I just generally despair of Hollywood filmmakers ever understanding how air works. They constantly get it wrong. Like thermodynamics -- assuming that people can be standing right next to a bed of lava or a fiery explosion and be perfectly find as long as the lava/flame doesn't directly touch them, ignoring the fact that the atmosphere would be conducting the heat and would roast them quite thoroughly. Or, same with explosions, ignoring the concussive force of the blast wave propagating through the atmosphere, which is far more damaging than the visible fireball itself. And it gets even worse when they have to deal with the absence of air in a vacuum -- sound in space, roiling explosions in space, explosive decompression myths, Superman's cape waving in space, etc.
That's why the Hermes decompression scene was so refreshing -- they actually got it right there. Usually when you see a scene of a spaceship venting atmosphere, it's a powerful wind that lasts for up to several minutes, but that's wrong. It's more like a balloon bursting or a water heater rupturing -- an abrupt release that's over in moments. That's why it's called explosive decompression. It doesn't mean that people blow up in vacuum like in Outland or Total Recall, it means that the air empties out very quickly in one single blast. They even had the air fog up as the decompression cooled the air and caused the moisture to condense, which is something that's often observed in aircraft that undergo sudden decompression. (That doesn't always happen, though, and I'm not sure it would've happened in conditions like this. It may have been a bit of a fudge to make the effect more visible. But if so, it was still grounded in plausible science.) They really did their homework there and made sure to get it right, which is why it disappoints me they didn't try harder to get across the near-airlessness of Mars. It's really contradictory to have the characters talk about the lack of atmosphere and then cut to a scene where there's a loud and forceful windstorm outside.
