Well, this afternoon I saw "The Martian". It was the 3D version and it was a pretty good movie. They didn't mangle it too much while converting from a book to a movie. The 3D effects were pretty good. They mostly weren't overdone, not much stuff thrown in the viewers face. The worst part of that was when there was stuff flying around during the storm. That didn't look very realistic.
Other than that they did a pretty good job of converting the book into a movie. They of course had to leave a lot of stuff out, since there just isn't as much room in a 241 minute movie to put it in as there is in the book. But they did hit most of the high spots.
I didn't much care for the rover they had. It didn't look too much like the one described in the book. And when he made his long trek it didn't look as Beverly Hillbillyish as was described in the book. It definitely didn't look as cludged together.
I also didn't care much for the end, when the other astronauts snatched him out of the ascent module. They threw away a huge lot of safety stuff that the commander required in the book when they did it. Commander Lewis was too good a commander to throw out the book the way she did. I reckon they just couldn't stand not throwing a lot of extra dramatic effort into it.
But as I said, overall it was a good show.
Bill Gill
