What are the odds that the movie adaptation of The Martian will succeed?

Cafe Society
1

The Martian is a novel, independently published by a first time author, about an astronaut stranded on Mars.

I found it be be a fantastically good read. The primary reason is the tone : the sarcastic, humorous tone of the books protagonist is extremely entertaining to read. The second thing is that except for a couple of subtle details, the book is realistic. Space travel, physics, the way equipment works is mostly correct.

Anyways, per the IMDB page, it’s getting a full court press adaptation treatment. Big name actors, a proportional budget, etc. Hollywood knows what a winner looks like, sometimes.

And I’ve been thinking back to times when a book adaptation was done into a movie.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Hunt for Red October. The Harry Potter films. Game of Thrones. Apollo 13. Gone Girl.

And I’ve noticed a clear trend :

  1. If the original book was well written with a coherent, sensible plot
    AND
  2. The movie actually faithfully adapted the book, changing things only by leaving out minor details to fit within 2 hours

The movie is a success. Hollywood consistently seems to believe that audiences are collectively stupid, I think. It seems to believe that they won’t notice glaring plot holes, that they won’t care if the action is unrealistic and CGI and machine guns have limitless ammo, that they won’t care if the same cliches used in 5000 other movies are reused again.

But, when Hollywood actually writes a sensible script, it often succeeds.

Is my assessment true? Out of all the movie-> book adaptations in the last 30 years of film (I’m limiting it to the last 30 years because that’s the era of modern special effects, when you can actually take a book about a fantastical environment and put it on the big screen without it looking stupid), how often are faithful adaptations of decent books a failure?

I can think of a few failures, but in those, the script of the movie had no resemblance whatsoever to the events in the book they were based on. The characters had the same names, but pretty much everything else was different. (such as the Eragon film)

2

I’m 40% through it right now, and it is indeed a page turner. I was, as a person with a zoologist degree, had a bit of my disbelief unsuspended when the author seemed to indicate that he thought that plants only photosynthesize (C02 in, O2 out), when of course they respire like animals too (O2 in, C02 out).

Anyway, for this one I am willing to bet a fair amount of money that any adaptation will introduce aliens. :smack:

I can recall a fair amount of horrid adaptations over the last 15 years or so-the worst was probably the Earthsea one, which was so FUBARed from the source material that the author herself disowned the entire thing.

3

I just finished reading “The Martian” a few weeks ago. Very good book, and should be fairly easy to adapt to the big screen without major changes. My only gripe with the book is that secondary characters were pretty shallow, so I’m interested to see how some of the actors can breath a little more life into them. My vote is that it will be a very successful movie true to the book.

4

Only in darkness. Some plants may not require that period of darkness.

In any case, it is irrelevant to the plot - he’s got a machine that can crack CO2 + energy -> CO + O2. Since he’s got limitless CO2 to work with (the thin atmosphere of Mars, and he’s got compressors) this isn’t a problem.

The 2 significant errors I know about :

  1. The event that gets him stranded at all is not possible because the equations for wind force have the pressure of the gas in them. The atmosphere of mars is too close to vacuum for there to be any significant wind force, no matter how fast the wind is moving.

  2. The heat radiators for the nuclear-electric interplanetary spaceship are described as a “lattice”. I emailed the author about this, and he told me that he was thinking about the “lattice” of radiator fins that modern CPU coolers use. This won’t work in a vacuum - fins facing each other will just radiate heat back and forth to each other and won’t shed net heat. The only viable design for vacuum heat radiators is a big flat plate with lines of sight to the background of space on both sides. Hopefully, the CGI model for the Hermes will look right.

He also had the nuclear reactor inside a compartment in the Hermes. He told me in the email he meant to say that the reactor controls were in a pressurized compartment, since you would never want to put a spacecraft nuclear reactor close to the crew. (for maximizing power:mass ratios, you put the reactor on a lightweight boom away from the crew, and you don’t shield the sides of it that are not facing the crew compartment.)

5

Can’t be any worse than Wilson from Cast Away.

6

Nah, Wilson wasn’t shallow, he just felt flat to me

7

Really? I thought he was pretty well rounded.

8

A potato would be more believable :slight_smile:

9

I thought Wilson bounced off the screen.

10

Seriously? I will take that bet.

11

Don’t do it, Max! It’s a sucker bet!

On Mars, humans are aliens!

12

I won’t take the bet that they add aliens, but I will bet that if they do add them, they’ll leave it purposefully vague as to whether the main character is hallucinating them or that there are actually real aliens.

13

I agree. I’d say there’s 0.5% chance they will add aliens, and 3.5% that they will add a scene where he’s dehydrated or something and thinks maybe he sees aliens, and 80% that if there is such a scene it will end up ambiguously featured in a trailer.

14

If he knows the difference between a chromosome and a base pair, he’s already ahead of the game.

15

It’s a great book, but I think a 90 minute movie won’t do it justice. There’s too much plot to fit into such a small time. A 4-hour miniseries would be better. My prediction is that they will cut out some key scenes for time reasons.

Guessing what they’ll cut and change:

  • using the old probe to get messages in binary. Change that to direct 2-way speech.
  • Cut out a lot of discussion, have them decide on the return to Mars a lot earlier.
  • Cut out the rocket that blows up. Go straight to the second rocket that succeeds.
  • cut out the dust storm that he has to drive around. Or maybe he gets warning over his 2-way radio, rather than works it out himself.
16

Thanks for the news about the film, Habeed.

17

Oh, another change to the book, I predict the character Mitch Henderson will die horribly.

18

Ha ha. I was scratching my head trying to figure out why Henderson would die in the first place. Here is the cast for anyone else missing the joke.
Matt Damon is a little old to portray Watney, but that’s a minor quibble. Solid cast, although they won’t have much to do if it’s true to the book.

19

November 15? Man that’s moving fast.

20

I still don’t get it.