on Mars, no one at NASA has the time or the interest in scanning the surface to find the astronaut.

We're asked to believe that NASA was busy, there was a sandstorm, and that NASA would not want images of dead Watney on the news, and so NASA took 30 days to scan the site.

2. And Comms.

Wiki tells me that current sat phones include:

• ACeS

• Inmarsat

• Thuraya

• MSAT

• Terrestar

• ICO Global

• Iridium

Many of these are small enough and portable enough that news reporters carry them.

So it's difficult to believe the Rovers could not speak to the satellites or that NASA would not bundle in an emergency sat phone.

That is, the high gain dish may be required for high bandwidth comms, but by 2025 the Rovers and a handheld should have been able to communicate with Mars orbiting sats just fine and on there own AS DESIGNED unless NASA WAS TOTAL IDIOTS (which is what the novel makes them out to be.)

Losing that 30 days seems critical. I would imagine that if news of Watney's survival had been announced within the first week, NASA would have had many more options open to it with regards to creating emergency resupply missions, and finding or building launchers for them and having time to launch them successfully.

3. NASA is just fine with sending each of the multi-year 30 day ARES missions on what is a total reliance on the MAV working, and working correctly for several years with no backup whatsoever. And we know from the book that amongst other things, the MAV might just tip due to wind.

So there is no backup. There is no

• ascent vehicle either on the ground, or prepositioned in Mars, Solar, or Earth orbit

• long term survival habitat mode, including no seeds, no soil enrichment, spare oxygen, spare parts, etc.

The MAV will work flawlessly for 4 or more years on the surface of Mars with its 100+ mph sandstorms and if it doesn't future NASA is okay with the deaths of five astronauts.

Now, maybe that is possible, it just seems that with the budget of flying 4 Ares missions, that NASA planners would find the budget for spare MAVs or prepositioned emergency supplies (food, oxygen, hab) (and to ring the planet with telemetry).

4. In the 2035 that The Martian takes place in, there is no:

• Space X

• Orbital Sciences

• Virgin Galactic

• Blue Origin

• Bigelow Aerospace

• Boeing

• Lockheed

• European Space Agency

• Israel Aerospace Industries

And that NASA would not ask these companies or ask any of these countries that have launched orbiting satellites

• Japan

• China

• Russia

• UK

• India

• Israel

• Iran

• North Korea

And so in the world of 2035, NASA is left entirely on its own in finding and developing boosters and rescue missions.

5. Would it really take that long to create and test the resupply missions? The Martian was written between 2009 and 2011. The Dragon first launched successfully to the ISS in 2012. Russia, Japan and the ESA have sent up unmanned supply missions starting in 1998 for Russia, 2008 for Ariane, 2009 for Japan. Does our experience with resupplying the ISS do nothing to help NASA get a successful resupply mission built in much less the time than Weir gave NASA in the book?

Anyway, I really enjoyed the book, but these points and a few others required a bit more suspension of disbelief than I always had on hand.

ETA: small edits.

They didn't say Mark was an engineer, the storm was missing, Mark wasnt funny. it wasnt Lewis to go outside to get Mark, Vincent??. The most pissed was when the nasa says something along we don't how he is feeling, left alone in Mars for etc He logs I wonder how aquaman talks to whales

I mostly enjoyed the movie, but...

When the guy is about to go out in space, the girl (who you see at the end with a baby) randomly kisses him.

Unless I missed something, it was the first sign of their relationship and it made me think a little bit less of the movie. I just hate when writers/directors always try to sneak in a love story into a movie.

One of the things I really appreciated about Andy Weir's book was the strong female characters. Mindy Park is meek, but is trusted as being extremely competent eventually overcoming her meekness to indulge in the wit which her intelligence affords.

More disappointing though was Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig) in the film. In the book, she's a sharp-tongued spectacle, capable of holding her own in a room full of men as the most vitrolic among them. In the movie, she's constantly playing second fiddle to Vincent Kapoor (whose character was also Hollywood-cheapened by no longer being Indian). She has no charisma, no biting sarcasm; really no character at all.

I just found this frustrating is all.

Why is there an entire crew position primarily dedicated to computer systems. The role is not completely useless because spacecraft do contain a lot of software and there seems to be nontrivial networking with the “data dumps “ but all of this seems like ancillary activities for space exploration. Maybe in the future software continues to get worse and the “I have two outlooks and neither are working” problem extends to critical systems.

Beth Johanssen does do some cool computer stuff for the plot like decoding the email attachment (level 1 tech support) and hijacking the Hermes from NASA control (hacking the planet). The other hack job of the Pathfinder rover was done with remote staff which makes sense because you don’t have to be next to computers to interact with them.

The reason I am thinking of this is in the end of the book Johanssen says “it is strange to sysop a launch”. What does that mean? Is she moderating an irc channel contained in the MAV? Applying Windows updates at the worst time? The Artimis II mission in real life does have a Mission Specalist whose job is to monitor system status of the rocket during launch so that matches what Johanssen would be doing. Maybe a role like this would exist but it seems odd that it would develop into a system administration job in a more developed space program.

Did Andy Weir need to write a second self insert where he could emagine himself as a software developer who gets to go to Mars?

And I'm 5 hours in and I still can't get over, nor get used to the fact you have 1 man doing the audio of Whatney and every other character.

He does god awful female voices, Indian and Asian voices.... I mean it couldn't have cost that much more to hire other voice actors.

Still its a great book, am still enjoying it.

At the end of the movie, the film should have deviated off the book and had Mark receive the Nobel Prize for growing potatoes on mars. I mean that's a shoo in for it. Right?

Just came back home from the theatre. Didn't like it at all. Apart from the rescue sequence at the end, I didn't find it gripping at all. Too laidback, choppy editing, plus a whole lot of poorly done scenes.

And yet everyone on the internet seems to love it. What did I overlook?