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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.

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