I read the book
first and it was fantastic! The trailers looked good so I went to the theater last weekend with the family hoping it would live up to expectations.
All in all, I can say that they did a good job. The movie was entertaining, didn't drag, the events that they cut out weren't missed all that much (except for his email to Beck, him figuring out the dust storm, and righting the overturned rover. The latter would've taken too long to show, the middle is a personal preference b/c of how he observed that problem and solved it tickled my scientist brain, and the 1st would've set up that relationship at the end better), the change to the end was fine, and I appreciated some of the events being brought to visualization on the screen. I would recommend going to see it on the big screen (I didn't do 3D or anything fancy).
However, I do think they missed a huge opportunity to make this movie great. I was really hoping that they would liberally use voice-over to explain why he was doing what he was doing in the scenes, really get into the "science-ing the shit out of it" portion of the book that made it so damn good. They did not. I think it could've been a whole lot better (and added more humor) if they had done that, as it was, they skimmed over a bunch of the meat of the book.
I also couldn't get past Jeff Daniels as the guy in charge of NASA, and Sean Bean as Mitch Henderson was just meh. Damon was fine, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Vincent Kapoor was good, and Donald Glover as Rich Purnell totally fun. The characters of Mindy Park and Dr. Beck were relegated to almost nothing which kinda sucked. But, I guess you can't keep everything.
"Now, more than ever, the illusions of division threaten our very existence. We all know the truth: more connects us than separates us. But in times of crisis the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers. We must find a way to look after one another as if we were one single tribe.” -King T'Challa, Black Panther
The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it. ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is. ~Winston Churchill
Last edit: 06 Oct 2015 13:36 by ScienceChic. Reason: better grammar
No movie can follow the book exactly. I thought this was a great treatment. BTW the evolution of the book is rather interesting. Write it and they will come.
BlazerBob wrote: No movie can follow the book exactly. I thought this was a great treatment. BTW the evolution of the book is rather interesting. Write it and they will come.
Yes, I agree. How the book got popular is pretty amazing. Didn't he just publish a chapter a week or something on his blog? A pretty cool idea.
BlazerBob wrote: No movie can follow the book exactly. I thought this was a great treatment. BTW the evolution of the book is rather interesting. Write it and they will come.
Yes, I agree. How the book got popular is pretty amazing. Didn't he just publish a chapter a week or something on his blog? A pretty cool idea.
Yes. Not sure if it was weekly but it was periodically. It was free for anyone who followed his blog and he improved subsequent chapters based on reader feed back. It was his readers who asked him to put it on Kindle so they could have easier access and it was Amazon who insisted on charging 99 cents instead of giving it away.
The rest is history. Hollywood and publishers beat a path to his door.
If I can talk the wife out of Hotel Transylvania II 
