After reading Andy Weir‘s novel The Martian I wondered how long it would take until somebody tries to turn it into a movie and more importantly if that movie would be any good. When I learned that no other than Sir Ridley Scott would direct the film adaption I was sure that it would be either epic or absolutely awful.
In The Martin NASA’s third manned Mars mission has to be aborted because a powerful sandstorm is threatening to destroy the space ship that the crew needs to leave Mars. During the emergency evacuation astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead and left behind. Stranded on an uninhabitable planet with limited resources he needs to figure how to survive for four years until a rescue mission from Earth can reach him. But as NASA doesn’t even know that Mark is alive that rescue mission might never come.
The film adaption of The Martian is very close to the original book. It doesn’t change the excellent plot much and features all the important characters. The second half of the original story is however strongly compressed, most likely to keep the run time of the movie under 2.5 hours. The only letdown is the Iron Man Sequence towards the end of the movie. While the science in the rest of the film seems plausible (even if it isn’t always correct) this scene features the usual unrealistic and over the top Hollywood action. It is even more annoying because one of the characters points out that the plan cannot work in the first place. But it is carried out nevertheless and succeeds in complete ignorance of the laws of physics. The spectacular but unobtrusive special effects, the breathtaking Mars scenery (in particular in 3D) and Matt Damon‘s excellent portrayal of the main character fortunately make up for that. The latter aspect is very important considering that most of the movie features Mark Watney by himself .
Film adaptions of books often butcher the original. This is fortunately not the case for The Martian. The movie is instead an excellent visualisation of the source material. I greatly enjoyed watching it even though I had very high expectations. But I’m now wondering whether we will get a Director’s cut on Blu-ray which features more of the plot from the second half of the book. That would make an already good movie even better.