Last night I went over to the Cocteau theater to listen to George R.R. interview Andy Weir, author of THE MARTIAN.  I had read the book several months ago and enjoyed it enormously because I’m a giant space geek.  It’s fun and funny and makes science and scientists cool.  It’s also a very short book so I finished it with in two days.

I then went off with GRRM and others to see the movie.  Which was great fun and inspiring, and apart from making cuts was a very faithful adaptation of the book.  Afterward George and I discussed the cuts.  He, of course, wished they hadn’t been made.  I thought they were perfect.  Basically George wanted more of trials and tribulations that Watney endured on his drive from the Hab and the landing site to the other crater where a return vehicle was waiting.  It consisted of more big storms, and getting tipped into a crater.  But here’s the thing.  We’d already seen one big storm, and by this point in the movie we wanted to see how launching a man into space while under a tarp was going to work out.  It was a pacing issue and the screenwriter and Ridley Scott made the right decision.

As for George’s constant whine about doing “faithful” adaptations.  Sometimes you can.  In this case it’s a short novel with a handful of characters and a very linear story.  It’s the Perils of Pauline done very, very well.  Those are easy stories to adapt — it’s one-damn-thing-after-another.  Other books don’t lend themselves to that.  Books that rely on the beauty of their prose, or vast amounts of internal dialog or have enormously complex plots and a lot of characters are far more challenging to adapt to a visual medium.  Make no mistake books and film are different mediums.  They require different story telling skills.

What I loved about the movie was watching smart people solve problems and humans being supportive of each other, agreeing that lives matter — even the life of one man.  My major quibble was with the portrayal of the head of NASA.  Even in the book I didn’t buy the idea that he would keep the information that Watney was alive from the Ares crew, and when you see Jeff Daniels portraying the bureaucrat on a fifty foot screen he becomes even more of a cliche.

There were two point that I wish had been sold a little better in the film versus the book.  I had a feeling that dimmer members of the audience might be puzzled about how Watney replenished his oxygen.  That was explained very well in the novel, but was a tossed off line in the film.  They spent a lot of time on how to make water — which was good — but the oxygen issue wasn’t as well defined.  The reason I wanted this is after a diet of gibberish from shows like V and movies like Independence where the aliens want our water or our natural resources I wanted people to understand that minerals and water aren’t hard to come by in the greater universe.  I’d really rather have these shows say that the aliens want our women (or our men).  It would actually make more sense.  (Which is not saying much).

The visuals on Mars were fantastic, but I actually enjoyed the scenes back at NASA and JPL even more.  Those scenes reminded me of that great moment in APOLLO 13 where all the techs are gathered and a guy comes in carrying an armful of junk, dumps it on the table, picks up a round tube and a square slot and says — “This has to fit into this.  Go!”

Weir addressed the elephant in the room right up front during is talk.  Yes, there couldn’t be a windstorm that powerful on Mars.  But hey guys, this is fiction and he needed a set up and this was great setup.  Why strain over that gnat when we swallow entire  747’s when we buy into stories with faster then light speed?

Bottom line — I really liked the book and the movie.  So read one and then see the other.