I finally got around to watching the film adaption of
The Martian over the weekend. I was somewhat
disappointed by the book, and I'd rate the movie as... competent.
The movie starts out with the advantage that the fundamentally "third person view" of films (with a very few
exceptions) smooths away the rather grating viewpoint shifts of the book. Film adaptions of books always compress their complexity, but much of the hero's work in keeping himself alive on Mars is skipped through in "
hard work montages", and this makes some parts of the movie feel very rushed, and yet, about three-quarters of the way through, I found myself thinking:
"Wow, this is a long movie!". It
is 141 minutes, but any movie that has you thinking about its run-time at all while watching it is doing something wrong.
The film looks good, and its depictions of technology, space-travel, Mars etc. are convincing within the reasonable limits of film-making. Watney's deteriorating condition is done well, better than the book. However, there is one
horrible special-effects/set-building failure which looks particularly cheap and bad in an otherwise expensive-looking movie:
When Watney patches the hole in the Hab left by the exploding airlock with thin polythene sheeting and gaffer-tape, and then the patch flaps loose in the Martian wind! Even if thin polythene could contain the internal pressure within the Hab, it would have been stretched tight as a drum-skin. It looked really naff, and totally kicked me out of suspension of disbelief.
The cast is very good, I think, delivering performances as strong as the rather bland script permits. Matt Damon carries the movie, but that's not really surprising given the work. Kristen Wiig is
completely wasted as an Annie Montrose so sanitised and uninteresting as to be unrecognisable as the character from the book. This is a problem with the script generally, in that the adaption pretty much sucks all the realistic conflict and tension out of the original story*, and treats the Chinese intervention in a manner that is frankly childish. The climax is just silly and bad, abandoning the film's previous realism, and apparently being based on the idea that you can't have a science-fiction film unless the commanding officer behaves like Captain Kirk. The same "scene" in the book is completely tense and absorbing as it stands, as well as much more realistic.
Overall, I judge the film, like the book, pretty good but very overrated.
*I don't know if this was the price of getting NASA's cooperation.