I believe it did.
I just came home from watching it and like most people here I enjoyed it immensely. I haven’t read he book yet and I see several people have brought up how much of the book’s humor is missing. I read something early this year by a writer (can’t recall who) that stated that it would be tricky writing a script because using all the humor from the book would serve to degrade the tension. Since the movie managed to be a well balanced mix of drama and laughter I guess they got it right.
And can anyone confirm my impression that, bar the ubiquitous use of go-pros there was virtually no product placement. The grape juice was grape juice, the sugar was sugar, the laptops had labels and tape all over them. Even at the end Watney’s coffee cup didn’t have a name on it. My imagination?
What an odd rant. The part I could read and you quotes. Mosr of it was behind a paywall and I wasn’t going to subscribe for that.
But… ‘Teddy?’ What, insufficient gravitas for NASA? She would have hated the 26th US president.
I remember Cisco being on-screen for the teleconferences.
Anyway, my two cents:
The best thing you can say about an adaptation is this: If the movie were the book, it wouldn’t be as good a book. And if the book were the movie, it wouldn’t be as good a movie. I can say that about The Martian.
Saw and enjoyed it - but one nit: was the “I have only disco music left” gag ever explained? Surely they would have taken all possible music and TV shows etc. with them on a mission of that duration? It isn’t like it weighs anything.
Another nit: I never really got the sense that the guy was really fussed or scared much about being left alone on Mars.
It was never really explained in the book either. It just said that Lewis had brought disco and 70s TV, and someone else had brought a bunch of Agatha Christie novels, and that was it. That was all the entertainment he had. In the movie, he did mention Lewis’s music collection as the source of the disco.
I figured that while they all had plenty of entertainment on the ship they were on for 15 months, no one bothered to bring much to the surface, since they expected to be just working and sleeping the whole time.
I thought the movie did a better job of showing his mental state degrading than the book did. Being thin and bruised and unshaven and digressing about space piracy to anyone who will listen.
All he has on Mars was his commander’s personal entertainment files, which were all disco. Other ones probably… I dunno were taken or destroyed.
[QUOTE=Malthus]
Another nit: I never really got the sense that the guy was really fussed or scared much about being left alone on Mars.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah, but OMG I am gonna die, every 3 minutes would get boring. 
I feel sorry for Japan, they don’t get to see it until
I just finished reading the book. I agree that the movie did an excellent job of translating the story, and I enjoyed both formats.
The one thing that I liked better about the book was the final rescue. I thought the movie went a little bit over the top with the Commander going out to rescue Watney and the use of the thrust from the suit. I was pleased to see that those things didn’t happen in the book, and that the original plan with Beck in the airlock worked as planned.
I did like the epilogue that the movie added showing everyone back on earth. Toward the end of the movie I was really hoping we would see a little of that, although I think the book worked fine without it.
Now I’m sad that I’ve finished both the movie and the book. It’s definitely a movie that I will watch again whenever it shows up on my T.V.
I dunno, in a world where my kid has hundreds if not thousands of hours of music on his phone, it just seems odd that spacemen on a years-long mission won’t take their own music. 
Unless there is some sort of explaination I didn’t catch.
Heh true.
It’s just a matter of tone - I know a trained professional must keep his or her cool, but in a movie, its hard to get anxious about someone’s fate if they aren’t at least hinted at being anxious, at having an inner life - they did in Gravity, the movie that this is most similar to.
He kept himself busy trying to stay alive, and didn’t have much time to ponder Great Thoughts. His sardonicism helped keep him from facing the probability of dying, too.
That said, there was a scene, right after the hab explosion, where he was sitting on a ledge composing his farewell message to his parents. He knew it all along, he just realized it wouldn’t help to dwell on it.
ETA: I don’t remember a character named Ryoko or one that looks like Naomi Scott. Maybe she got edited out?
Why, after the airlock breach, could he not have restarted his crops with some of the big potatoes he had in the kitchen? He could’ve cut those into many more seed potatoes than just halving them, which is what they showed initially. And if he’d done them in bags, he could’ve left the bag intact while rooting for potatoes in the soil. It’s more efficient.
StG
They all froze almost immediately, when exposed to Martian surface temperatures.
I think it was explained in the book as his concern that the microbes in the soil that aid in plant growth would have been killed by exposure to the extreme cold of the Martian atmosphere. Though, later, they seemed to have lived somehow.
The potatoes and soil microbes were all dead from the breach. The potatoes could be eaten, but wouldn’t sprout.
In the book, Watney had enough stored up for the trek to the Ares 4 site, but barely, and they had been sterilized by flash-freezing.
Neither the book nor the film mentioned the bacteria he might have, er, had stored intestinally, and could perhaps try to restore his crop from using whatever potato eyes looked least dead. But he had to get moving by then anyway.
In the book, he finds her personal travel kit in the rover containing her disco collection. Driving music, he guesses. She had been the last to use the rover and was scheduled to use it again. When they aborted to the MAV she didn’t have time to retrieve it from the rover. Everyone else probably grabbed their kits from the Hab.
The movie gives the commander a definitive hero moment making up for her “abandoning” Watney on Mars in the first place. And it gives Watney more to do instead of sitting in the MAV like a sack of, well, potatoes until Beck rescues him. The book ending is more “realistic” but I think the Hollywood ending works too.
I thought it was remarkable that they mentioned after the fact that the microbes necessary for the potato plants had been killed by the frost, but that there had been no mention of them before that (at least, as I recall). A lot of the science was glossed over, and left as an exercise for the viewer. I approve.
As standing wave noted, it probably was what got left behind. IIRC, the mission was scheduled for 60 days and probalby nearly every hour had been programmed and planned to get the maximum benefit from the crew members…so very little time for R&R. As one other poster said, there were probably large amounts of media on-board the mothership, where they would be spending 600+ days in transit.
Plus NASA can be a bear when it comes to weight, and even a few pounds of personal audio-video equipment would have to be taken into account for MAV liftoff.
I stongly concur. The beauty of the film is that they kept it ‘realistic’ while never losing the tension and drama of the situation. Like Apollo 13, you knew (at least anyone who read the book before) that they all made it; but you were still involved in the film right up to the end.
Oh, and that mentions another thing; Hollywood managed to restrain itself and not kill off any other character during the rescue attempt, which can be a staple in a lot of movies. I was worried near the end (the EVA) that they were going to do that, but they avoided it–instead showing what a combination of science, training, preparation, and courage can really accomplish.
I can’t agree that this makes sense. We know they had laptops and we know they had earphones - they use them in the work. Music these days takes up exactly zero measurable “weight” - right now, I’m carrying around literally hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of music on my iPhone in my pocket. I assume computers in the future won’t grow less capable of storage.