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Wacthed The Martian last night...actually UNDERSTOOD the spacey stuff!


SpaceyCLE

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Honestly... I felt kind of let down by the movie. I made the mistake of reading the book first. I understand a lot must be cut to squeeze a story into a two and half hour time frame, but it was just too much. Far too much content was removed. It felt completely rushed and had no tension what so ever. Im hoping big time that there's a directors cut. Matt Damon was fantastic as Mark Watney. But I want to see more of this character and the others.

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You're entitled to your opinion, provided that you can back it up with objective evidence.

Why, specifically, is Ridley Scott a crap director in this? DIRECTING, mind you, not visual effects or set design or script.

Well that's an oxymoronic statement. Your wanting me to provide objective proof to an opinion. If it's firm in facts then it's no longer an opinion, it's fact. What I learned in school was opinions were NOT based on facts, and facts were. Anyway- I could, but tbh we've dragged this debate long enough.

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Dude, the director was RIDLEY SCOTT. He knew what he was doing... And the reason they used those launches was because they were REAL launches.

I have not seen the movie.

I asked a couple people at work how they liked it, and they loved it.

Then I asked them if it had Ridley Scott trademarks ... you know, great pacing, great direction period, etc. Neither of them knew who Ridley Scott was. They had no idea who the director was. These are people who go to a lot of movies, who happen to be in their forties. Needless to say, I was dumbfounded. =D

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That actually isn't a good comparison. Although the AGC (Apollo Guidance Computer) on the CSM and the LM was indeed only a fraction as powerful as today's home computers, they were custom-built to run just the programs required to take the entire stack to the Moon, and then (for the LM) down to the surface and back up, compared to modern computers which run an OS then programs on top. Although, the slide rule part is accurate - it was VERY hard to calculate everything without modern supercomputers; plus, they had to pioneer advanced programming techniques to get everything in the AGCs to not overload the CPU (or the equivalent).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_%28scientist%29

There is a famous picture of Margaret Hamilton standing next to a stack of paper taller than she is which is the printout of the Apollo computer codes she was in charge of. She also famously avoided an abort of the Apollo 11 landing by advising that the crew could ignore some error codes being thrown by the landing computer.

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after i finished reading the book for the second time (im gonna see the movie this week) i felt the burning need to do a Duna mission in ksp, and right now the pre supplies are enroute and i am about to send the kerbals (no dust storms please!) anyone else after reading the book or watching the movie get the burning desire to go to duna?

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Every movie has holes in it; the question is if they are small enough to be ignored by most...

We're on page three of this thread and nobody complained about the fact that the gym on the hermes was laid out like a regular gym with lots of duplicate equipment (for a crew of 5, 6?) and ample room and BIG FREAKIN' PANORAMA WINDOWS?! Those windows were at least 5m2 each if not more, for no good reason other than "it looks good." Just think how thick (and thus, heavy!) those windows had to be to withstand the pressure difference between the ship's atmosphere (even if not 1013mBar) and vacuum.

Speaking of withstanding pressure... I felt that covering the blown airlock hole with a sheet of plastic and some strips of duct tape was overly optimistic. And I doubt Mark Watney would not wear his spacesuit inside when it was flapping back and forth in that storm!

Don't get me wrong, I LOVED the movie and I do feel it set new standards for "scientifically accurate" in the genre... There was very little of "applied magic" instead of science, but as seen in this thread it's not perfect either. And perhaps that's better, as some of Ridley's decisions where without doubt to make the movie more enjoyable, or because it wouldn't impact the story but provide better visuals.

Honestly... I felt kind of let down by the movie. I made the mistake of reading the book first. I understand a lot must be cut to squeeze a story into a two and half hour time frame, but it was just too much. Far too much content was removed. It felt completely rushed and had no tension what so ever. Im hoping big time that there's a directors cut. Matt Damon was fantastic as Mark Watney. But I want to see more of this character and the others.

Translating a book to a movie is hard. They are two different media. Time is an abundant resource in a book; in fact we want a book to be "long" (well, most readers do, at least). In a movie it's a problem. LOTR was incredibly long because Tolkien wanted to tell a really really long story you could read at cold winter nights curled up in front of a fireplace. Thus, a 10+ hr epic was created. I didn't hear anybody complain about it being too short even though even then parts of the story were left out. Interstellar was nearly three hours, and considered very, very long... Make a movie longer than two hours and your audience will get restless. So there's the challenge to keep a movie as short as possible.

I think that the right choices were made to cut a lot of meat off the story. Most of the science doesn't translate too well into movie making, unless you want tons and tons of monologueing, which, again, would turn off most of the audience. What remained was a great, relatively fast paced story that made for exciting entertainment.

The only part where I felt cheated was that the entire trek to the Aries IV launch sites as done with a simple “400 sols later†(or whatever the number is). I do think that the movie could have done with a twenty minutes more of that, just to emphasize the duration of that part, without adding all the disasters that happened in the book, but just to emphasize the drudgery. Or maybe the dust storm episode as a "reason" why more movie time is spent on that part (I'm sure some suitable disco music could be found to cheer up the whole episode).

Fast paced? Definetely. But nothing is worse* than a slow paced action movie for the sake of being slow paced. Rushed? When looking at the book, yes. But it's a movie. It has to move faster; time is an extremely constrained resource.

* Pre-emptive snark: yes, this is a hyperbole. There are many things worse than that: war, poverty, children dying of starvation, etc. But this is meant in the context of the movie adaptation.

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Every movie has holes in it; the question is if they are small enough to be ignored by most...

We're on page three of this thread and nobody complained about the fact that the gym on the hermes was laid out like a regular gym with lots of duplicate equipment (for a crew of 5, 6?) and ample room and BIG FREAKIN' PANORAMA WINDOWS?! Those windows were at least 5m2 each if not more, for no good reason other than "it looks good." Just think how thick (and thus, heavy!) those windows had to be to withstand the pressure difference between the ship's atmosphere (even if not 1013mBar) and vacuum.

... snip

I've noticed that every space movie is guilty of putting way too much space in their ships. When was the last time you saw any stellar craft designed for efficiency rather than aesthetics? From gigantic star destroyers with literal amphitheaters for bridge areas, to small single-seat fighter craft big enough for five.

This activates my nerd rage. However, I do realize the needs of the camera. What good is a movie if you cannot frame it properly?

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My biggest complaint about The Martian was, where's the SLS? It showed a lighter variant of the Atlas V carrying payload to Mars?? At the end, the follow up Ares mission was performed by an Delta IV HEAVY? Holy Jebediah, the D-IV Heavy couldn't put the Orion module past the moon! The heck! Moreover, the launch portrayed at the end was just videos and audio taken from Orion EFT-1 (launched in December 4th of 2014!!). I had a lot of problems with it, I heard a lot of praise, but I feel I just got Gravity'd. Good story, but whoever was directing didn't know up from down.
Well the directors had two options. Use CGI, which is expensive to do and liable to look fake to many viewers. Or use a stand-in, which is cheaper and will look real because it is real, but might be recognised by a small number of NASA geeks and complained about by an even smaller number. I recognised the Delta IV Heavy, was mildly surprised it hadn't been an SLS, but didn't care any further - it has basically no bearing on my enjoyment of the film.

As for what did annoy me about the film:

Gratuitous gorn at the beginning. Totally at odds with the rest of the film. What's the point? To establish Matt Damon as a tough guy? The rest of the film will do that just fine. To earn the film a higher rating because teenagers won't see a PG? Bleurgh.

Matt Damon fanservice throughout. It's not an action movie, and while it is sensible that an astronaut is in good shape I found myself less able to identify with Damon's Hollywood-hunk version of Mark Whatney than with the original book's character.

Showing that thin plastic used to hold air in stuff. It stretches belief that Watney would take off his suit inside with such a flimsy seal. From the book description I envisioned something much thicker, maybe something like what a bouncy castle is made of.

Almost completely skipping over the epic Mars road trip. I know time is a constraint but I'm sure more could have been included if cuts had been made elsewhere. Drop the opening gorn and gain five minutes, for a start.

The ending.

Poking the hole in the suit. He didn't do that in the book and it just felt silly on the screen. Why not just jump from the MAV and coast towards the Hermes - timing would be tricky but it ought to work.

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I've noticed that every space movie is guilty of putting way too much space in their ships. When was the last time you saw any stellar craft designed for efficiency rather than aesthetics? From gigantic star destroyers with literal amphitheaters for bridge areas, to small single-seat fighter craft big enough for five

I thought that "Europa Report" did a good job on that. But yes, in general ships seem to have ample amounts of space. I guess once you have the anti-grav technology it doesn't matter that much. :)

- - - Updated - - -

The ending

Yes, that mistified me. It adds a funny note to the movie, but really, the way it was done in the book contained just as much tension (maybe even more) and wouldn't have been that much difficult to implement, I'd think. Maybe it was reasoned that for a generic audience the way it went down in the book wouldn't look dire enough?

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Honestly... I felt kind of let down by the movie. I made the mistake of reading the book first. I understand a lot must be cut to squeeze a story into a two and half hour time frame, but it was just too much. Far too much content was removed. It felt completely rushed and had no tension what so ever. Im hoping big time that there's a directors cut. Matt Damon was fantastic as Mark Watney. But I want to see more of this character and the others.

I kind of feel like this, but having worked on a movie and having cut a lot of loved material to fit the time myself, I can relate to what was done. In fact, given that things HAD to be cut, I say they did it spot on.

EXCEPT for the part where he does't fry his radio while fixing the rover in the movie. The pirate monologue makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE then.

I loved the movie, in any way.

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The ending.
Poking the hole in the suit. He didn't do that in the book and it just felt silly on the screen. Why not just jump from the MAV and coast towards the Hermes - timing would be tricky but it ought to work.

Well,

the main tension left at that point is the fact they they are on very different orbits, and he needs to accelerate a lot to not slam into the commander like a sack of wet bricks. I agree he should've started his derpy manuver by jumping off the roof, using the MAV capsule as his remass (considering he needed every dange m/s he could get I was very suprised when he didn't), but they imply pretty strongly that he needed more delta-v than space suited jump could alone provide.

I need to get ahold of the book soon to find out how the author handled that bit. Well, that and to enjoy all the stuff they had to slice out to make it movie better.

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At the end, the follow up Ares mission was performed by an Delta IV HEAVY? Holy Jebediah, the D-IV Heavy couldn't put the Orion module past the moon!

Why would it need to? The Ares missions use Hermes for interplanetary travel the Orion just goes to Hermes in LEO... Human rating the DIV was being argued for so in this possible future that actually happened so this bit isn't that bad really.

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Amen... It's a great movie that uses 3D perfectly to convey the message that space is hard. And bad. Very hard. And very bad.
One of the quotes they added near the end of the film (that was not in the book) though does sum this up pretty well, and is honestly one of the most Kerbal ways of looking at things I can think of:
It's space. It doesn't cooperate. I guarantee you that at some point, everything's going to go south on you. And you're going to say, "This is it. This is how I end." Now, you can either accept that, or you can get to work. And you solve a problem. And you solve another problem. And another. And if you solve enough problems, you get to go home.
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I've noticed that every space movie is guilty of putting way too much space in their ships. [...] This activates my nerd rage. However, I do realize the needs of the camera. What good is a movie if you cannot frame it properly?

Ever heard of Das Boot? There was an earlier, abandoned, attempt to make that movie. They inherited the submarine set complete with detachable sides for camera and lighting, but decided to weld it shut and use a hand camera in the confined space, to great effect. Made quite a splash at the time.

I can't think of a space flic that would benefit from the same approach, though. Maaayyybeee Apollo 13, if at all.

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Even though I recognized some of the discrepancies you guys are talking about, I still thoroughly enjoyed it.

Like, I doubt CIA/FBI/government agents go into Mission Impossible or 007 movies and cringe at how unrealistic it is.

Having had the chance to work with a whole host of alphabet soup agencies from a number of different countries... Yes, oh yes they do. Honestly most of it is whining about how little paper work there is in the movies. Other lesser comments come about over how easy and comfortable they make stakeouts and following suspects look, and how utterly foolish most fights and weapons handling looks, and things like that.

But lets be honest, and admit that it kind of fun to complain about movies with the right group of people.

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