Book vs. Movie: The Martian
By Ben Gruchow
October 27, 2015
BoxOfficeProphets.com
The Martian
NASA botanist Mark Watney is part of a six-member expedition to Mars in the unspecified present or near future. An unexpectedly severe dust storm causes the expedition to be aborted. During the dust storm, a piece of antenna strikes and impales Mark and his team loses track of him. With no other option, they leave his body behind. Mark is not exactly dead, and thus do we have the setup for The Martian.
Mark has the expedition’s habitat (addressed in an abbreviated sense here as the Hab) to sustain him with oxygen and water, but not food (the remaining supply will not last him until the soonest possible rescue attempt). Earth finds out he’s alive owing to comparisons between satellite photos of the Martian expedition site by a NASA technician. The meat of the story alternates between Mark’s efforts to survive and NASA’s efforts to rescue him. The novel takes an epistolary format during most of the sequences on Mars, with Mark’s attempts documented via log entries. The sequences on Earth and aboard the Hermes, with Mark’s teammates, are told in third-person past tense.
The Book
One of the most thrilling things about Weir’s The Martian is its format, what the book manages to do in spite of that format, and how that assigns the novel its voice. The nature of Mark Watney’s presence in the narrative - comprised almost entirely of log entries - automatically removes a lot of suspense from an inherently suspenseful scenario. Rather than be in the moment, we are introduced to each situation and incident in the present tense. Since there is nobody besides Watney on Mars at the start of each log entry, it means that no matter how catastrophic the obstacle or conflict, our main character is alive and the story will go on. Weir toys with this technique a couple of times, most memorably in a mid-book incident involving sudden decompression, but by and large it hews to this format for all of the sequences involving Watney directly.
In most of the sequences outside of this, we transition to the crew of the Hermes, or to NASA on Earth, and to omniscient third-person narration. The tension generated here is much more conventional, and just about every transition to this third-person narrative involves a complication or setback in Hermes or NASA’s attempts to rescue Mark. Since we know this before Mark does, the outside sequences achieve the effect of tightening the screws in the Martian portion of the story by virtue of expectation.
This leaves the Martian sequences free to introduce and explore Mark’s predicaments and the solutions he devises to them. The first one (and one of the two really major conflicts) involves sustenance. Given the time it would take for a rescue mission to reach him, he does not have enough food to survive. The solution he comes up with - take advantage of a nearly-unlimited supply of multivitamin supplements, break up the NASA meal rations over an extended period of time to obtain the requisite protein, and farm potatoes for the remaining daily caloric needs - is neatly laid out within the first page of the book’s third chapter (roughly 18 pages into a 370-page book). Therefore, most of the conflict involves implementation and workflow rather than discovery.
To avoid this coming off like the science lecture it otherwise would be, Weir employs the storytelling technique of describing the situation and character detail in the context of ongoing incident. This is a utilitarian approach to world building, but an effective one, and Weir also uses it to introduce us to the narrator’s sense of humor. Being free of the need to create tension from the events themselves, Mark uses the log entries to give us inflection and tone.
There are three instances within the novel where the author steps outside of everyone’s point of view and assumes omniscience. These instances are explicitly there to set up an imminent event, and they create a different and more unpredictable species of tension from the kind we encounter during the NASA and Hermes passages. It’s appropriate, then, that the developments led up to during these parts are the most immediately disruptive to the story.
The first of these is easily the most explosive (no pun intended), involving a lengthy description of the manufacturing process for the Habitat canvas, and a frightening scenario under which a component of that canvas can malfunction undetected over time; the other two scenarios catalog similar sequences of events involving a rocket filled with food and supplies and a long, sloping entryway into a critical basin on the surface of Mars.
The Martian is one of a very short list of fiction novels that create an accessible representation of an event cascade, which is a term generally used in the programming world to represent a series of developments caused by an initially innocuous action (in the programming sense, an example would be a mouse click or keyboard stroke). In very basic terms, an event cascade is described as one action directly causing another, which directly and/or indirectly causes another or more actions. The Martian uses the concept of the event cascade to fill the void where an antagonist’s actions would be in a traditional story. It’s a heady chance to take, because event cascades are only innately exciting or suspenseful if the author is unusually good at setting up conflict and consequentiality in a very short and unfussy way, unless the reader comes to the table with an existing interest in the subject.
The Movie
Ridley Scott’s The Martian gives us an opening hour that is tuned into precisely the same wavelength as the novel, and navigates the necessary liberties taken with skill. For example, Mark’s solitude on Mars begins when a satellite antenna impales him on the way to the MAV launch with his teammates. This is chronicled in Weir’s The Martian by a log entry containing a detailed portrait of what happened and how Mark survived the breach of his suit in the Martian atmosphere. The movie does what it must to provide the visceral impact that Mark’s words give us in the book. The botanist, played by Matt Damon, makes his way back to the Hab with the antenna sealing the hole in the suit, and extracts the antenna fragments in a methodical self-surgery scene that is tense and bloody without being gratuitous or exploitative; think a PG-13 variant of what Noomi Rapace does to herself in Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus.
There is another example, one that marks a point where the film actually improves on the delivery of the source material. After Mark establishes communication with NASA - utilizing the discarded Pathfinder rover and a positioning camera - there is a terse exchange between him and Vincent Kapoor (renamed rather pointlessly from the novel’s Venkat Kapoor, and played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) wherein Mark, told that his crewmates on the Hermes have not yet been debriefed on his survival, lets loose with a string of profanity. In the novel, this is written out as a direct punchline. It succeeds, but it succeeds more because of timing than because of content. In the film, to sidestep any sense of the line reading going south (and to prevent the film from slipping over into the R rating it certainly would have gotten), Mark is seen from outside his vehicle, cursing soundlessly. Kapoor reminds Mark to watch his language, because his words are being broadcast live to the world. In the novel, Mark’s immediate response is very simple: Look! A pair of boobs! -> (.Y.). Funny, yes, but simple.
In the film, though, Mark’s response is never shown or explicitly described. We get as far as Kapoor’s admonishment and then we see Mark’s face as he types. Then we cut to a scene with Kapoor, on the phone with the President, apologizing for the content of the message. Also funny, and since it lets us use our imagination, the content of Mark’s response takes any number of forms.
I mention this exchange in such detail because it’s noteworthy to witness a major studio picture, even one with a relatively modest budget of $108 million, take the route of implication over explication when it comes to such a high concept as “man abandoned on Mars with a ticking clock”. With a scenario like that, you expect risk avoidance from the producer(s). In essence, you expect bells and whistles to be pulled out at every opportunity. To its considerable credit, Scott’s The Martian goes for explication only when it’s the most appropriate way forward for the story.
If anything, Scott pushes his film toward implication a little too much toward the back half. Consider Mark’s voyage from the Habitat (known in both mediums as the Ares III mission site) to the point of rescue, known as the Ares IV mission site. The journey is more or less tossed off in the film. It’s established that Mark needs to arrive at Ares IV in order to be rescued, he leaves Ares III, and he’s at IV shortly. It’s established in both mediums that the distance between the two mission sites is vast - 3,200 kilometers and roughly 40 to 50 days of travel.
This is a development that is covered in some detail and at some length in the novel, and strictly speaking, it’s one of the first logical places you’d go if you were a screenwriter looking to trim a 370-page novel down to a 140-minute film. However, this journey serves a significant purpose in written form. We learn about the circumstances of Mark’s rescue scenario in bits and pieces as the journey goes onward. Each development and complication occurs with the same attention to detail and the same plausibility that we’ve seen elsewhere, but since we’re being told about something out of reach (time- and space-wise), there’s no opportunity to solve the problem.
As a result, complications start to pile on top of each other. By the time we’ve arrived at Ares IV, we’ve been exposed to several exchanges’ worth of dissertation on the hazards Mark is about to face, and this serves to turn a climactic sequence that is technically pretty languorous into something that sneaks up on us with its intensity and magnitude, and hangs onto those things for its duration. This passage of time also serves to conceal the gradual tonal switch between the last Ares III set piece and the final climactic set piece; this tonal switch is quite a bit more obvious in the film, and one senses that it was at least somewhat inevitable. There is, mathematically, only so much buildup and slow ratcheting of tension you can fit into a single feature.
The Verdict
The Martian, in book and movie form, has multiple nominal answers to the question “What’s it about?” It’s “about” a guy who gets left behind on an inhospitable planet and needs to learn how to get from Point A to Point B (in time and geography) in order to live. It’s also “about” the will to survive and the go-to-any-measure-necessary ethic of survival. The sequences on Earth and aboard the Hermes are “about” the tug-of-war between pragmatism and idealism.
It is not just about those, though. We choose the ultimate answer by the factor that influences the story to be as unique as it is: The Martian is about the delight of problem solving. Were this novel limited to being about survival or conflict aversion or event cascades, we would have something that would be no doubt equally comprehensive and equally structured - but these are not newcomers, or strange tablemates, in the world of science fiction or popular fiction.
The Martian is a story wherein each event crests not at an act of disaster or triumph or even resolution, but at the moment of breakthrough in the mind of each character when a seemingly unsolvable equation becomes solvable. It is a story where we get a rush not from the mere existence of a problem and a solution to that problem, but from the narrator’s exaltation at discovering the final variable involved. The narrator’s self-aware and occasionally mordant sense of humor - a sense of humor that occasionally spills over into the supporting characters - helps with this, but it’s not enough to explain the addictive nature of each conflict or event. The material is suspenseful, and emotional, but it is above all in total control of its identity, and keyed-in to the part of problem-solving that makes certain individuals pursue hazardous, life-threatening, but innately necessary and promising goals - and as implied before, it’s unfussy in its approach to both. It eventually becomes something akin to an endless chain reaction. When we find out about a new complication, we don’t necessarily feel tension as much as an urge to race on and find out how the characters involved are going to overcome it, and what they’ll do with the next complication.
The movie adaptation contains a lot of this. It contains less than the source material, and it has the cinematic voice to contend with. This, by default, makes the story more conventional. Ridley Scott’s The Martian gives us an intelligent splicing of science fiction and thriller; it comes up short in comparison to Andy Weir’s The Martian in regard to the vibrant and heady depiction of individuals coming up against extraordinarily difficult circumstances and the glee that comes from finding the right path through them. Neither iteration is in a position to be impeached for the way they go about themselves, but one of the two still contains all of the positive elements of the other while offering more of what makes it stand out.
Book vs. Movie winner: Book.