The Martian is not the best scifi movie I ever saw, but it is reasonably faithful to the book for a change. Only a little tiresome with the manipulated tears. Funny how the tear ducts respond even when the brain is saying oh, come on now.
I rented the flicker via Amazon and watched it on my Kindle Fire tablet for about six bucks. The “Martian,” Matt Damon was exceptionally good. So were the young babes, unknowns to me, at Mission control and on the Hermes spacecraft, which was easily the largest thing Earth ever launched and with Starship Enterprise interiors.
I still think, as I did with the book, that the author was too much of a NASA and government fanboy. Damon being of and being rescued by a private space company would have been much more interesting. There were sequences that demanded some NASA involvement but those could have been finessed.
I did come away with less of a sense of the book’s story of one man’s ingenuity in the face of impossible odds. Damon always seemed to be plugging in available hardware rather than devising unique ways around his problems. More of the focus, certainly more than in the book, was on NASA and its (in this case) babe or black scientists and their ingenuity in working out a rescue. The group, rather than the individual, was a cause for celebration. Typical of a socialist worldview.
The movie, like the book, also annoyed me for its use of CNN as the major television channel that “brings the world together” when Fox has been No. 1 for more than a decade now. But that’s what you would expect from Hollyweird, where conservative commenters like the ones on Fox are verboten. CNN’s liberals obviously preferred. Just like the Hollyweirdos keep making unpopular leftist political message movies, somehow eating their losses.
So how many stars on the Stanleymeter? Four. Do I advise you to rent it? Only if you’ve read the book first, which is much more inspiring if much less tear-jerking.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 