The Martian Book to Movie | Review

“I Started the day with some nothin’ tea. Nothin’ tea is easy to make. First, get some hot water, then add nothin’. I experimented with potato skin tea a few weeks ago. The less said about that the better.”

Being late to the party as I always am, I finally got around to reading The Martian after hearing so many good things about it around the interwebs. Seeing as the DVD is coming out in a few days, I decided to be super relevant and promote the shit out of this FANTASTIC book and film.

The story features Mark Watney, an astronaut (and more importantly a Botanist) who is on Mars as part of the Ares 4 Mission when a sandstorm forces the team to leave. However, Mark is impaled, thought dead and has to be left behind.

Spoiler: he’s not dead. (don’t worry, this isn’t actually a spoiler, considering the first line of the book is “Well I’m fucked”). Incidentally, this sums up the book’s amazing sense of humour as it’s so light and natural in Mark’s dialogue, especially considering the life threatening situation he’s in. In the film, Matt Damon captures this extremely well, bringing to life hilarious dialogue straight from the book (“In your face Neil Armstrong”) (“I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this”)

In the book, a lot goes wrong from the Hab exploding to his loss of contact with NASA as he’s about to start his trip to Ares. In the film, some of them are kept in and some are left out. This wasn’t too much of a problem as it allowed the film to focus on the scenes in depth instead of trying to include everything and falling short (ahem order of the phoenix).

The book and film both used multiple perspectives which were split mainly between Mark and the people working at NASA. However, there was also some uncommon narrators in the book which I really enjoyed and gave a deep sense of perspective to the story. For example, when Airlock 1 detaches from the Hab, we are given a chapter narrated from the perspective of the Airlock, with Mark being referred to simply as “the astronaut”. I absolutely loved this as it gave a really original feel to the story.

The soundtrack for the film was absolutely perfect, incorporating Commander Lewis’ love of disco music (and Mark’s immediate hatred of it) into the background of his new life on Mars.

I loved the change they made to Mark’s rescue in the film. As in the book, the Hermes crew had to blow a hole in the ship in order to slow down enough. However, it was Commander Lewis that came to his rescue, which is made more emotional when thinking about the guilt she felt for leaving him behind. Mark also got to ‘Iron Man’ to the crew, a dream which was left behind (pardon the pun) in the book.

Basically, you just need to read or watch it. This book was sat on my shelf for about 4 months and I had no idea what I was missing the entire time.

Best wishes and DFTBA

Jaz x