The martian movie vs book
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The popular Indiana Jones movies are a well-known, romantic pastiche of the serials' clichéd plot elements and devices.]Īndy Weir’s self-published novel The Martian became a huge bestseller, and it was a big hit at the box office this weekend. Other popular clichés included the heroine or hero trapped in a burning building, being trampled by horses, knocked unconscious in a car as it goes over a cliff, crashing in an airplane, and watching as the burning fuse of a nearby bundle of dynamite sparked and sputtered its way towards the deadly explosive (at the beginning of the next chapter the endangered character usually simply got up and walked away with only minor scrapes). The popular term cliffhanger was developed as a plot device in film serials (though its origins have been traced by some historians to the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle or the earlier A pair of blue eyes by Thomas Hardy from 1873), and it comes from the many times that the hero or heroine would end up hanging over a cliff, usually as the villain gloated above and waited for them to plummet thousands of feet to their deaths. 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.Many famous clichés of action-adventure movies had their origins in the serials. 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. 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. 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. 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. Rather than be in the moment, we are introduced to each situation and incident in the present tense. 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. 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 sequences on Earth and aboard the Hermes, with Mark’s teammates, are told in third-person past tense. The novel takes an epistolary format during most of the sequences on Mars, with Mark’s attempts documented via log entries. The meat of the story alternates between Mark’s efforts to survive and NASA’s efforts to rescue him. Earth finds out he’s alive owing to comparisons between satellite photos of the Martian expedition site by a NASA technician. 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). Mark is not exactly dead, and thus do we have the setup for The Martian. With no other option, they leave his body behind. During the dust storm, a piece of antenna strikes and impales Mark and his team loses track of him. An unexpectedly severe dust storm causes the expedition to be aborted.
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NASA botanist Mark Watney is part of a six-member expedition to Mars in the unspecified present or near future. There will be spoilers for both book and movie. 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. 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. This will usually happen when the film part of this equation is released. Movie, we look at novels of any genre and compare them to their feature-film adaptation. Movie: The Martian By Ben Gruchow October 27, 2015