Wrong approach to the book

Rating: 7/10 (23 September 2015)

I have read (and loved) the book, and I am not distancing myself from that in this review.
There's many ways to adapt material, and in a sense, The Martian is very faithful to the book it is based on. Obviously you can not fit an entire book into a movie, so you would have to skip parts of the plot, etc.. The book the movie is based on is in large parts the astronaut's first hand account of what is going on, the logs he writes. The movies have him making video accounts of the same, so we can hear the character say the lines instead of writing them. All of this makes sense.
What I disagree with, was what the movie decided to put its main focus on. It has picked a couple of moments from the book and spent quite a lot of time on them, and fast forwarded through the rest. This has the effect of making Watney's stay "easier" then it is in the book. To me, the book was at its most interesting when Watney was coming up with great solutions, and explaining how he did so. The movie has some of this, but skips most of explanations, choosing to rather "show than tell" (which you'd think be a good thing).
That said, I thought they picked great actors to play all of the roles, and all in all I appreciate how close to the book the movie was with what it decided to have on screen. I wish the movie all the best, but would really have preferred if it was done differently. I don't know how, but for this movie I would not have minded an almost continuous voice-over. Or at least for the movie to be longer. Or maybe replace most of the parts without Watney in them, having rather the ongoings on earth being related through other means. I don't know what would work the best, but the direction they went for was a big disappointment to me.