NASA's copious input is blatantly obvious.
#OLD MARTIAN MOVIE MOVIE#
These nerd nits aside, I have to say that the look and feel of the movie - especially surface operations is spot on. The tech stuff is the backdrop against which someone desperately tries to get home - against all odds.
And when multiple bad things happen in sequence you have a disaster and you eventually get documentaries about these disasters - just like "The Martian". Lets assume that everything failed - for whatever reasons, since, things like that do happen in expeditions. You also have to ponder why a human mission to Mars had a communications system back to Earth that was not fault tolerant with multiple back-ups. After all, things like this happen during expeditions to remote locations. If you can get beyond that (maybe a large meteorite landed nearby or a volcano blew up) and just accept that something really bad and unexpected happened then the movie works. A hundred reviewers of the book and the movie have noted that Mars winds never get this intense. To anyone watching movie trailers the premise is known that a sandstorm causes mayhem and destroys lots of stuff and one astronaut (botanist Mark Watney) is left for dead as the rest of the crew escapes. If you are a space person then you only have two things to get your tech brain adjusted to - and it happens early on. But in the end the good guys prevail - since it is success that motivates NASA - even if they stumble a bit on the way. Alas, as is the case today, its almost as if one person at NASA can't excel at something without having someone down the hall doing something stupid or selfish. In the balance: the way NASA is shown working (sometime against itself) is quite accurate. Of course there are the people in the film who break the rules - for the right reasons - my favorite type of NASA employee. In the case of the crew, the aw-shucks jokery is intermeshed with unabashed bravery and out-of-the-box thinking. Snide cynicism and self-serving biases by a few upper management types (and one particularly snarky public affairs officer) are more than balanced by the sheer ingenuity and creativity of NASA's rank and file. It is that good.Īs for how NASA is depicted - it is realistic. Indeed, the scenery (some of which was shot in Jordan) is on a par with what David Lean showed audiences in "Lawrence of Arabia" - but with highly accurate Martian phenomena included. Ridley Scott is renowned for his sweeping vistas and he certainly does not disappoint in this film. That is quite an accomplishment in and of itself for a SciFi movie. I could not tell what surface visuals were shot on location on Earth and which ones were computer generated and I simply did not even stop to bother to think about that. The movie works just fine if you have not read the book and is still surprising if you have read the book.Įvery single frame in this film is gorgeous and stunning. Lets just say that the book and the movie are faithful to one another. The film is a lot more streamlined and really focuses on the book's core tale and peoples the story with characters you could really relate to.
#OLD MARTIAN MOVIE MANUAL#
The book often reads more like a lab manual of nightmare experiments (many of which are personally familiar) where you wish you paid more attention in class that are filled with somewhat incessant (but understandable) profanity. Having read Andy Weir's entertaining book I had a basic idea of what would happen.
You are on Mars with Mark Watney and you really want to see him get home. Little time is wasted on things that do not support the story. The movie is fast-paced and really doesn't miss a beat. But it does happen in space and does so in superbly flawless fashion. It would be a good movie even if it was not set in outer space.
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