Week 9: The Martian

I’d seen the movie before reading The Martian, and I enjoyed the movie. Perhaps for the first time ever, I actually find myself liking the movie better than the book. Weir wrote The Martian very much like a screenplay, and without the visual elements of the movie tying things together, it felt like a portion of The Martian was missing. I knew intellectually that Watney was on Mars, but I never got very strong descriptions of what he saw, smelt, and felt while he was there. I wanted more introspection from the protagonist. I wanted to feel his pain and his joy. I loved his black humor, but I wanted a full range of emotion, one which really dwelled as much on hope as it did despair. I feel like the movie did a very good job in adding that epilogue which is sorely lacking in the book. Weir’s The Martian cuts off abruptly, satisfying neither its protagonist’s nor its reader’s desire to be at home once again. Where’s our touching reunion with the family? Where’s Watney’s first meeting face-to-face with the NASA people who helped keep him alive? Where is his struggle to associate with people after being isolated for so long, or his indulgence in earthly pleasures that he was cut off from for so long? For a novel which places a return to Earth as the best possible resolution, it feels like I’ve been cheated when it doesn’t ever show that resolution to me. The reason I complain is because I’m pretty happy with large portions of the novel. I’ve always had a fairly scientific mind. I delve deeply into the science portion of the news every week, merely skimming the rest. So I really dig how deeply and unashamedly scientific Weir’s The Martian gets. It’s very cool to be in the shoes of a botanist on the surface of inhospitable Mars. The technology is clearly researched carefully and inserted smartly by Weir. Perhaps an over-devotion to the technical aspects of the novel is why we seem to be so out of touch with Watney’s deeper emotions. The best parts of the novel are when he gets pissed off at NASA and types something crude to be broadcasted to the whole world, so Weir definitely has the potential to write emotionally-charged descriptions. I’m very interested to see what Weir does next about moon colonies, since I think a lot of his growth as a writer will be in portraying the flawed and emotional aspects of his characters. I’d still absolutely recommend The Martian as a book and a movie to people, with the caveat that it really is just a basic space opera. It’s not handled quite as cleverly as Firefly and Serenity, which use a very diverse cast of characters to delve into the ramifications of an uncaring universe, thrown all too quickly into the future while humanity’s development regresses into something very much like the Wild West. Firefly is focused foremost on character, secondly on tone, and thirdly on the technicalities. This order of importance works far more smoothly for most audiences, and it allows me to become more devoted to its characters than I was to Mark Watney, even though I enjoyed both space opera works.