It looks closer to what I want to see in a Mars mission movie. The two that came out a few years ago (99, 2000? Mission to Mars and Red Planet) drug themselves down by bringing in unnecessary "soft sci-fi" elements (the Face on Mars" being an alien base/ship in RP creatures on the planet creating a breathable atmosphere) a trip to Mars alone would be an ultimate and dangerous task for a group to take. This movie looks much more grounded in reality and showing what it comes down to for a mission to Mars.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this. I'm glad that there's been an upsurge in hard-SF movies in the past few years --
Gravity, Europa Report, Interstellar, and now this. Although they've all had their shortfalls in plausibility.
Gravity exaggerated the hazard of space debris to a downright comical degree and made orbital space seem far tinier and more tightly packed than it should be.
Europa Report had full Earth gravity in the scenes on Europa's surface. And
Interstellar went pretty woogy with the power-of-love pseudoscience in the final act. Still, it's nice to have a surge of movies that at least make an effort to be plausible. Before the past 2-3 years, movies that portrayed space authentically rather than as a fantasy landscape were quite scarce.
2010, Contact, Apollo 13... that's about all I can think of in the past 35 years.
Besides, the movie is based on a bestselling book, so there's not much of a point in secrecy. Millions of people already know the story, so there's no point hiding things.
Of course. It's not as if being surprised at what comes next is the
only possible reason to experience a story. Lots of movies are based on books or plays or true stories or things that most people are familiar with. Lots of people rewatch movies and shows they've already seen. The surprise of not knowing what's next is one tool in the storyteller's kit, of course, and it can have value, but it's not the exclusive purpose of fiction.
I doubt very much that when Zeffirelli made
Romeo and Juliet or Olivier made
Hamlet, there were mass protests from audiences complaining that they already knew how the stories turned out.
So, Matt Damon and Jessica Chastain went right into another space movie after Interstellar? Guess they really wanted in on this project.
I saw a meme yesterday to the effect that, between
Saving Private Ryan, Interstellar, and
The Martian, America has spent a great deal of money on retrieving Matt Damon.
What was with all the rashes on Watney's body towards the end?
From spending months in a spacesuit? Or maybe a result of dehydration?
I've got to agree with everyone else and say this was a great movie. Not only was it a great hard sci-fi but it was also a great movie on it's own. The plot's engaging the pacing is great, It's funny at the right moments and emotional when it should be. One of the best movies I've seen in a while.
I'm relieved to hear that. Ridley Scott's output in recent years has not given me a lot of faith that he still had it.
[*]Mars has 0.38 Earth gravity. Was it portrayed accurately in the movie? Just a thought. Had to ask.
It was not. Ridley Scott basically said he couldn't get enough bang for his buck portraying the gravity perfectly. Frankly I agree. Zero gravity shots are usually really cool and draw the audience in but showing less gravity doesn't quite have the same appeal. A good 70-80% of the movie takes place on Mars and accurately portraying the gravity would not only be a pain in the ass but it would also be super expensive. He kind of rationalized it by saying that the space suit is heavy enough to weigh him down.
I don't know if it would've been that hard. There are wire rigs NASA uses in training that create enough upward pull on a person to cancel out part of the Earth's pull and simulate moving in low gravity, and Hollywood has decades of experience with digital wire removal.
Anyway, the speed at which things fall goes as the square root of the gravity, so things would fall about 61.5% as fast -- something that took a second to fall to the ground on Earth would take 1.6 seconds on Mars. It would be a noticeable difference. And the weight of the spacesuit wouldn't affect it, because everything in a given gravity field falls at the same speed regardless of its weight. It might keep Watney from jumping as high, but he'd still come back down at a slower speed than he would on Earth. As far as walking, it might look fairly similar, but there'd still be an effect on his gait.
It used to be believed that the astronauts on the Moon adopted a hopping motion because it was more efficient than walking in Lunar gravity. But I recently read that it was more to do with the stiffness of their spacesuits. It's hard to say what the best form of locomotion on Mars would be, since we're taking our sweet damn time going there to find out.
Fifty Shades of Red should be the sequel. 
