They only used the song in the trailer because it (a) has the lyric “There must be some kind of way out of here”, and (b) it’s cool and easy to cut action to. There would’ve never been any intention of using the song in the film itself. This is common with trailers, especially since using Disco in the trailer–no matter how true it might be to a recurring meme in the story–would’ve been a colossal marketing blunder.
I took my kids and everyone liked it a lot. I think I would have liked it more if I hadn’t already read the book but that’s the nature of the beast.
I understand why they put lights inside the helmets to make sure you saw the actor’s faces for the movie, but if you’re going to do that maybe leave out the joke about not being able to see his face.
You’ve lost me on that. 
Well, it’s possible that everyone else *did *have their music on them when they evacuated.
That would make sense - except for the fact that we are shown that they left various computers behind.
Or Lewis and Johanssen’s music was the best of the bunch. Maybe Vogel had nothing but German polka.
In the book, their media was on separate thumb drives, right? Would they have stored music and movies on their work laptops?
That was when the PR people back home wanted him to pose for a picture.
On the music, my thought is that he’s just not the kind of guy who listens to music recreationally. I can relate: I’ll listen if it’s on in the background, and occasionally put something on while I’m doing something else, but it’s not a big thing for me. So he didn’t bring any of his own music with him. Once he was stranded, though, he was going insane from loneliness, and had an overriding need to at least hear human voices, any human voices-- Even if they’re singing “Stayin’ Alive”.
Well, it would have been less jarring if they made a point of that in the movie. Maybe NASA regulations prohibit storage of music on one’s work computer and require seperate storage systems or something. Then, it would make sense.
Though as a distinction, it doesn’t really - if you are on a lengthy space mission, why not have music stored wherever? Less stuff to carry - were are told every ounce is important, why have media on seperate bits of hardware you have to carry, rather than stored in weightless bits in one’s computer you need anyway?
In any event, why the selectivity? Storage is essentially free - why not have basically all available music? Or are they limited to what will fit on a thumb drive from 2015?
Oh, and that review wasn’t XKCD’s first take on The Martian
If I were running a Mars mission, one of the rules would be no mixing of work and play. The work computers would be locked down and have only those bits necessary for the mission. So no media storage on the main systems.
So music and other media would have to come out of the mass allocation for personal effects–maybe only a kilogram or so. Most of the crew probably brought their iPod Femto or whatever, and managed to bring it back during the evac. Lewis’s got left behind and Watney used his mass allocation for something else.
Or the others’ computers might be password-protected. Maybe Lewis was logged in at the time of the evac, so he can still go through her stuff, but the others weren’t. He has more music options; he just can’t access them.
Watch the interview between Weir and Adam Savage if you haven’t already. That’s exactly how Weir describes it–a whole book of the CO2 scrubber scene.
Or his stuff was aboard the lander, as was most others.
I would take Wagner operas, the Brandenburg Concertos, no everything by Bach, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Rafe von Williams. For such a long trip and return, perhaps their music and literature was pooled, in collection aboard the lander or Hermes.
And maybe he did have those works, and they weren’t any good to him, because he needed voices.
He should have given them another shot. Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.
the discussion about the music, or any other recreational material, is interesting, but the beauty of the movie is the pure exposition of Johnson’s statement that ‘nothing concentrates the mind so much as the prospect of being hanged in the morning’.
The movie is also full of ethical choices, about which discussions might grow for many pages…and about merciful impulses that impelled so many people to try so hard to think of ways to rescue the man left behind, and to be so willing to inconvenience themselves, to put themselves in grave danger, to try to save just one life.
But we talk about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Speaking of the ethics: How many other people died of preventable causes while Watney was stranded? And how many of them could have been saved, for the same amount of expense as it took to save that one man? I don’t think I would have wanted the film to dwell on that excessively, but it would have been interesting for at least one of the characters to mention it.
That is an argument for doing away with the space program altogether. :dubious:
Not to mention all advanced surgery.
I am so, so glad they didn’t mention it. Isn’t there room in the world for an uplifting movie about space exploration and man’s spirit to survive without having to digress into a bunch of hand-wringing about how wasteful it all is? Perhaps ‘Apollo 13’ should have had a character pointing out that the accident wouldn’t even have happened if we had just ignored the folly of going to the moon and spent the money on the poor. That would have made the drama so much better.
And why does this binary choice always seem to get applied only to space programs? Would you advocate that a story about building the Metropolitan Museum of Art have a scene where some concerned people talk about how many starving Africans could be saved for the price of one painting?
Perhaps a movie about a great racehorse like ‘Sea Biscuit’ should have had a scene where people talk about horse racing as a sport for the rich, and how unjust it all is that we buy and sell horses for millions of dollars while poor people starve. I’m sure that would have made it much more compelling to the viewer.
Because we should never miss an opportunity to harangue people who don’t spend their every waking moment worrying about the progressive cause-de-jure.