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Former NASA Mission Controller James Oberg Lauds 'The Martian'
At IEEE Spectrum, James Oberg gives high praise to the upcoming film The Martian (release date: October 2).
Oberg doesn't have much to say about the acting; he concentrates on the physics and plausibility of the plot and the technology portrayed, which beat those of most Hollywood space epics, and notes in particular "There’s no cheating on even highly-technical spaceflight topics, as shown in the treatment of the so-called “Rich Purnell maneuver,” wherein the Hermes slingshots past Earth back to Mars for a desperate pickup attempt. ... The basic strategy of the Rich Purnell maneuver is not fictional—a crippled Japanese Mars probe named Nozomi actually used a similar Earth-flyby scheme to set up a second chance for its own faltering unmanned Mars mission a dozen years ago."
Oberg's background gives his appraisal some weight -- he's a former NASA mission controller who specialized in orbital rendezvous maneuvers. He has some quibbles, too, with the way mission personnel are depicted, and notes one excursion into "fantasy mode" near the fim's close, but concludes that it's a fair trade for the overwhelming sense of realism.
I'm hoping for just the opposite. I read as much of the book as I could stomach. The plot idea was excellent, but the writing was terrible, like an 15-year-old boy wrote it, and the level of understanding of science about equal to that of your average 15-year-old. Almost every page made me want to hit my head into a wall.
However, I'm hoping that the movie will be better, and there's some signs that maybe it will be. For example, compared to the laughably absurd way in which the potatoes were grown in the book, in the trailer for The Martian one can see a grow tent with light coming in from the skylights. Anyone who knows anything about plants can still see that there's still way too little space and energy input to produce enough to keep a person alive, but at least it's not the 2-3 orders of magnitude off like in the book (among literally dozens of other reasons that plot point alone as presented in the book wouldn't have worked, among dozens of other plot-points that were head-wall-bangingly bad). I'm hopeful that they've gone through and fixed most of the plot holes and bad science, and will be left with an at least somewhat plausible movie based on the (quite good) "castaway on Mars" premise.
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
*double snicker*
For me, the experience of reading it was the scientific equivalent of MST3K - at least one hilariously bad science error per page when stuff is actually happening. Sometimes numerous. Protagonist not noticing that the hydrogen levels are Mickey Mouse-voice high and the oxygen levels unconsciousness-levels low? Check! 2-3 orders of magnitude too little light to grow crops? Check! Not even understanding how photosynthesis works? Check! Fraction-of-a-percent-as-dense-as-Earth atmosphere wreaking havoc in a windstorm? Check! Page after page of the same confusion between moles of a substance and liters of it? Check! Giant rant full of superlatives about how dangerous the radiation of 238-Pu is? Check! And a thousand more checks, just over and over again. If I wrote up a book describing all of the science errors in The Martian, it'd be longer than The Martian.
I guess the book is more enjoyable to people who this stuff doesn't jump out of - to me it was like the author kept interrupting the book to hold up a sign reading "I Got A D Average In My High School Science Classes". Then again, even if the science hadn't been so terrible, the author's writing probably would have ruined it for me anyway. All of the characters have the same "voice", which comes across like that of a teenage boy. In the case of our protagonist, that of a "botanist" who hardly ever uses a single scientific term but is obsessed with his butt. And with all of the scientific equipment given old school pulp sci-fi names like "oxygenator" and such.
"This administration is so incompetent that they cover their tracks with bigger tracks." - Seth Meyers
It's good when the science is accurate, that doesn't happen often enough. I remember watching the Ninja Turtles movie and practically screaming at my wife:
Me: They just got bled almost dry and now they're being given ADRENALINE?! That wouldn't wake them up, it'd put them into cardiac arrest!!!
Her: It's a movie about sewer dwelling mutant turtles, taught by a mutant rat, fighting a ninja war in America, and THAT'S your plot hole?
I hate printers.