I kept thinking... What if the rover gets stuck in the sand somewhere? Even the simplest problem or setback like that and he would have been done.
The Martian - Grading & Discussion
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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He talks about wishing that he could have contact with NASA to plan out some kind of known safe route (by that time in the book he'd lost contact again) but he ends up dropping his speed to about 5kph if I remember correctly.
Whatever route he takes in the book was a dried lake bed (basically - I believe it says a one-time catastrophic flood caused it) so it has mostly stable ground.
The movie does show the wheels spinning at least once.
Saw it Sunday and both my daughter and I absolutely loved it. Better than Gravity, it had that great moment where the protagonist has to accomplish a big climactic, near impossible thing, and in the middle, something goes horribly wrong. I didn't think we got that in Gravity.
I loved that there were separate, interesting and justified dramas going on, on the Mars, the Hermes, and on Earth simultaneously. Loved Donald Glover coming up with the plan to get Hermes back to Mars (swigging his own pee and reacting to that, had me in stitches).
Extremely well written and directed. I had a hard time believing it was a Ridley Scott movie. Wasn't dark, fairly straight forward plot and story. Just well done all around. HIGHLY recommend.
I loved that there were separate, interesting and justified dramas going on, on the Mars, the Hermes, and on Earth simultaneously. Loved Donald Glover coming up with the plan to get Hermes back to Mars (swigging his own pee and reacting to that, had me in stitches).
Extremely well written and directed. I had a hard time believing it was a Ridley Scott movie. Wasn't dark, fairly straight forward plot and story. Just well done all around. HIGHLY recommend.
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It's interesting that there's such a gap once he leaves the Hab and heads for the Ares IV (?) which took him what. 6-weeks to two months? He was going nearly a few thousand kilometers, essentially driving from the West Coast to the East Coast at one of the narrower points. (Just guestimating from what I think I remember him saying the distance was and quick conversion in my head.) Seems like we should have gotten some stuff in there of his journey considering what he had to do (could only drive for a few hours then had to charge the vehicle for 10 or 12 hours.) We only "checked in" on him a couple of times, but we should have gotten some real scenes in there if only a log of how he felt living in that camper for several months.
This is a movie that really probably could have broken the 3-hour barrier and not have really impacted it at all because there's quite a bit they could have added to really flesh out his experiences on Mars, esp. since it seems in the book Murphy's Law was in full effect and kept screwing him over. (The make-shift garden being the icing on the cake.)
Which I guess brings me to another series of questions.
First, from what I've read it seems the Martian "soil" is pretty fertile on its own and could be suitable all by itself to grow in but we'll ignore that and accept that he had to make his own fertilizer in order to grow his crops.
Would any bacteria or nutrients in the soil really have been badly damaged by the flash-freezing of the decompressed habitat? Bacteria is pretty hardy stuff, so much so that even when launching or spacecraft to Mars we make sure it's as "uncontaminated" as possible to prevent contaminating Mars with Earth bacteria which would complicate any search for life. I know there's a difference between the even the "warmest" of cold nights on Mars and the coldest nights here but it's not as if farms across the world have to repopulate the bacteria in their fields after the winter.
But, we'll accept the soil was sterilized when the Hab decompressed. Couldn't he just start the garden over? Seems to me he'd still have some human waste to use and his potatoes for planting. He may not be able to have as big of garden but something is better than nothing.
If there's one grumble I'd make it's the use of metric units in the movie. Sure, sure, it's vastly more scientifically accurate to use Metric as opposed to Imperial and naturally accurate to NASA (though this is an organization that destroyed one of its spacecraft in Mars' atmosphere due to flubbing the conversion between Metric and Standard units since one device used one and one used the other. (I forget the details, but it was a lack of proper conversion that caused the craft to be destroyed. The Mars Polar Lander, IIRC.) Which is fine, I more less can get the "idea" in my head on converting them, but I know I'm not precise and I've no real concept of how cold "-60 C" is (what the HUD said a Martian night was at one point) beyond a rough idea of what that is in Imperial. When he says the distance to the other Ares craft, I roughly know that in Imperial but, again, not precise with a margin of error.
Not sure how this could have been accounted for in the movie since it's vastly more realistic to use Metric but you're also showing this movie to an audience of average Americans who do not use Metric and have no idea how cold "-60 C" is or how far "2000 kilometers" is.
This is a movie that really probably could have broken the 3-hour barrier and not have really impacted it at all because there's quite a bit they could have added to really flesh out his experiences on Mars, esp. since it seems in the book Murphy's Law was in full effect and kept screwing him over. (The make-shift garden being the icing on the cake.)
Which I guess brings me to another series of questions.
First, from what I've read it seems the Martian "soil" is pretty fertile on its own and could be suitable all by itself to grow in but we'll ignore that and accept that he had to make his own fertilizer in order to grow his crops.
Would any bacteria or nutrients in the soil really have been badly damaged by the flash-freezing of the decompressed habitat? Bacteria is pretty hardy stuff, so much so that even when launching or spacecraft to Mars we make sure it's as "uncontaminated" as possible to prevent contaminating Mars with Earth bacteria which would complicate any search for life. I know there's a difference between the even the "warmest" of cold nights on Mars and the coldest nights here but it's not as if farms across the world have to repopulate the bacteria in their fields after the winter.
But, we'll accept the soil was sterilized when the Hab decompressed. Couldn't he just start the garden over? Seems to me he'd still have some human waste to use and his potatoes for planting. He may not be able to have as big of garden but something is better than nothing.
If there's one grumble I'd make it's the use of metric units in the movie. Sure, sure, it's vastly more scientifically accurate to use Metric as opposed to Imperial and naturally accurate to NASA (though this is an organization that destroyed one of its spacecraft in Mars' atmosphere due to flubbing the conversion between Metric and Standard units since one device used one and one used the other. (I forget the details, but it was a lack of proper conversion that caused the craft to be destroyed. The Mars Polar Lander, IIRC.) Which is fine, I more less can get the "idea" in my head on converting them, but I know I'm not precise and I've no real concept of how cold "-60 C" is (what the HUD said a Martian night was at one point) beyond a rough idea of what that is in Imperial. When he says the distance to the other Ares craft, I roughly know that in Imperial but, again, not precise with a margin of error.
Not sure how this could have been accounted for in the movie since it's vastly more realistic to use Metric but you're also showing this movie to an audience of average Americans who do not use Metric and have no idea how cold "-60 C" is or how far "2000 kilometers" is.
Americans really need to get with the times and adopt the metric system completely. Imperial measures in sci-fi movies really annoy me.
That's all fine and good, but you're dealing with generations of people who're used to Imperial units and more over generations of people who may understand the Metric system but have no concept of what the units mean and are. I can visualize in my mind how far a mile is, it's much tougher to visualize a kilometer.
Watney listens to disco music (reluctantly), and watches Happy Days, The Dukes of Hazzard, and The Six Million Dollar Man, if I recall, with sarcastic commentary offered on the latter show's episode about the Venus probe.
I believe at that point all of his harvested potatoes had been cooked or were frozen in the accident.
In the book he listens to Disco and watches "Three's Company" and "Dukes of Hazzard". He makes various jokes about Mr. Roper and Chrissy. Then he makes a hilarious comment about how he doesn't understand why Rosco just doesn't drive out to the farm and arrest them.
Also, in the book, after the hab explosion, he discovers that some of the bacteria in the dirt did survive, but since his potatoes had frozen they would not be viable to plant so he has to abandon his farm.
Also, in the book, after the hab explosion, he discovers that some of the bacteria in the dirt did survive, but since his potatoes had frozen they would not be viable to plant so he has to abandon his farm.
Martian soil may be fertile, but it lacks the bacteria (as far as we know) needed by the plant. Human waste was used because it has the bacteria.
As mentioned, the plants all died. The potatoes were still edible, but they would not germinate.
Well, neither of those is that hard to figure out. I mean, minus sixty is a large negative number, so it's got to be really cold, right? That's all you need to know. I doubt anybody hearing "minus sixty Celsius" is going to assume it's a balmy day on the beach. And I think most people know that a kilometer is on the same order of magnitude as a mile, so they can guess that 2000 km is more than a thousand miles; they aren't going to assume it's, like, 500 feet or something. In both cases, it's really quite easy to get a general sense of the magnitude even if you don't know the precise conversions. And that's all that's needed in a movie.
True, but still having units most people can comprehend can make it easier to grasp the scope of things. While "-60C" is very cold and "2000 KM" is "far" away are things people can grasp. But a lot of the time it can bring a person deeper into the notion by giving them something they can relate to or comprehend.
Say "2000 KM" and people say, "Oh, far away." Say "1200 miles" and people can now grasp the distance and relate it to something known, say, roughly the distance between LA and Kansas City, a trip that'd take several days by car with multiple rests in there -and not the type of rests Damon's character was taking.
Temperature is a bit different when getting into such "low" numbers but "-76 F" would sound "colder" to most people than "-60 C."
It's no real big deal, again, I've got some understanding of the metric units and convert them in my head with a some margin of error but most audience members aren't going to be able to and giving them numbers they can relate to and compare to known things can go a long way for helping people understand the scope of things. "2000 KM" is a long distance but not a distance most people can compare to anything to grasp *how* far. "1200 Miles" people can grasp and can now compare.
Speak for yourself. I can't keep track of intercity distances like that. But that doesn't interfere unduly with my understanding of distance references in stories.
Anyway, it's not a writer's job to pander to ignorance. The United States has been officially on the metric system since the late 1800s. It's just intellectual laziness that's kept the public and the schools from keeping up. Heck, when I was in school, we were taught the metric system, because that is, or should be, just basic everyday knowledge. If that's no longer part of the standard curriculum, then that's just a shameful lowering of standards. Blame the schools for leaving people so ignorant of something so basic.
So do you think Star Trek movies should've had Klingons giving measurements in miles instead of kellicams? Should Battlestar Galactica (the original) have used minutes instead of centons? You're overthinking this. Have a little faith in the audience's ability to reason out unfamiliar units from context.
For temperature, its dead easy to understand. 0 °C is when water freezes and 100 °C is when water boils. Carbon Dioxide freezes into "Dry Ice" at -78.5 °C.
And -40 is the point of intersection. If you know how cold -40 is, all you need to know is that -60C is cold enough to freeze your bits!
I've been in temperatures below -40 C. Within seconds you can feel your skin starting to burn due to the cold.
Don't you think that places like Britain, Australia and New Zealand had a similar problem when they adopted the metric system a couple of decades ago? I grew up under the imperial system, was in my mid-teens at the start of Australia's switch to the metric system and 30 years old when it was completed. Even my parents adapted well to metrification.
Nowadays I don't know how much I weigh in pounds, and I have a much harder time visualising distances in miles than kilometres.
With the metric system, everything is base 10 and the various measurements are related. For example, a cube 10cm x 10cm x 10cm filled with water is 1 litre and equals 1 kilogram and 1 cubic meter of water is 1 ton. It's easy to visualize things this way.
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Actually we're still sort of stuck between imperial and metric. Generally, long distance is measured in miles (and speeds in MPH) but short measurements are in cm, mm, etc. Weights and volumes are just all over the place. At least in terms of most people's day-to-day use anyway. In industry it's pretty much metric all across the board.
Most of this is I think due to the older generations still being stuck in the old imperial mindset and in another generation it should sort itself out. Some conventions can be hard to shake though.
Right. It's only mysterious until you learn it. It's like learning a new language. Use it regularly enough and it becomes second nature.
Exactly. That's why it's so silly to complain about learning metric being too hard. It's actually so much easier and more intuitive than Imperial measurements. You don't need to remember 12 inches in a foot and 5280 feet in a mile and 16 ounces in a pound and however the hell many fluid ounces are in a tablespoon or whatever. The only number you need to know is 10. It's incredibly simple and straightforward. The only thing that makes it hard is trying to convert back to Imperial.
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