{"id":15148,"date":"2015-11-02T09:51:40","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T17:51:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2015\/11\/02\/15148.html"},"modified":"2015-11-02T09:51:40","modified_gmt":"2015-11-02T17:51:40","slug":"the-martian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2015\/11\/02\/the-martian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Martian (book and movie)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a look at the book of The Martian<\/cite>. I hadn't had much interest in reading it—I've read stranded-astronaut-survival stories, and they've never much held my interest—but I figured it was worth at least glancing at it before seeing the movie.<\/p>\n

I skimmed the first forty or fifty pages. And I know a lot of you loved it, and so I'm sorry to say this, but: I didn't find it very interesting.<\/p>\n

It seemed to me to be (after the initial setup) mostly a long series of word problems. If you have x<\/i> amount of O2<\/sub> and y<\/i> amount of H2<\/sub>, how much water can you make, and how do you do that without blowing anything up? And then given z<\/i> square feet of arable land, how many potatoes can you grow, and how many calories will that result in, and how many Martian days can you live on that?<\/p>\n

There was a time, in my teens, when I might have enjoyed settling in with a pencil and paper and trying to check all the math. But that doesn't appeal to me so much these days, and so, sadly, I found those opening chapters of the book a little tedious.<\/p>\n

I recognize that different readers have different sources of reader pleasure; and there's clearly something there to like, because I think what I've seen people say about the book has been pretty much uniformly positive. So I'm of course not saying that the book is bad; just that I'm not the right audience for it.<\/p>\n

So I went to the movie feeling that I had verified that I didn't need to read the book, and thus that I could enjoy the movie for what it was; I figured that the movie was likely to substitute montages for math, and that I would enjoy that more.<\/p>\n

And I was totally right about that. I enjoyed the heck out of this movie.<\/p>\n

I would've liked it regardless, but I liked it even more because I saw it with Kam; she enjoyed it a lot too, and I got to enjoy her enjoying it.<\/p>\n

Also, if she hadn't been there then I would've been the only one in the theatre who was laughing at most of the funny bits—the audience was oddly subdued. Though some of them did applaud at the end.<\/p>\n

Spoilers follow, so if you don't want spoilers, stop reading here.<\/p>\n

\n

The movie had minor lapses here and there. There were a couple of things that I'd have liked to have seen explained better; in particular, early in the movie a journalist should've asked “Why can't the Hermes<\/i> just turn around and pick him up?” and the NASA people could've explained that the orbital mechanics don't work like that. And I wondered about various sciencey bits; for example, in the book he explained about using the oxygenator to get oxygen from CO2<\/sub>, but I had forgotten that, so while watching the movie I wondered why he seemed to have an unlimited supply of oxygen. And I wanted the effects of Martian gravity to be more visible, or else to be explicitly mentioned. There were also some science\/tech things that were glossed over or simplified for the sake of keeping the movie entertaining, especially various things having to do with communication and time lag. (See also a list<\/a> that includes some of the science flaws in the movie, but note that that list includes really big spoilers.)<\/p>\n

But all of that felt pretty minor to me, and I can get behind occasionally choosing in favor of heightened drama over accuracy.<\/p>\n

And overall, I thought the movie worked very well. I liked the diverse cast; I liked the mix of teamwork and individual effort to solve problems; I liked the script; I liked Matt Damon's comic timing and delivery; I liked much of the presentation of information; I got teary repeatedly at various bits. Some things were a little bit predictable, but this is after all a big-budget Hollywood movie, subject to the constraints of such movies, and I thought it did a great job within those constraints.<\/p>\n

There's a disclaimer at the end, saying something to the effect that just 'cause NASA cooperated with the filmmakers doesn't mean NASA endorses this movie. Which I suppose constitutes plausible deniability, but I kinda suspect that NASA loves this movie—I don't know for sure, but I suspect this movie has gotten a lot of people excited about space. Not to mention science in general, and botany in particular.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a look at the book of The Martian. I hadn’t had much…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,43,54,104,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies","category-reviews","category-science","category-space","category-speculative-fiction"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}