A Rushed Disappointment

Rating: 6/10 (5 October 2015)

This is the first time I read the book before watching the movie. Perhaps you've heard the expression, "The book is always better than the movie." This is due to the lack of time a movie has to flesh out details compared to a book. However, it doesn't mean a movie has to be bad. A movie can be altered and still be very good. Gone Girl is an excellent example of this. The Martian does not stray too far from the book, but it does suffer from lack of tension.
If the point of this movie is to show the trials and tribulations of surviving on Mars, why did they gloss over Watney's efforts? One of the best scenes in the book is Watney figuring out how to survive after the airlock to the Hab blows. The first challenge was to deal with his emotions. His first reaction is to give up, sit there, and die. He calms down and starts to figure it out. He first fixes his helmet and suit with resin (by the way, this resin is used to help Watney with many issues but is absent from the movie), figures out how to create smoke to find and fix the airlock leak, and then roll the airlock close to the collapsed HAB by jumping countless times against the wall. He then has a limited amount of time (time he had to calculate with information he knew about the situation and what he knows as an engineer) to run into the HAB and find a new helmet. If his execution faltered in any way, he would have died. Watney working through these issues on screen would have created the tension needed and given weight to his efforts to survive.
What did the movie do for this scene? Watney ducktapes his helmet to cover the holes. That's it. The situation was far more dire and dramatic in the book. The movie decided to take the easy way out, for the sake of time, and trivialized the entire scene. There were more issues in the book, but the few they cherry picked for the movie had the same feel of it being far too easy.
The other issues this movie has is bland characters and gimmicky effects. A bomb made from sugar and liquid oxygen does not make beeping noises in space and you don't need silly ass flashing lights! Why are there crowds of people standing outside watching huge displays of Watney getting rescued? Can't they watch it from their home? Why is accessing the byte code of a jpeg done in two touch screen button presses? That's stupidly convenient. Why does Mitch become a pussy when confronted by Teddy? In the book he's not. Why make that change? Why have any semblance of a romance between Johanssen and Beck when it adds nothing to the story? In the book, Watney confronts Beck about his feelings towards Johanseen. This conveys the idea that these astronauts have a relationship with each other and not just silly banter.
My voice is in the minority if you look at the scores this movie is getting, but this movie does not stand up to serious scrutiny. The movie makers chose easy, feel good exposition and does little to challenge the audience. You got a great cast of famous actors/actresses with an awesome book as the basis for the movie. If you're not very critical of movies, chances are you'll end up liking it. For me, the movie makers were just being lazy. There's a lot of missed opportunity (like the airlock scene) and its sad to see this great story diminished. Do yourself a favor and just read the book.