“The movie was better than the book” is not something I say often, but to my surprise that’s how I felt about Weir’s red planet bestseller.
I loved the 2015 film version of The Martian, a sincere love letter to science and human ingenuity and possibly the last truly satisfying movie from director Ridley Scott. Despite my best intentions, it took me about ten years to get around to Weir’s original novel. Everyone I know who read it seemed to love or at least enjoy it, so my expectations were high accordingly. Plus, you’d normally expect a novel to be in many ways a richer experience, with a greater insight into the characters and their psychology, more care given to details and fleshing out the world.
It’s been a while since I last re-watched the movie, but it seems like it stuck pretty close to the book while adapting the story of Mark Watney, a NASA astronaut in the near future who gets stranded on Mars after an accident separates him from his crew. With his ship heading back home and everyone believing Mark to be dead, he is now the sole inhabitant of the hostile, inhospitable planet.
Mark’s only hope is to survive until the next manned mission to Mars, with nothing but limited supplies at his disposal and his own scientific smarts… and some potatoes the crew brought with them all the way from Earth. In between Mark’s journal entries detailing his challenges, successes and near-fatal disasters, the story switches to the NASA team, who figure out pretty quickly that he in fact is still alive, and work around the clock trying to find a way to bring Mark back home.
You couldn’t possibly accuse Weir of skimping on research, or not being committed to realism and technical accuracy. Without a doubt, The Martian is impressive when it comes to science and problem-solving, the issue for me was that the book didn’t offer much more than science and problem-solving. I read and enjoyed countless sci-fi novels with paper-thin characters and average prose that are memorable for their intricate world-building, thought-provoking ideas, flights of imagination, but long descriptions of physical processes and scientific minutiae just don’t compensate for me in the same way.
In retrospect, the book made me appreciate the film’s stellar cast, who breathed personality and charisma into what on paper can barely count as characters. The NASA team are bland ciphers all around, with maybe one or two distinguishing traits assigned to each one. Mark fares much better as the protagonist, but he still never feels like a fully realised human being. Realistically speaking, a person NASA would send to Mars is likely to be steady and resilient, good at compartmentalising and not given to introspection. The one time in the book Mark starts ruminating more than usual, he almost instantly cuts himself off. Still, it feels disappointing to read the book and fail to get more glimpse into the psyche of its hero.
Also, as much as I appreciated Mark’s humour and smart-assery, at times the glib juvenile jokes got too much. The undercutting of seriousness and emotion with quips made me think of some of the worst tendencies of Marvel superhero movies.
I probably would have liked The Martian a lot more if I went into it completely blind, and could enjoy the suspense and plot twists without already knowing everything there is to know about the story. As it is, it left me with a strange and unusual feeling of getting less from a book than I did from a film.
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