New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

In Book vs. Movie, we look at novels of any genre and compare them to their feature-film adaptation. This will usually happen when the film part of this equation is released. This will not be a review of the merits of either version of the story, but an essay on how each version of the story acquits itself within its medium. After analyzing both versions of the story, we’ll arrive at a verdict between which medium is more successful at telling its story, and whether any disparity between the two can be reconciled in a way that doesn’t impeach the winning version. There will be spoilers for both book and movie.


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.

Continued:       1       2       3       4