#The martian movie ending full#
It's a difficult screenwriting challenge to capture the exhilarating moment of solving a problem without the full explanation of how that solution works. Though they seem to be consistent in both the book and the movie, Watney's thought processes (and NASA's) are explained meticulously in the novel, but they are only hinted at on-screen. Those smart solutions are by necessity less detailed in the movie than in the book.
And it conveys, perhaps better than the book does, a gut feeling of why space travel is worth doing - and that it's filled with smart people improvising doing their best with the situation they're in. It makes it look challenging and dangerous and fallible. Seeing the personalities on screen, explaining a seemingly impossible spaceship maneuver or digging up old technology to try to rig a solution to a communications problem, makes those scenes much more of a treat.īasically, this movie makes space travel look awesome. Although those aspects are included in the book, they don't shine quite as much as Watney's narration. Other elements that benefit from the movie treatment are the machinations, collaboration and debate by people within NASA. Where in the book Watney fills up the audience's view, because readers are only seeing his words, in the movie Watney is almost always shown at his proper scale in comparison to the vast, isolated planet. In the book, Mars reaches out and periodically makes itself known - producing the particular conditions that challenge Watney during his journey - but Mars' constant, giant emptiness fierce weather and looming landscapes are much more present in the visual medium. (Image credit: By Karl Tate, Infographics Artist)īut in the movie, Watney shares the screen with another, inescapable character: the Red Planet itself. Check out our full infographic to see what we think it would take to survive on Mars. In the film "The Martian" (2015), an astronaut played by Matt Damon has to improvise when his crew leaves him behind by accident.