Hacker Cinema
The Martian
2015 · Film · 141 min
Directed by Ridley Scott
During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.
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244 comments on Hacker News
I guess it's a sign of getting old when I see the world classic and expect Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, but instead the list has Arrival, The Martian, and the Bourne Identity. The Sixth Sense is on the list for the US and it's a movie I coincidentally rewatched last night, again finding it to be a masterpiece.
In any case, very different list in Canada: Rocketman, Ford v Ferrari, Little Miss Sunshine, Catch Me If You Can, Jurassic Park, and the Proposal.
The only movie I've ever enjoyed after reading the book was Jurassic Park. I've never seen the Dune movies or most other book-based movies, but honestly The Martian and Project Hail Mary were tempting. I'll probably surrender to one of those two someday.
I do definitely watch TV and movies from time to time. Really my beef is with social media. TV and movies as media, that's a wagon I just largely fell off of at some point.
I'll still watch a good movie, for sure. Interstellar, Primer, Coherence, Run Lola Run, The Big Short, Contact, Excalibur... But The Expanse, Project Hail Mary, The Martian... I enjoyed the books more than than the movies, and the movies were good. Still haven't read Contact, shamefully.
Wuthering Heights was a remake, and Hail Mary was also a safeish bet since it's a novel by the same guy as The Martian.
Not to say that it isn't an improvement, but we're still pretty far from seeing American cinema catching up to the world stage in originality, let alone to the golden Hollywood era.
It’s a movie, not a book. The audio book is 16 hours runtime. The movie is 2 hours. Some things were always going to be left out. The details of the science stuff was one of them. It works better in a book narrative where the process is told than a movie where it’s visual and you have to show.
The Martian book has more of the science process than PHM book does to begin with.
The movie hit all of the primary points but never got into the details. If you read the book you can fill in the details. I imagine that a lot of people watching the movie didn’t know why some things were happening. Maybe some will be interested enough to read the book or the audiobook. If not, they had a good experience in the movie anyway.
It’s still a really good movie.
I read the book and really enjoyed it, but I heard the movie isn't really like the book, especially not enough of the science stuff unlike the Martian movie which does indeed have more of the science stuff. Those of you who read the book, what do you think of the movie?
I like the underlying theme of both Project Hail Mary and The Martian: No great evil just be human and solve problems with a little humor. We need more of that and less might makes right superhero movies.
The Starship is also built to house astronauts for longish trips. It’s not a stretch to think of it as a larger Skylab station. If the can figure out how to attach six or eight of them in a ring with bridges and spin, they could have the artificial gravity station that’s been the stuff of science fiction (and the movie The Martian)
"a fall of moondust" would translate extremely well to screen, and "the martian" has shown that it's the kind of movie that would do well enough in terms of reception.
I loathe movie adaptations and never watch them, but the source material The Martian was a very good read in my 12th grade.
I like hard SciFi with no aliens and plausible rules.
It was nice seeing my 2025 reading list represented.
I started the year reading the first five books of the Foundation Series (book #1 on the list). A must read for anyone who hasn’t read it. I couldn’t believe how well it held up 70+ years later(!!)
I just finished the 3 Body Problem trilogy, and think it’s appropriate book #2 (The Dark Forest) is on the list as it’s probably the best — but all three are great.
I’m now ready Project Hail Mary. It’s been a long time since I read the Martian,but Andy Weir’s writing style is fast paced and practically a screenplay already. It’s obvious from the first chapter why it was picked up for a movie.
I think the Martian was adapted well from book to movie, so I have hope for this one. That said, compressing the entire story into a theatre runtime is tricky: I think it would be a win if only half of the character and relationship growth of the two ship bound protagonists comes through in the adaptation (because it was sooo good in the book!)
I know this sentiment but for me it does not apply to Scott. He made some great movies later in his career; Black Hawk Down, Hannibal, Prometheus and The Martian are all masterpieces imo. The Last Duel was also pretty good
> you'll make it back
The Martian was just a movie
>I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian
Within the time and marketing constraints of a Hollywood film, I thought they did a good job on 'The Martian'. Let's hope Hollywood doesn't ruin 'Hail Mary'.
I really need to re-read Project Hail Mary, especially with the film in development. I really hope the film lives up to the book. I think they did a reasonably good job with The Martian, even though they cut out the entire dust storm section (and my favourite joke in the book!)
Hard sci-fi can definitely be popular, The Martian and The Three-Body Problem are two examples I can immediately think of. I think the Arrival and Contact movies would also count (not sure if the books were considered popular before their film adaptations came out). There is usually a way to avoid most of the "opaque wall of gibberish" so that there is just enough for a technical-minded reader to tell that the author has put some thought into it and the science makes sense, but still little enough that a non-technical reader can enjoy the story without having to care about the scientific worldbuilding.
I think Lord of the Rings might be a good analogy. LotR is sort of "hard fantasy" in that Tolkien put a ludicrous amount of work into building an internally consistent world, as you can tell by The Silmarillion, but that book is not enjoyable to read (in my opinion). Part of the reason LotR is good is that he took out enough of the walls of text to make it fun to read. A good hard sci-fi author might have a Silmarillion-level of knowledge about their own book's setting, but be able to leave almost all of that out of the final product.
That is a good explanation. I loved Hail Mary, but it's cheeseburger sci-fi. A lot of fun, an easy read, very enjoyable. It's not Michelin Star material, but even Gordon Ramsey eats at Burger King sometimes.
If you enjoyed The Martian (book or film), then this is just more of the same.
In my opinion, The Martian had better writing. You could tell Weir was having a blast writing it, and his enthusiasm translated directly to the main character's love of science and enduring sense of humor in the face of almost constantly dying.
Hail Mary felt like it was trying to capture the same magic but missed the mark. The plot felt constructed rather than spontaneous and I couldn't relate much to the main character at all. I agree about the Hollywood motive. I'll probably watch the movie.
It’s not really good. It feels like the author was just trying to recreate the Martian and it was only written to be turned into a movie. It’s a book for people who don’t usually read. Everyone just talks about the audio book
> Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
That's the very feeling I had when I read 'The Martian'. While I was reading it I actually thought something to the tune (It's been years now) "This reads like a movie".
Guess that explains why the movie is so faithful to the book.
It's funny, I would not put this or the Martian into made-to-be-movie category, mainly featuring a single protagonist alone with his thoughts of how best to effect survival. I haven't (and probably won't) see the movies. I preferred the Martian very much compared to PHM, but I did enjoy it. Just had a problem with suspension of disbelief to do trivialization of language learning and communication (especially alien).
Obviously subjective, but I had seen The Martian before I read the book (many years after seeing the movie), and liked the book way better than the movie. Read Project Hail Mary right after finishing The Martian, and enjoyed that one even more. I guess the writing is a bit dry, but it kind of makes sense and I quite like it. I'm cautiously optimistic about the new movie.
The hype, absolutely not. I found the writing to be very poor. However I enjoyed it. The story is refreshing and straightforward.
To be fair, I read it months before the movie announcement and it really felt like reading a movie plot. If you prefer, I thought that the author had a great story idea but cared very little about writing a book, like he already knew this was for Hollywood.
I think with good production it’s going to be a better movie than the book.
Never read the Martian but I was told it was the same thing.
off topic, but I recently read Alfred Lansing's "Endurance" and felt that was in spirit like "The Martian" although I remember the latter more from the film than the book.
I think this also derives naturally from another really interesting observation. The surface of Mars, that apparent desert, is 2%+ water by weight. [1] I say "+" because later studies have shown it to be even moister. So this is really interesting in the context of the movie/book "The Martian" because this surprise came out after the book was released.
A huge part of the plot is about him getting water which he ultimately does by extracting it from fuel, but it'd have been trivial to get it from the soil itself. If you can excuse the butchery of measurements, even just the 2% level is moist enough to extract a liter of water per cubic foot of soil! For more consistent measurements, that's 35 liters of water per cubic meter of soil!
I suspect when we finally get boots on the ground and can start doing real research and exploration, we're going to find more surprises than we could ever imagine.
[1] - https://www.space.com/22949-mars-water-discovery-curiosity-rover.html
I enjoyed The Martian (novel and movie) but I didn't care for Artemis or Project Hail Mary. I thought the characters and dialogue were fairly weak, even though the underlying ideas were clever. Also I thought that "main character amnesia" was a frustrating plot device (in PHM).
Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.
There is this one movie but it's set on Mars instead (The Martian). And I think the series For all Mankind also had an episode with this kind of plot.
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing.
This is made even true on the Moon because its low gravity means that even a hair of velocity is going to make you 'bounce' after landing. This is why things like probes and rovers landing (or at least ending up) on their side or even upside down on the Moon is a fairly frequent affair. On Mars (and other places with an atmosphere) you can use atmospheric braking which is essentially just slowing down by bumping into the atmosphere in a controlled fashion. You can even get things like parachutes involved in the process.
The dust storms in Mars are also 'fake' at least as presented in movies/books like "The Martian." Mars has an extremely low atmospheric pressure (relative to Earth) so fiercest dust storm imaginable would feel like nothing more than a slight breeze. The only issue they pose is visibility, and dust accumulating on solar panels. Andy Weir, by the way, was well aware of this when writing "The Martian" which is otherwise a phenomenally well researched hard sci-fi book. I think it's highly telling that he had to intentionally fudge reality to create a crisis on Mars!
I assume you're basically trolling here, but as I mentioned, obviously the radioisotopes would be for emergency power generation - life support in the highly improbable case of all other power sources simultaneously failing, not as a driver for industrial level manufacturing. You're also far off on solar estimates, probably in part because that Wiki page hasn't been updated in well over a decade and solar tech has rather change in the interim. You're looking at ~590W/m2 solar irradiance at Mars' equator, so production of something like ~100W/m^2 with typical consumer panels and perhaps 150W/m^2 with high end panels. So that's in the ballpark of ~0.1 acres for a MWh of production.
Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published.
I'm not sure that comparison is as obvious as it might seem. Because while the air is unbreathable on Mars, the most violent weather would be pretty much harmless. A roaring blizzard in Antarctica could actually directly damage facilities with force. This was one of the very few things that was intentionally faked in "The Martian." The whole 'violent dust storm' that sets off the crisis of the movie doesn't exist. Low atmospheric pressure means that dust storm would have felt like a slight breeze, at most. I think it's quite noteworthy that a hard sci-fi book ended up having to turn to fiction to create a crisis on Mars!
Missions to Mars are mostly planned with in-orbit refueling, so launching from the Moon would not be easier. The Moon in general is also a rather harsh mistress. You have 2 week long nights with absolutely brutal extremes of heat and cold ranging from -133C at night to 121C during the day, no atmosphere whatsoever, a fraction of the gravity of Mars, regular bombardment with meteorites and so on.
A Moon base will be a far harsher place than a Mars base. Mars is bizarrely similar to Earth - nearly the same length of day/night, similar axial tilt so similar seasonal patterns, nearly the exact same land area, and even calm weather. Notably the 'raging dust storm' in "The Martian" that was used to set up the crisis for the movie was one of the few things that was intentionally faked. The low atmospheric pressure on Mars means even the most brutal dust storm would feel like a slight breeze at most. It's also telling when you need to fake something to create a crisis, in an otherwise very hard sci-fi book!
What is this supposed to prove? The question isn’t particular novel. There are decades of speculative terraforming discussions on the internet that you can search via Google, especially after the Martian book and movie.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
I don't mean in broad genres, but more in terms of the range of emotions and thoughts that the top movies of the year evoke. The Martian is great movie, and does thankfully hit a different spot than the generic dystopian Sci-Fi, but there still seems to be a compression of that range, one which unfortunately nobody can quantify so that's why it's mostly opinion here.
> The fact that nobody would make a Doctor Zhivago or even a Back to the Future today is not something I can fix with all my searching.
What do you mean by that?
I'm not familiar with Doctor Zhivago so I had to look it up, the 1965 film is based on a 1957 novel, which seems to match just fine with the pattern of The Martian, The Three Body Problem, Game of Thrones, Fifty Shades of Grey, etc.
Back to the Future is a fun trilogy, but the first film was mostly set in 1955 (so if it had been done today the past would have been 1994, compare to Captain Marvel being mostly set in 1995), the second film was 1985's idea of 2015 (and we still get plenty of what-if fiction in the near-ish future, e.g. Blade Runner 2049, Cyberpunk 2077), the third was yet another wild-west Cowboys-and-Indians gunslinger (1885) — but if you mean to focus on the more playful and fun aspects of how it was put together, or the positive vibes of good people working to solve problems and where it's clear who the goodies and baddies are, BttF reminds me more of The Orville or Lower Decks. (And The Martian if you want to consider the environment/time travel itself, rather than Biff, to be the problem).
If audiobooks count, so far enjoying the hell out of Project Hail Mary, I possibly got turned on to it by a mention on HN (I like The Martian movie, so I gave it a shot, and maybe decide to get that on audiobook too, now)
I also found the film of The Martian way better than the book. I got so sick of reading about concentrations of gases and stuff in painful detail. So yeah, good story, but not so good writing. If Project Hail Mary is anything like that then I'll give it a miss.
BizarroLand wins the award for getting the joke (reference to the movie "The Martian"). Please forgive my taste for very nuanced humor. :-)
In the movie "The Martian" Matt Damon grew potatoes on Mars. Lived off of them and ketchup for a long time, and the ketchup ran out.
After numerous attempts at growing an audience, I decided to focus on the creative side of content marketing and stop worrying about audience building altogether. It felt like trying to grow potatoes on Mars like Matt Damon in the movie The Martian.
Context suggests film...
"Jurassic Park inspired more people to go into biotech than any academic paper. The Matrix inspired more people to go into computer science than any GitHub repo. The Martian inspired more people to go into aerospace engineering than any industry trend report.
Science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it does something much more interesting: tell stories about technology so compelling that people dedicate their lives to advancing the frontier"
Here's what I term my "flypaper" movies. If I happen to glance at the satellite TV guide and notice one of these coming up, there's a good change I'll be watching it.
Lawrence of Arabia The Maltese Falcon Most Hitchcock films Blade Runner The Man From Snowy River The Martian Monty Python & the Holy Grail The Princess Bride Serenity The Thin Man series The Thing Tombstone Young Frankenstein Monty Python and the Holy Grail Clerks and most Kevin Smith movies Baby Drive and most Edgar Wright movies Fanboys Spinal Tap Kung Fu Hustle Apollo 13
I rewatch many movies quite often. But the ones that really stand out, in no particular order...
Wargames Jurassic Park Evolution Unstoppable Lord of the Rings Die Hard 1, 2 and 3 Alien 1, 2 and 3 Back to the Future Ghost in the Shell (basically all of it, mostly seasons 1 and 2) The Martian Tron 1 and 2 Anything by Miyazaki, but Howl's Moving Castle even more so
Hunt for Red October
The Outpost
Master and Commander
The Martian
All four Matrix movies
The Godfather Trilogy, best in a single sitting (Connie’s arc is awesome, the cinematography of the third epic; the only problem is how much more of the outside world each of the sequels needs).
Greyhound
A Bridge Too Far (which has changed dramatically as I have learned over the last almost fifty years; I now see it as so subtlety tongue in cheek and cynical).
Draft Day. Possibly the best constructed movie.
There's basically little to no truly hard sci fi under that definition. Even the Martian fudges things to make the storm happen as the plot needs it to. I can't think of any other recent movies or books that fit your criteria, though I'm sure there are some books at least.
It's so strange because my experience is the opposite. I see a lot of content about reading and books (how there are no great books anymore, what was the best book, etc), fun facts and other trivia about authors, a few books getting made into movies (hello Dune, but I was thinking of the Martian and Ready Player One) ...
but I don't see any of this cultural expectation, this peer pressure. (One of my friends keep recommending me books and movies, but that's an exception. Okay, I saw Pikkety's Capital on a different friend's bookshelf. And that's it.)
...
and it's also interesting because I remember when half of the world was waiting for GRRM to stop trampolining!
I purposefully put down the last book somewhere around halfway because I thought the next one will be upon us soon, so it'll be great to pick it up and read the remaining story in one go. Hah.
And somehow after Banks died I stopped reading books. (Sure, no connection, but well, it would have been nice to get more of his funky space stories!)
I felt the same way. The realistic complexity of the show feels dumbed down and is an immediate turn off and even cheap. Let’s say compared to the movie The Martian, the way they show and not tell is a great example for keeping realism engaged.
Mars atmosphere can barely be called that. It's less than one percent of earth's pressure. People just have a wrong perception of it because of wildly inaccurate depictions in movies like The Martian. And even if you want to transmit using radio between the surface and low orbit, it's far less of a bandwidth issue than transmitting over millions of kilometers. Deep space transmissions of the future will use optical wavelengths instead of radio, there's no question about it.
Plenty of good sci-fi, but mostly on TV.
Still, you're also probably overlooking how common sci-fi films are. Like say, Ad Astra with Brad Pitt (2019). The Martian in 2015. Blade Runner 2049. And so on.
I've still got a 2013 plasma with 3d and while you lose half of the horizontal resolution (the image is stored twice side by side) it isn't really noticeable in most 3d blu ray movies. Streaming services lose a lot more sharpness by compressing the heck out of their movies.
Most blu ray players (even the 4k ones) still support 3d since the only thing needed is to pass the image with a '3d' flag set. The rest is up to the display.
Personally I'd like to add the movies "Hugo" and "The Martian" ;)
As a fun anecdote this is one of the very few things that was completely faked in "The Martian" - book and movie alike, which is otherwise a hard sci-fi book. I think it's quite telling when your instigator for a disaster scenario on Mars has to be faked!
Well at least intentionally faked. It turns out Martian regolith/soil is also much more moist than expected so getting water will be relatively easy, but at the time of the book this wasn't known!
Meant to say The Martian - Solid new hard sci-fi, very different from the movie.
Marrow - A group of people find a Jupiter sized ship of unknown origin and start a galactic cruise with many different species in the far high tech future.
The Stars My Destination
Starship Troopers - very different from the movie, sci-fi classic. Even on the Marines reading list.
Forever War - partially on Earth most in far flung space battles.
The Martian - solid Jew hard sci-fi again very different from the movie
Plenty more but, sadly sci-fi falls under Sturgeon's law.
I am not a fan of the essay nor of its style, but I credit the author with good topic selection and nice details.
I like Ridley Scott movies. I think of Scott like Dickens. A straight-ahead, topical but not actually edgy (in subject) cinematic allegorist, and a great master of the business of telling stories.
As a moviegoer, I am entertained by his movies, in the moment. As a filmmaker, he is sufficiently deep in his treatments to give me something to return to from time to time to consider and relate to real experience.
I still make every niece, and nephew watch The Martian when they are in middle-school and Bladerunner in high school. Some of Scott's work is, in a manner, canonical.
Scott has made some bad films, and he abuses some stories in service to the business of movies. Let's see Napoleon and talk again.
Maybe some fiction with facts? You might like "Andy Weir" (sci-fi)
- Project Hail Mary
- Artemis
- The Martian
Maybe watch the movie "The Martian" first if you don't want to commit. As always, the books are better.
Also "I Robot" by Asimov is short stories. (Not like the movie)
There have been movies shot on GoPro (notably scenes from The Martian), so I cease to see the novelty of "shot on iPhone".
https://goproessentials.com/3-films-utilized-gopros-filming/
It's indeed a ridiculous premise, but no less ridiculous than the more-recent book and movie "The Martian", where a wind storm on Mars is the initial event that triggers all the following drama.
I wouldn't even worry about how useful the rating systems are, I'd worry about how arbitrary they are even if you accept their standards. E.g. the "one fuck" rule for PG-13 films, except a film like The Martian can say it twice without being rated R because the raters vote on what they think American parents would think about the film in that case.
I don't want to spoil anything but intelligent life that evolves under high pressure depth is explored in Project Hail Mary by Any Weir (author of recent popular culture book then movie The Martian).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary
https://www.amazon.com/Project-Hail-Mary-Andy-Weir/dp/0593135202
I think my moment was the realisation that we're one, maybe two years away from building a real-life C3PO - like, not a movie lookalike or marchandize, but a working Protocol Druid.
Or more generally that Star Wars of all things now looks like a more accurate predictor of our tech development than The Martian - the franchise that is so far on the "soft" side of the "hard/soft SciFi" spectrum that it's commonly not seen as "Science Fiction" at all but mostly as Fantasy with space ships. And yet here we are:
- For Protocol Druids, there are still some building blocks missing, mostly persistent memory and the ability to understand real-life events and interact with the real world. However, those are now mostly technical problems which are already being tackled, as opposed to the obvious Fantasy tropes they were until a few years ago. Even the way that current LLMs often sound more confident and knowledgeable than they really are would match the impression of protocol druids we get from the movies pretty well.
- Star Wars has lots of machines which seem to have some degree of sentience even though it makes little practical sense - battle droids, space ships, etc - and it used to be just an obvious application of the rule of cool/rule of funny. Yet suddenly you could imagine pretty well that manufactures will be tempted by hype to stuff an LLM into all kinds of devices, so we indeed might be surrounded by seemingly "sentient" machines in a few years.
- Machines communicating with each other using human language (or a bitstream that has a 1-1 mapping to human language) likewise used to be a cute space opera idea. Suddenly it became a feasible (if inefficient and insecure) way to design an API. People are already writing OpenAPI documentations whete the intended audience are not human developers but ChatGPT.
He didn't die in the _The Martian_ or _Ronin_, but he was fired from his job in both movies.
Yah I read The Martian before seeing the movie and found the movie left so much out! Makes sense as the audiobook is 10 hours and the movie is 2.
There's no hard boundary between the two categories, since nearly every sci-fi is going to have fantastical elements to them. For example The Expanse authors have paid careful attention to the physics of space-flight, which they then use create their vision of "realistic" space battles. But they also have interdimensional stargates that instantly transport you across the universe. So hard sci-fi or fantasy? People can argue endlessly about which category a book belongs in.
Personally I think the most useful metric is "would my non-science geek fans like this?". Or to put it another way, is one of the primary appeals of this novel the extrapolation of realistic science. An appreciation that may be lost on someone who isn't as interested in that subject. My fantasy loving friend has been an interesting barometer in this way.
Didn't like The Martian therefore, it's Hard SciFi.
Dune: sci-fantasy
Star Wars Sci-fantasy
Three Body Problem: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Book 1: Hard sci-fi
The Expanse Season 1: Sci Fantasy
To my understanding the Martian was originally written as web serial, right?
I haven’t seen the movie. Not personally my type of film although I’ve heard good things.
The Martian is an excellent movie based on one of the best scifi books. Gives me a lot of hope for the Project Hail Mary movie.
I finished The Martian and then immediately discovered there was a movie coming out in two weeks. That was pretty cool.
Arrival, The Martian, Moneyball, The Big Short, there's something magical about these movies that no matter how many times they are on TV I will just sit and watch them again. I don't know what it is about the stories but it probably has has something to do with that XKCD comic about the scene in apollo 13.
Thought there was research that they'd have to have some kind of artificial gravity as in the 2001 family of movies? If not brain fluids than bone mass.
Also, what's the weight in food that's required to keep somebody alive for 4 years? Will water be more of a problem than food? As per the Martian, they can pre-position food and supplies for the stay and the return, but it seems energy-expensive to chase down a capsule on the voyage to Mars to drop off supplies. Hell of a DoorDash, eh?
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
Search located Pathfinder without problems[0]. But not the Ares III landing site[1]...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Pathfinder [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
Thanks a lot for linking Polygonjs here! I assume it might be a follow up to my tweet yesterday announcing new CAD modelling nodes [0].
For context, Polygonjs is a design & animation tool for WebGL. It is based on the popular threejs library, and allows artists and designers to create interactive experiences without any coding. It's is also procedural and node-based, which means everything is created by linking nodes together. Your scenes are then fully procedural, you can always go back at any node and tweak things and see your changes propagate. It's great to experiment.
There are several examples scenes you can start from [1]. Those shows how to setup basic or custom material, procedural geometry, particles, raymarching, states & events, computer vision. There are examples for every taste, and more to come.
Even though the visual editor is not open source, the core library is [2]. So if you are a coder and would like to add nodes to your projects, you can perfectly do so, via the plugin system [3]
It is inspired by visual effects tools like Houdini and Nuke, which I've used for years when working in films like Gravity, Avatar and The Martian. One of my goals is to bring the power of those tools to the web.
Finally, this is all from bootstrapped effort, I'm not a funded company, so I'll take all the support and love you're happy to send my way! While the app is free to use for unlimited time, I encourage you to purchase a license, it's a lifetime one with 12 months upgrade (similar to jetbrains IDE) and you'll always own your files. There's no tracking (except for one license check when the app starts), no lock-in. And it's currently at a reduced price.
[0] https://twitter.com/fradingue/status/1634604273433563137
[1] https://polygonjs.com/docs/examples
[2] https://github.com/polygonjs/polygonjs
[3] https://polygonjs.com/docs/plugins
These are all generally highly reviewed can lead to interesting discussions:
Gattaca - interesting take on genetics/DNA discrimination
Europa - hard science fiction, maybe a bit slow for a 12 year old
The Net - older movie but the concept of digital exile resonates today
City of Ember - post apocalyptic civilization that lives deep underground
First Man - dramatization of Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing (not realy "fiction")
Arrival - first contact situation, tastefully done
Contact - another first contact situation that explores how politics, skepticism, and fanaticism react
The Martian - easily as fun as the book
The Prestige - competing magicians in an industrial age setting
The Hunger Games - extreme class divide in a future setting
Jurassic Park - the original not the sequels
Stargate - wormhole travel to another planet (be careful with the TV shows though, SG1 on streaming has full frontal nudity and "not ok" scenes which were obviously not on the broadcast version and a total shock when we watched it as a family)
District 9 - has some graphic gore and language, so it might be 14+, but is an interesting look at aliens as refugees
Contagion - a look at how a pandemic could play out. Premiered before COVID.
The Maze Runner - interesting setting and look at group dynamics
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids - fun setting
The Village - scary movie with a sci fi twist
Galaxy Quest - comedy
Short Circuit - old movie that deals with AI sentience
Innerspace - another old one, but has some fun concepts
First some that I don't see mentioned here yet:
Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Limitless (2011)
Looper (2012)
Upgrade (2018)
Source Code (2011)
District 9 (2009)
Black Mirror S3E2: "Playtest", S4E1: "USS Callister"
The 7 minute YouTube video "Slaughterbots"[1]
The YouTube series The Backrooms[2]
If you are worried about your son hearing swear words and seeing blood, and not just whether or not he will be able to understand/appreciate the movie, then you probably want to wait with a couple of those.
And then I would also agree with those here that mention Inception, Interstellar, Back to the Future, The Martian, Men in Black, Minority Report, The Terminator, Terminator 2, and The Expanse. I also don't think he should have much of a problem following along with The Matrix.
[1]: https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVAh-MgDVqvDUEq6qDXqORBioE4Yhol_z
I get the sense that you would like some adult themes, but not too slow?
Top of my mind (and in no specific order) would be:
- Dark City
- The Thirteenth Floor
- City of the Lost Children
- Tron (original and maybe new one)
- Interstellar
- Inception
- A Clockwork Orange
- Her (very relevant to our times)
- Dune (2021 version)
- Brazil
- The Martian
- Children of Men
- Edge of Tomorrow (most like Marvelverse on this list but still very good)
- Moon
- Twelve Monkeys
- Upgrade
- The Fifth Element
- Contact
- Okja
- District 9
- Predestination (very relevant to our times)
- Serenity (but might need some prep from the tv show before watching)
- World on a Wire
- The Abyss
- Minority Report (very relevant in our times)
- The Fly
- Videodrome
- Equilibrium
- Strange Days
- The Andromeda Strain (relevant after Covid)
- eXistenZ (trippy but I loved it when it came out and was only around your sons age)
- In Time (interesting class dynamics on display)
- Enemy Mine
- Franklyn (some interesting takes on mental illness)
- The Arrival
Every kid is different and every parent is different.
At 12, I found most horror movies silly or disgusting rather than horrifying. But ALIEN and ALIENS are both great. A few scenes from THE TERMINATOR were disturbing, but it's a good story and TERMINATOR 2 is very good. PREDATOR wasn't for me at 12, but certainly was at 14.
THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE MARTIAN, BILL AND TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE, THE INVENTION OF LYING are all well-made, entertaining, and should be thought-provoking.
Arrival - best science fiction movie in recent memory (maybe ever?)
Ex Machina - also great.
Her - different style, but still very good (also with recent LLM developments maybe closer than we think).
The Martian (not as good, but entertaining)
Also I know parents have their preferences, but 12 seems old enough for any of this (if they’re reading Asimov)
I was disappointed in interstellar (but it is a beautiful movie) just dumb in a lot of ways and the “but what above love” subplot really annoyed me.
I’d give gravity an honorable mention. The director’s other movie Children of Men is one of my favorites but doesn’t really qualify as scifi.
For shows, the expanse is probably the best recent thing.
I’m not sure if Super8 qualifies, but I think that’s a generally underrated movie.
Having spent some of my time in high school (in Nebraska) working in a greenhouse, I'm scratching my head trying to figure out the value proposition for most of these companies. I kind of wonder if this was all motivated by that movie "The Martian" where Matt Damon was growing potatoes on Mars with hydrazine.
This reminds me of "The Martian": the initial set-up was completely impossible, but if you ignore that the movie was pretty good.
Off topic. Do you have any movie suggestion close or related to this book? I've seen The Martian, 2001 Space Od, Interstellar, and Event Horizon.
> How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical?
How much more of what we did failed but nobody died (somebody died, but not always) because those failure happened in a hospitable environment for life?
We didn't just "magically" progress, we failed 99% of the times to evolve the process until it succeeded.
Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars, most of which could lead to an explosion, and predict that 99 of them will fail (and probably explode)
Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
The Martian is just a good SCI-FI movie.
> In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to expand and do work?
steam engine was well known 2,300 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
It took > 2,000 years to perfect it.
And we have free water and oxygen on Earth but no water nor oxygen on Mars.
For folks who don't want to click, the argument is Indiana Jones didn't have an impact on the outcome of the story; the Nazis still would have found the arc and died in the end.
It's an amusing idea, but I've always thought it was weird to call it a problem with the movie, as it would apply to the protagonist in a bunch of movies (spoilers abound in this extremely random assortment of movies off the top of my head):
* If Kurt Russel's character hadn't been in The Thing, everything that happened still would have happened
* If Harry and Sally hadn't been in When Harry Met Sally, New York would still be Yorking
* If Florence Pugh's character hadn't gone to Sweden in Midsommar, the tourists still would have died
* If Richard Dreyfuss's character hadn't been in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the aliens still would have made contact, dropped off their old passengers, and picked up new passengers
* If Scott Pilgrim hadn't been in Scott Pilgrim, everyone would probably still just be hanging out more or less the same
* If Matt Damon's character hadn't been in The Martian, they would have all still ended up back on Earth
* If Rocky Balboa hadn't been in Rocky, probably two other people would have boxed and one of them would have won
To each their own, but for my money good stories are about character journeys, not about... I dunno, like, an accounting of what changed during the movie.
If you haven't read Ted Chiang's short stories yet, do so. His first collection (Stories of Your Life and Others) was my favourite, but his more recent one (Exhalation) was also very good (the title story, Exhalation, is gorgeous). Stories of your Life is what the movie Arrival was based on and (as ever) the story was better than the movie.
As far as sci-fi novels, I have pretty generic tastes for this crowd: Dune, The Dispossessed, The Martian. The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favourite books. Not exactly sci-fi but close.
So is The Martian. The physics in the movie and book are absolutely magical: windstorms powerful enough to impale people but not enough air pressure to require a top to the spacecraft. Toxic, perchlorate soil growing potatoes… Both the book and movie are wonderful, but have huge gaps of implausibility.
Importantly, it’s one of the rarest sci fi films where there’s no “supernatural” element whatsoever- no force, no Q, no monolith. Just man against nature. Only three movies I know doing this are gattaca, Martian and the moon.
First thing that came on my mind was The Martian book/movie and How the guy was eating only potatoes.
I need that diet now.
I asked ChatGPT. It gave me bunch. I got some I've never heard of. I think I'll look into them.
<ChatGPT>
list 50 interesting movies that explore AI.
The Matrix
Ex Machina
Blade Runner
The Terminator
I, Robot
The War of the Worlds
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Transcendence
The Fifth Element
2001: A Space Odyssey
WarGames
Westworld
The Machine
Her
The Iron Giant
Automata
The Truman Show
The Prestige
The Martian
The Fly
The Bicentennial Man
Surrogates
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Limitless
Robocop
Electric Dreams
The Island
The Time Machine
The Circle
The Arrival
The Host
The Stepford Wives
The Brain that Wouldn't Die
Frankenstein
The Invisible Man
Metropolis
The Thing
Jurassic Park
Independence Day
Gravity
Artificial Intelligence: AI
Avatar
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The Matrix Reloaded
The Matrix Revolutions
Inception
Interstellar
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Butterfly Effect
The Future.
</ChatGPT>
I had to look this up, it seems it was related to the myth of a LOX tanker truck spilling/crashing and turning the road asphalt itself into an explosive. Seems kinda weird to omit this though as it's not really arcane knowledge (Pretty sure "The Martian" had a scene where they blow open an airlock with something similar).
Other mythbusters censors include dropping an entire episode about credit card hacks/fakes because Visa and friends threatened to pull ads from the network, and another episode where they accidentally caused their test mice to cannibalize each other.
I meant movies not songs.
Eg https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/the-martian/id1039586890
Which is the same price as some games
Eg https://stadia.google.com/game/human-fall-flat-stadia-edition
That's the game I brought when I dipped my toe in to try it out (although I remember it being cheaper than that).
> I don’t think movie purchases at any one retailer drives the kind of numbers Google was hoping to get out of Stadia.
I have no idea, but it's notable that movies don't need porting to a platform, but each game will need at least a little work.
This reminds me of the binary patching done in The Martian film.
Funnier still was a comparison between Indian Mars Orbital Mission ($73 M) and the budgets for Gravity ($100M), The Martian ($108M), Interstellar ($165M). ISRO (India's space agency) engineers missions to Mars for the price it takes Hollywood to make movies with Mars, space etc.
Counter arguments:
While there are a ton of lost movies, we also live in a world in which services like Criterion Channel, Mubi, and Shudder make more film available than ever. The other week, I got curious and watched a movie from Ulrike Ottinger, loved it, and when I get around to it I can watch any of a dozen more of her movies.
Likewise, I just bought a boxed set of folk horror movies from Severin Films. I miss good video rental stores, but even pre-Netflix there weren’t more than a dozen US cities with video stores where you could rent stuff like that.
The top grossing lists are mostly dominated by blockbusters, it’s true, but let’s look at (say) 1978. Grease, Animal House, Close Encounters, Every Which Way But Loose, and Heaven Can Wait (a remake!) are the top five. It’s been a blockbuster-driven market for 40+ years, with the occasional breakthrough art house film and, more frequently, a big non-franchise genre film (The Martian, Us, etc.) None of this has prevented great directors like the Coen Brothers, Soderbergh, or del Toro from making very good movies.
There’s a market for super-hero movies. There’s also a market for “real” film. These two things are sometimes in tension, but I think at the moment they’re both viable.
> We should watch The Martian
Although the events at the beginning and end of the film require massive suspension of disbelief I rate The Martian as one of my favourite films for presenting an optimistic view of science and engineering, massively realistic by Hollywood standards. I'd definitely suggest watching it.
I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what does and doesn't impact him; he reacts quite clearly if something is problematic (he's read/watched LOTR/Hobbit and one moment he reacted to in The Hobbit movies was Bolg vs Kili). Mal in Inception was probably the heaviest thing as the gunplay there isn't overly visceral. We've watched The Matrix together, Ready Player One (undead ballroom was fine, but skipped the old zombie in the bathroom) and Ender's Game (has a graphic bullying revenge scene). I love Moon, but the language is a bit old for him for now - one day though, as I think that's one of the tightest sci-fi stories, and will get him thinking. Blade Runner too.
He'd probably cope with recent Dune, which I thought was very polished. We should watch The Martian, as he read Project Hail Mary and liked it. From memory, Arrival would be good assuming some of the undertones went over his head. Contact is another good one in a similar vein (common element with Project Hail Mary and Arrival of decoding messages).
What’s wrong with the movie Moon?
What’s wrong with trying to transcend known Physics, there are so many things we don’t know, so speculating / imagining what is still unknown is part of sci-fi (as long as it’s not fantasy like the space mushroom network in Star Trek Discovery - which is not Star Trek anymore anyway)
And talking about logical consistency… Martian is good, but it had parts in it that were questionable, so I don’t understand why you’re not applying your same standards you used for Moon to the Martian.
Interesting that it’s an article about Carl Sagans SciFi side and it doesn’t mention that he’s the one who suggested the aliens in 2001 be just a big monolith without form. Also arguably a better sci-fi film (and more cerebral?) than Contact.
I love Contact myself but it was clearly not exceptional. I’d rate it comparably to 2010, 2001’s sequel.
For me it’s banalaity arises from its following of the one sci-fi trope that always disappoints me - the existence of an unexplained force/alien/species/molecule that transcends known physics as the main plot point. Pretty much every sci-fi show movie novel has this component and I’m just tired. The only two movies I know that don’t have it are the Martian and Gattaca. Those are the exceptional sci-fi works if you ask me.
PS: please don’t mention the moon, I hope we can keep the discussion to sci-fi works that are logically consistent at the least.
I’d wager that it is the second most accurate and prescient science fiction movie only behind 2001. It’s also better than 2001 because it’s pretty much the only good sci-fi movie I know that didn’t involve a “fantastical” or god-like being/power playing a major role (in that regard tying with Martian).
Could that just be a movie prop left over after they filmed the martian with matt damon?
I can find some enjoyment in books that do not overly rely on visual imagery. I quite enjoyed the Martian because it focused so much on the character’s thoughts and the state of the character’s mind. I enjoyed the first three the Expanse books because of the political world building and character development. Though watching the TV adaptation added a new layer to the story as it could fill out the visual gaps, so to speak, of my reading experience.
But I find myself being drawn in to movies and TV shows as they can render entirely new visual worlds that are unlike anything I can experience on my own. I guess this is also why I don’t mind movie and TV adaptations so much.
> One of the things that interesting to me about coming to a place like Funspot is seeing things like what happened today with your score, where people start to congregate, including me, watching someone absolutely take control of a game like you did.
People love seeing people be competent. I miss this in modern TV series, btw. It's one of those things that makes the older Star Trek series so compelling. Or for a relatively recent example: The Martian. I wonder why it's so rare to see stories like that in fiction though?
(thanks to the other commenter for pointing out how to fix the article)
According to [1]:
> Temperatures on Mars average about -81 degrees F. However, temperatures range from around -220 degrees F. in the wintertime at the poles, to +70 degrees F. over the lower latitudes in the summer.
Bear in mind the atmosphere is <1% the pressure of Earth's, basically a vacuum. This actually means you'd barely feel 60mph winds (which, interestingly, was one of several flaws in The Martian book and movie) so hypothermia probably wouldn't be a huge issue from the air but still matters if you contact something solid.
It's unclear where the water on Mars is. It's definitely on the poles, which means you're at the lower end of that range, but there may also be water ice in more equatorial latitudes.
[1]: https://www.weather.gov/fsd/mars
The Martian dust storms are pretty tame. Nothing like portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere is 1% of what it is here on earth.
So while it is a “storm” it isn’t like a tropical force hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over time.
The book felt almost like a screenplay to me; I suspected when I read it that it would make a solid movie.
Also you can go into more technical detail in a book than you can in a film, and maybe detail wasn't important to the plot of the Martian, but I felt book-Mark's desperation a lot more clearly because of how difficult it would be for me to be clear-headed enough to think through everything that was necessary to stay alive.
There are exceptions. I found The Martian's movie much more entertaining than the book (I've read the book before the movie came out). The book felt like a shore most of the time.
hey, I loved The Martian too (the book moreso than the film but only because the book was so great) - but it really isn't SciFi, or at least what I'd describe as SciFi. It's set in the modern day using modern day technology. That's not an insult, it's just a categorisation.
Not to be offensive but this article made me feel dumber just reading it. THE MARTIAN isn't enough to inspire people to pursue science? Why? Because it uses clever ideas to "work the problem"? I'm not sure about his background but that is pretty much the only way to solve problems in the real world. Servers down you "work the problem", a researcher who doesn't understand why data looks like it does - "work the problem", trapped on Mars - "work the problem". Then he talks about reality and how Sci-Fi doesn't match up with reality!?
Including political realities is absolutely important when designing technology to solve large scale problems. Acting like SciFi (Andy Weir, Star Trek, and Neil Stephenson are all good examples) doesn't address that is a shitty shallow analysis. The Martian, is mostly an adventure story but Project Hail Mary deals with the political reality heavily and TNG talked about political reality and social issues and in fact the best episodes revolved around that. As someone that is an engineer, a life long SciFi fan, and am studying to change careers as a scientist (Biology/Data Science) this article reads seems pretty terrible as analysis/criticism of Sci-Fi like someone that has never actually built anything.
> I'm going to look forward to the sci-fi space films where the drama is survival in a hostile environment, and infinitely prefer them to war films.
So, movies like The Martian? I wish I could come up with more examples, and I hope someone replying to me does...
Google does this - just search for the movie name and put the word streaming after it. https://www.google.com/search?q=the+martian+streaming
The US govt is certainly still involved in propaganda. For example, NASA helped with The Martian.[1] DoD released a game, America's Army, about 20 years ago with a total budget of $32 million over 8 years or so.[2] Also, Pentagon pays about $10-15 million annually just for the various pro-military messaging we see at sports events (salute to veterans, etc).[3] These are just some examples, but there are plenty more.
[1]. https://www.popsci.com/why-nasa-helped-ridley-scott-create-martian-film-and-what-means-future-sci-fi-space-movies/
[2]. https://www.wired.com/2009/12/americas-army-budget
[3]. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/11/04/report-at-least-50-teams-were-paid-by-department-of-defense-for-patriotic-displays/
The last bit from The Martian (movie) about how you just need to start solving problems: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYCLFE86Po
Since my divorce, I've found that I get a lot of help out of media like this for recharging my spirit to work on things. Sometimes kids' movies are the best, because they aren't at all about the 'how', but they are about the 'why'. Here's a list of a few that I find helpful:
Tomorrowland
Big Hero 6
Robots (2005)
The Martian
Sneakers
Real Genius
Wargames
Macguyver (80s show)
Cosmos
October Sky
Iron Man
The Astronaut Farmer
Flight of the Phoenix
Something Ventured
Now if I can only figure out how to get a team behind me like in those movies... :)
Great suggestions here, many that I've either never heard of or never considered - I look forward to checking them out and please keep them coming, I'm hopeful this can turn into a masterthread to keep coming back and discovering motivational media.
Should maybe have done this earlier but adding a few of the ones I've already watched.
Technical Motivation:
- Silicon Valley (TV show, 2014-2019) - The Social Network (2010) - The Imitation Game (2014) - Halt & Catch Fire (TV show, 2014-2017) - Iron Man (2008) - Primer (2004) - The Martian (2015) - Hidden Figures (2016) - Flight of the Phoenix (1965 original or 2004 remake)
"Sales" Motivation:
- The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) - Door to Door (2002) - Underrated straight-to-TV film about a man with cerebral palsy who wants to become a door-to-door salesman - Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) - Pure sales, persistence and Pacino - Salesman (1969 documentary) (As above, but instead of Pacino it's real door-to-door bible salesmen and what they go through)
Honorable Mentions:
- Mr Robot (2015-2019): probably the most thrilling and technically accurate depiction of technology and hacking ever put to a screen, but as someone else said it's also very dystopian and depressing, and not too motivational except in the brief bursts that they show Elliot setting up a hack. Either way no VisualBasic GUIs here.
- Flash of Genius (2008): about the inventor of the modern windshield wiper who had it stolen from Ford and sued them. The premise is motivational, but I personally found it more of a cautionary tale on what you can lose for your principles when you go up against the giants.
The Martian. I don’t know of any other movie that better celebrates the uniquely human ability to overcome challenges through innovation and persistence. That movie gets me charged up.
You didn't like The Martian and Blade Runner 2049? Not exactly mid-budget movies but one is a well-made popcorn-flick while the other is the highly improbably well-made sequel to a 40 year old cult classic. The amount of non-superhero Sci-Fi in the theaters at the moment is a bit of the low side for me but there has been significant, good movies since 2014 and Interstellar.
> It’s why The Martian is one of my favorite movies (and book, of course)
It's funny because even though the book was so loved because it was so rational, and human's actually acted how humans would act in that situation, Hollywood STILL couldn't resist making tweaking the end slightly to make it over the top and impractical. Thus we ended up with Mark Watney flying around like Iron man in space with a hole is his space suit.
Still a great movie though. But a better book.
It’s why The Martian is one of my favorite movies (and book, of course). No evil, conniving, contrived antagonist designed to be hated. It’s just everyone working together against the most unforgiving antagonist of all: the universe itself.
I don’t want to watch movies or read books where people are just awful to other people, I can open the newspaper on any given day to find that.
> Musk’s target price is essentially a rounding error compared to the budgets of Gravity or The Martian.
Do we even know Musk's target price for a return-trip to the moon? It's very hard to extrapolate from the $10/kg figure ($1M/launch) that keeps getting quoted, as a return-trip to the moon without discarding a Starship (which will blow up the cost enormously) will involve a lot of launches. Even the HLS architecture, which leaves Starship stranded in lunar orbit and uses Orion to get the astronauts back, needs 10 launches.
Even if we're very generous and assume 20 launches at $1M/launch, that's ~20% of the budget of these movies. But that's very aspirational: for HLS, which is already ambitious, NASA paid $2.89B for development & 2 launches. If we assume 80% is development, you're still looking at $289M per trip.
The Martian by Andy Weir, if you haven't seen the movie yet. If you have, he's had another similar novel out recently, Hail Mary.
Yeah, Arrival fits well and I enjoyed it. There are a number of lower budget films you could add to that list like Primer, Moon (2009), or Gattaca. Ex Machina is sci-fi + drama. I'm sure there's plenty more. There's just a tendency for sci-fi films to lean heavily into action (or occasionally horror) like The Martian film did when compared with the book.
Jurassic Park feels more action/horror focused to me, but it has a sci-fi premise.
Any fantasy movie in a futuristic setting (even one that's technically in the past, like Star Wars) would be widely considered science fiction. Granted, that is a common definition of science fiction.
But science fiction can also be something like The Twilight Zone: a genre that explores "what-if" scenarios. A genre that takes some fictional premise and attempts to explore the consequences logically. An example premise could be, how might modern society have evolved if the Greek gods were real? A sci-fi story would try to approach that question in a scientific and logical way. Star Trek often followed this pattern. Star Wars doesn't.
A weakness of defining sci-fi by a futuristic setting is that you can change the genre with only superficial changes to the story. Other major genres - comedy, horror, mystery, romance, action - are defined by the feeling or thought process they try to evoke. But take Star Wars and replace the planets with kingdoms, the Jedi with wizards, and the force with.. well, that's fine as it is.. and you can create a story with the exact same plot points but without a futuristic setting. There's no actual science in Star Wars; only a futuristic setting.
Setting doesn't feel like it should be the feature that defines a genre. You should be able to have a comedy, horror or mystery take place in a futuristic setting and a sci-fi that takes place in the present (and we often do, eg, The Handmaid's Tale).
I'll note that there aren't many movies that stick to just sci-fi; most incorporate a lot of action (like The Matrix). This is probably because filmmakers feel 2+ hours of science fiction would be boring. The movie The Martian heavily cut from the science of the book and focused on the action (while the book had little action and a lot of science). You see a strong sci-fi focus more often in literature and TV.
> They're also assuming the movie is set in our version of reality, even though they know it's not, because there's 2 space stations that are closer together than in our reality.
I really love it when movies set out to explore an alt universe. They're fun. But Gravity didn't do that.
> Also they're missing the point of the film, and of science fiction, it's not about predicting the future, it's about exploring humanity via putting humans into extreme/unusual circumstances.
No, I think you miss the point of sci-fi there. Sci-fi is literally just fiction where science is the major plot directive. It could use that platform to discuss ethics (as Star Trek often set out to do), it could use it do explore loneliness and survival (as The Martian did), it could be a platform to scare people (like Alien) or it could just be using it as a canvas for something totally made up and fun (like Guardians of the Galaxy). But there's absolutely no reason what-so-ever why sci-fi can't be about predicting the future. And in fact a great deal of sci-fi does set out to do just that.
The real problem with many of the comments in this thread is they assume "sci-fi" is this single entity in which all content assumes the same goals. But it's not. Different writers will have different stories to tell and different emotions they want to leave with the audience.
Furthermore, movies are not the only platform from which sci-fi exists. If you take a look at novels you'll see that sci-fi is actually a massive genre to which cinema only scratches the surface of. I'd wager that's probably true of most genres when comparing books to movies though.
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is a good starting point. Written by an author that knows how to write pop-thrillers with a very keen attention to the details in his books. It deals with the aftermath of the moon spontaneously breaking apart. No explanation is ever given to the reason. The first line of the book is:
> The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.
If you're looking for something even harder there's one author to stands out. Greg Egan. Most of his books are created by modifying some part of relativity and seeing what kind of world would be the logical conclusion from that modification. From the blurb for his book "Orthogonal".
> In Yalda’s universe, light has no universal speed and its creation generates energy.
> On Yalda’s world, plants make food by emitting their own light into the dark night sky.
Every one of his books are this weird, and he has books worth of education material and graphics to help explain the mechanics of each universe he creates. He has also done some novel discoveries when it comes to superpermutations.
If you don't want to go quite that deep into it all, you could take a look at "The Martian". The movie is a fine piece of work, but the book is really amazing. It goes into a lot more details. Andy Weir, the author, even made sure the phases of Earth and Mars matched up so closely that you can figure out when the book is happening by inferring the travel times and communication delays.
Generally, you won't find much of this genre. Writing space opera (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) doesn't require too much. You have to have good characters exploring an interesting scenario, and then write it competently. Proper hard Sci-Fi on the other hand is incredibly difficult. It requires intimate knowledge of things like orbital physics and being able to infer what is and isn't possible within the next ~20 years. This is where most hard Sci-Fi is set because it grounds it the most. An analogous issue is that hard Sci-Fi often "expires". Stories written 30 years ago suddenly start sounding silly because technology developed in a new and at-the-time unexpected direction.
The only one I can really back on this list as a physicist rather than a movie lover is The Martian. I watched it at quite a low point in my physics undergrad and it re-sparked my joy for physics. At least until I graduated! Hey-ho.
The Martian is probably the best example of an author really embracing the 21st century. You give the text of the book away for free on a website and make money off the people who want the audiobook, the movie rights, the kindle, etc. In the 21st century, entertainment is free, attention is expensive, so you have to give away your free entertainment to get attention and then sell the entertainment in more rarified mediums like movies, audiobooks, even kindle, that require higher production costs than writing a blog.
I don't remember The Martian movie having many examples of bad physics (other than a "severe windstorm" on a planet with very thin atmosphere; a mistake carried over from the book). It just didn't mention a lot of the science that made the book interesting.
I don't remember too many glaring examples from The Expanse either. They generally have artificial gravity when under thrust and not when they don't. When slowing down, they generally have the engines pointed towards the thing they're approaching. The characters in high-G maneuvers don't look the way people would actually look in those situations, but that's hard to fake without actually sticking actors in a centrifuge so I'm willing to give them a pass.
Scientific accuracy isn't really the focus of the show, though. It's a show set in space that needs reasonably accurate physics in order to have a plausible setting and not detract from the the story and the characters.
There was massive amount of in space infrastructure and lots of people. Even though they did space mining there is no way they would be able to put all that in place without RLVs. IIRC they even show them a couple times, basically big NASP like SSTO aerospaceplanes.
They also have regular transcontinental flights going through space, even though its IIRC not clear if its sub orbital ballistic trajectories or FOBS like partial orbit ones.
Still, many would-be hard SF films get this completely wrong - huge space stations and/or interplanetary spaceships yet they launch it all on rather dated looking expandable boosters!
Already The Martian it's pushing is pushing it with using basically improved EELVs (launched by ULA, none the less!) yet having hundreds if not thousands of tons of equipment and propelant in place.
Interstellar or Ad Astra is bad shit insane - dinky ELVs and multiple interplanetary colonization attempts and humongous space ship in the former and KFC & artillery fireballs on the Moon in the former. And Ad Astra even has booster stages being dropped when launching from Mars because hey, why not waste even more resources!
What people find "believable" or "realistic" will vary.
Within the genre of Science Fiction there is a sub-genre of Hard Science Fiction in which it's considered more important that it could actually work. Fire Upon The Deep probably wouldn't generally be considered at all Hard because it has Faster-than-Light travel, which is one of the things you generally would rule out of Hard SF because of how conservation rules in Physics work, if you can do FtL then you can do time travel (because space and time being the same kind of thing), and then what's your story?
"The Martian" a novel subsequently made into a movie is pretty realistic, turns out the setup (a storm on Mars separates Mark from the rest of the crew) is the least realistic part of that entire story.
If that's a bit too realistic, some of Liu Cixin's shorts are pretty wild while remaining down to earth about what's practical. "The Wandering Earth" for example.
Greg Egan is very Hard, but you may find you think Greg's technically possible stuff seems harder to believe than faster-than-light travel which isn't possible at all. The Clockwork Rocket couldn't happen here, but it's set in a universe with a different dimensional symmetry, the Amalgam stuff is set in this universe, but with a society far more advanced than ours.
But then if it turns out "realistic"/ "believable" counts like Star Wars style laser blasters and stuff then I dunno, lots of things, maybe you'd like Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch stuff, (or indeed Iain M Banks' Culture novels) which aren't Hard at all.
> Apollo 13 - I think few films come close to capturing how ingenious some people can be
I agree, I also like The Martian and The Shawshank Redemption, which both have similar premise of human ingenuity solving difficult problems.
A few tangentially related links ...
First, there are a few write-ups of the fictional UI(s) used in The Martian:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/30473933/The-Martian-UI-Screen-Graphics
https://medium.com/territory-film/ui-stories-the-martian-efffa28e1a98
Second, I think this blog on sci-fi typography may be interesting to those reading this thread:
https://typesetinthefuture.com/
It does make me wonder how they obtain the metal to make the ship, though.
I agree, though. Stupid space-fantasy can be tons of fun. Hard-SF always gets criticised for not being truly hard-SF. Even in the Martian, the adjustments needed to pick him up at the end would mean they're never going to make it back to Earth.
Does it matter? It's still a fun movie. But balancing between fun and scientific accuracy can be hard, and a slip can be jarring.
So how does everybody feel about The Expanse? There's some explicit super-science McGuffins in there, but most of it seems about as accurate as you could hope for, given the setting. Travel takes months. Not entire sure how their engines work, because the Rocinante does change course a lot without carrying insane amounts of fuel, so they do seem to have some sort of fantasy fuel.
That's the thing, I was aware of all the hype about this movie, including the terrific consulting. After 20 minutes though, I gave up. What exactly did I miss? Some time travel, some worm holes? Well, I don't personally think that has anything to do with science.
For my taste, The Martian is the best hard sci-fi book and sci-fi movie out there.
Possibly interesting fact: the writer of The Egg also wrote The Martian. Haven't read the book, but the film was great and much funnier than I expected.
Really cool! This reminds of Andy Weir's The Martian (I highly recommend the book - there was a movie as well - especially the chapters that touch on some programming!) and the lead characters clever efforts to use what (bio)tech he has in order to survive on Mars.
The difference is, Superman has a long internal struggle between his desire to do right and his desire to give up in the face of so many people suffering, he may be America’s Boy Scout but he works hard and he keeps a low profile and he is modern day Sisyphus - skipping out on his everyday life to go to unpleasant places alone and deal with unpleasant people, save lives, and come back to .. a journalist notepad and a story about some trivia and no amazing rewards.
Neo on the other hand is a modern day superhero exactly, he’s like the Wanted film main character - he did nothing, doesn’t work hard, doesn’t train at anything, and then sometime while he’s working a drudge job and slacking off, the universe dumps hero on him because of someone he innately is, and then everyone loves him for this thing he didn’t do, but instead is a thing he is.
The equivalent in real life might be considering Dr Jonny Kim, graduated high school, joined the navy, became a Navy SEAL, became a combat medic, sniper, navigator, went on 100 combat missions, graduated with a math degree, went to Harvard med school and became a doctor, and is now a NASA astronaut selected as a possible mars mission candidate, navy reservist, husband, father, decorated combat vet, and 35 years old; and then imagining NASA deselecting him and replacing him with a 35 year old you know who “thought about being the first man on Mars since childhood” and whose favourite film is “The Martian”, and is just waiting for NASA to find him because he’d be the perfect candidate, he could “learn any of that stuff but won’t waste his time until they choose him” [hey that too much describes me!]. Sure maybe Jonny Kim always dreamed of going to Mars and loves The Martian, but he also did things.
Batman went to be Far East and trained hard in martial arts for years, Neo waited for someone else to load martial arts skill into his brain in a safe virtual environment which he could control so he never lost.
Heroes in the past did hard heroic things, rather than dreamed of being called upon to do easy heroic things they could innately magically do. Heroes of the past wanted to win a war, action movie heroes play to a viewer who wants to be seen as a hero and doesn’t care how the saving of people (or whatever) is irrelevant and secondary.
At least for me, that is not the case.
Most television and film content is just unbelievably boring, self-important, and undemanding of the viewer's attention. Frankly, content producers have become more and more disrespectful of the viewer's time.
In very rare cases, I suddenly notice I've lost track of the plot--if that happens a couple times, that's when I know I need to put away my phone/laptop and focus on the show.
It is not obvious which content is actually demanding. For example, the film The Martian was very dense and demanding of attention, while the more recent Ad Astra could be summarized with the single sentence "sad sack mopes around space." Dialog rich comedy is generally the most demanding.
They all had an established director, producers, and/or actors. It’s a safe risk because studios (from this list fox (rip)) can either bank on the casting list/director history (baby driver, the Martian, arrival) or have it as their one “cinema” film for awards season. Theres a lot missing for 10 years of film that just didn’t take off.
The reference above is to the book "The Martian" by Andy Weir. Also a movie starring Matt Damon. Good read. Highly recommend!
Xkcd reference that got me to read it: https://xkcd.com/1536/
There are specific reasons for the things you're talking about.
For Antarctica (which is not the Arctic, but I assume what you meant - Scandinavia is quite self sustaining!) you have the Antarctic Treaty System. [1] The TL/DR there is that pretty much every form of development in Antarctica is illegal, and you're not allowed to leave any waste whatsoever. When an antarctic researcher is on a mission, they're required to bottle up their feces/urine and bring it back to base. The urine is processed and then returned to the sea. Feces are generally returned to the host nation for local removal. Mining and other industry is expressly prohibited.
But something even more interesting is comparing Antarctica to Mars, even ignoring the treaty system. Mars has two big things going against it: radiation, and a negligible atmosphere. That means you need to limit your exposure outside, and when you do go outside it needs to be with appropriate equipment and clothing. Of course the exact same requirements also hold true of Antarctica, though to a lesser degree.
But it also has quite a lot of things going for it. Mars day/night cycle is identical to Earth and it even has near identical seasons owing to a near identical tilt. Antarctica, by contrast, has what is basically a 6 month long day/night cycle. And the weather is absolutely vicious. There are genuinely violent snowstorms, as well as temperatures that average -30F, and much lower on the inner areas away from the coasts. By contrast temperatures on Mars (depending on what part of the planet you're on, and when) can get right balmy. Summer on the equator? It gets up to about 70F, though the nights are still extremely cold owing to no atmosphere.
But the snow storm part is one of the more interesting comparisons. Maybe the biggest thing is "The Martian." The key plot event there was a terrible sand storm on Mars ravaged their base and setup the plot for the rest of the film/movie. The Martian itself is a hard sci-fi book. This is one of the very few things that was intentionally faked. The worst sandstorm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze owing to the negligible atmospheric pressure. Think about that - a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a meaningful disaster!
There's a lot more to say/compare as well, but this is already getting a bit too long. Suffice to say, these issues are extremely counter-intuitive, but also extremely interesting to explore!
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
Does this mean we have colonised moon? (in reference to The Martian movie)
I unequivocally recommend Daemon. If you liked reading The Martian, you might like Daemon. They both read very much like a screenplay.
The Martian is a great book and a great movie, and if I didn't know which one came first I would be hard put to say which is an adaptation of which. I don't know if Suarez is in talks with anybody to get Daemon produced as a feature film, but if he's not, he ought to be.
The sequel / conclusion, Freedom, is a very different novel, but also compelling and brings a decent enough end to the themes from Daemon.
Mars’s pressure is 1% of Earth’s at sea level, don’t believe the film “The Martian”, which on Earth is tantamount to a vacuum.
Having said that NASA’s going to flying a helicopter drown there, the rotors just have to go around really fast to overcome the lower gravity.
Antarctica is a really interesting topic in its own right. One major reason there is minimal development there is because development is literally illegal. The Antarctic treaty system [1] prohibits any sort of non-scientific research, specifically ban things such as material exploitation, and also sets strict 0-impact laws. For instance it is, again literally, illegal to take a piss on Antarctica during a voyage. It needs to be bottled up and brought back to base where it can be extensively processed before being 'returned' to the sea. Disposable trash that cannot be recycled is packaged up and returned home for disposal processing.
But there's something much more interesting about Antarctica. The intuition is like you said, colonizing it is a million times easier than e.g. Mars. But this is not so simple. Antarctica is a pretty brutal place. It's not that just exposure to the climate entails death but there are also often violent storms. And the perpetual darkness of the Antarctic winter is why the population plummets from thousands to about a thousand during winter. Mars, by contrast, has a low pressure atmosphere, unbreathable air, and high radiation levels. This means you can only go outside with substantial protection which is comparable, though of course more extreme, than Antarctica. On the other hand, it's otherwise a very tame place. The most violent storm on Mars would feel like a slight breeze. This is one of the very few things thing that the book/movie "The Martian" intentionally faked. It's extremely telling that a hard sci-fi book had to resort to fantasy to create a disaster scenario on Mars.
Mars also shares a number of oddly convenient similarities with Earth. It shares a near identical day/night cycle, and even oddly enough has a near identical pattern of seasons due to near identical axial tilt. Because of this it doesn't sense to speak of 'Martian' temperatures since when/where are quite important. Summer near the equator gets right balmy at about 70F, though the lack of any meaningful greenhouse to trap in the heat does mean nights are still very cold. And of course Mars has absolutely abundant mineral resources. The red color itself is from iron oxides - rust. 0.3G will also offer unimaginable opportunities. For the most predictable launching vessels from Mars will be exponentially easier on Earth, and all the resources necessary to establish such industry exist in abundance on the planet. It will also undoubtedly spur on tourism, new sports, and so on. Some exciting potential!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System
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The above is already longer than I thought it'd be, but really it's also necessary to mention something about computing. Try to mentally take yourself back some decades ago. Computers are literally the size of buildings with extremely fragile hardware, have enormous costs associated with them, cost millions of dollars, and need to be operated by large teams of highly skilled professionals. And in exchange for all of this you get again what were glorified calculators - the ENIAC [2] for instance was the first general purpose computer, and it achieved a blistering 35 divisions per second. Imagine somebody said soon you'd have computers sold for tens of dollars, capable of fitting in a pocket, that operate on the billions of operations per second. They'd become so ubiquitous and cheap you'd see them in practically everything. It's easy to take what we've achieved for granted, but we live in a reality that was, not long ago, the domain of fantasy.
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
I agree with both this & the parent comment. I think the tone & aesthetic of those have been more dominant -- at lot from those in particular setting the tone -- in that span.
There are some more uplifting things like The Martian (great) or Interstellar (admirable ambition but falls short) . . . but I think space movies have to be slightly discounted as cultural products because they're something of a subgenre that leans more towards escapism (by definition) than futurism. (Less so with books since there's a lot more room to build out the world vs. squeezing a standard plot (problem-solving drama, Frankenstein story, everyman vs. even-more-powerful-and-evil elite) amongst cool FX shots)
It looks quite like the base in The Martian movie.
Yeah, The Martian is like, the hardest sci-fi book I've ever read, but I found the film adaptation... lacking
My aunt, who was a forensic doctor, would be driven up the walls by the absurdity of the CSI screenplays. I'm an engineer and they manage to trigger me into laughter.
A bit is suspension of disbelief when some inaccuracy is needed by the story (like the sandstorm in The Martian) is tolerable, but completely messing up innocuous stuff you should have hired a field specialist to help you (physics, astronomy, police, medical, anything) with is inexcusable with the kind of budget even a lowly Sharknado has.
Seriously: I love movies. I was torn between engineering and cinema in college. Let's join together to never again have a cringe worthy moment on TV (unless it's there for the comedy value).
There are a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is that Mars has the greatest chance of being a self sustaining civilization in a fashion that's somewhat close to Earth standards. The major negatives on Mars are unbreathable low pressure air, and radiation dangers. Those are big negatives to be sure but outside of that:
- Near identical day/night cycles to Earth, and it even has seasons.
- Extremely calm weather. One thing some may not know is that the 'sand storm' used to create the precipitating disaster in 'The Martian' was intentionally faked. Mars minimal atmospheric density means a hurricane would feel like a slight breeze. That a hard sci-fi book had to turn to complete fiction to create a disaster scenario speaks for itself.
- Extensive mineral and elemental resources. Another issue 'The Martian' got wrong was accidental. One of the big problems that was solved in the movie was finding water. This was before Curiosity discovered there's water everywhere. You can get about a liter of water from a single cubic foot of Martian soil. And of course the atmosphere is loaded with CO2. That's not only what plants crave, but you've also got great potential there for something like the Sabatier reaction which combines CO2 and hydrogen to produce methane (which can be used, among other things, as rocket fuel) with water as a byproduct. Of course you can even just split the CO2 into carbon monoxide and oxygen -- this will be one of the critical experiments on MOXIE, part of NASA's Mars 2020 rover. We haven't been able to discern the exact mineral resources, but there's no doubt they're there - and vast.
- It's big. The surface area of Mars is oddly enough near identical to the land area of Earth above sea level.
- Comparable temperatures. The moon ranges from -260 to +280 degrees fahrenheit. By contrast Mars ranges from -195 to 70 degrees. And there are seasons. That -195 on Mars is during winter on the poles, granted that 70 degrees is on the equator during summer. But in general there are many places on Mars where the temperature would regularly be quite reasonable at many times.
There are many other reasons as well. These are mostly just off the cuff, though it's obviously a topic I'm invested and interested in. By contrast when you look at places like the Moon, really it's only benefit is that its close to Earth. But in terms of potential and environment, the Moon is to Mars, as Mars is to Earth.
If they allow people to vote on which artist to be chosen then my vote would go to Andy Weir[1] (author of The Martian[2])... but then in his talks he stated quite clearly of his fear of flying, so ... :D
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Weir [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
Gell-Mann amnesia effect is the same with movies or other information that is packaged for mass consumption or pop culture, getting details wrong might be a simplification for understanding and consumption, or a first impression that might not give the full picture but allows mass consumption of the idea to get closer to the truth.
In movies, if you are in a field portrayed in the movie, you see how much was wrong regarding that field or subject in the popular or surface level understanding of a subject. But then go on to believe the suspended or simulated reality the movie portrays on other fields or subjects that may also be off base but in the general direction.
Communication sometimes has to be a simplification or a surface level knowledge set that is understandable or consumable by all people or the target market, especially people that might not know about a particular subject. So you might read an article or see a part of a movie that is wrong, but the general gist is correct or the view represented might be people's first take on a subject, but the more detail one knows it might skew farther from that initial idea.
Similar to the way hackers are portrayed in movies, hackers do things with machines and software that are amazing in real life, but it is a cartoon version in the movies. Space travel movies are also usually guilty of this. The Martian was lauded for the more scientific and reality based takes on aspects of the movie, but also it was still packaged for consumption to get a point across.
When it comes to news and facts, incorrect details are bad when articles are wrong or get detailed parts incorrect, but many times first impressions are wrong or first takes on subjects are off base slightly, ultimately the truth comes out or is refined to closer to correct. Journalists might not fully understand a subject enough or may be missing parts to fully get all the details correct, eventually through more work though these ideas are corrected. The journey to truth and fact is iterative.
People simplify to get to a point where they can understand something to then find out the truth through more discovery, it is a work in progress, kinda like finding out about our place in the universe, initially people thought Earth was the center of all that is. The pursuit of knowledge and fact is getting a foothold to climb closer to the truth bit by bit, unless the bias is intentionally to mislead or spread disinformation.
What a complete waste of time. The point of a simulation like this would be to see observe how people react in isolation and under stress. But, reading this article, its clear that these people are acting to please the scientists rather than reacting naturally to events.
If everyone clucks like a chicken on Day 7, is it because that’s what happens under these conditions or is it because the software developer from New York saw it in a movie and thinks that’s what the scientists want to see? They’re even quoting lines from the Martian while they are in the simulation.
They are playing make believe. This is not science.
This seems like such an odd response to me. The Martian is as far as you can get from hard sci-fi?
It seems like Andy writes exactly for movies. Heavy on scene and technicality details, but very, very scant on quality dialogue and character development.
> Name one other thing recently on air that’s realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Person of Interest is on WP’s list of hard sci-fi, but isn’t about space. (This surprises me a little, it never struck me as accurate and I lost interest in the show fairly quickly.)
I mention that in part to call out that this thread is equating sci-fi with outer space. There are plenty of non-space scientific topics on earth that are covered in movies and TV. Making hard sci-fi only about space might be missing a general trend toward more rigor about science in general.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_science_fiction#Television
Worth noting that Expanse is not on WP’s list. Nor are Gravity, Interstellar or The Martian. Gravity is a good example of the story intentionally breaking whatever hard science might have been there.
What I do see across all the genres is a peak of interest in space between maybe 1965 and 1995. Perhaps most important is writing, short stories and novels, since those often fuel TV & films.
If I look at the trend based only on this WP page, it does look like 1990-2010 was a trough and that space is trending again.
Mostly my feelings/intuition, but here's the argument:
Name one other thing recently on air that's realistic about space while also being interesting to general audience.
Closest thing that comes to mind would be NatGeo's Mars series, but that's half documentary, half speculative concept art, and definitely very niche. Beyond that, there's nothing. Before that, we had the trio of Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian, the former two being sorta-hardish if you squint hard enough. And before we had 2001: A Space Odyssey, and that's it.
It's difficult to make a space show that's both true to physics and fun/engaging at the same time. Most authors don't bother with "true to physics" part. The Expanse succeeded at both, because an excellent team took great source-material and expanded on it, instead of butchering it like usually happens. The result was a show that was interesting to non-space geeks, that still gave accurate picture of how space works. If someone asked you, "I wonder why they're doing X", or "I wonder why they didn't do Y", your answer would likely contain some explanation of real-world physics. This is how you give regular people intuition about concepts they're not encountering daily.
So yeah, losing the only show about near-future space exploration that's both engaging and highly realistic - I think it's a bad day for both science outreach and science fiction.
On the other hand, I read the book before seeing the film and wish I had done it the other way around. Same case with The Martian too - I found myself distractedly comparing notes (in my head) too often while watching.
Perhaps the one book-then-movie reading/viewing sequence I'm happy with was Casino Royale. It was a good faithfully-gritty adaptation.
12 Monkeys - Travelling back in time to try and track the outbreak of a virus that wipes out most of humanity.
The Abyss - Survival and discovery on a deep water mining platform.
Apollo 13 - Look at the rescue efforts of this historical NASA moon mission. (Does it count as sci-fi?)
The Dish - Also not quite sci-fi, but a comedy about Australia's involvement in the first moon landing.
Battle for Terra - Surprisingly good animated movie about invading aliens.
District 9 - Alien refugee camp in Johannesburg.
Gravity - Astronaut stranded in orbit, trying to get back to Earth.
The Martian - Survival and rescue of a lone astronaut stranded on Mars.
Moon - After a serious accident, a solitary worker on the Moon discovers a conspiracy.
Oblivion - A veteran assigned to extract Earth's remaining resources begins to question what he knows about his mission and himself.
Predator - The classic that launched the franchise.
Predestination - Faithful adaptation of Heinlein's short story, "All You Zombies."
The Prestige - Some minor sci-fi elements. At the end of the Nineteenth Century in London, two stage magicians engage in a battle to create the ultimate illusion whilst sacrificing everything they have to outwit the other.
Source Code - Using limited time-travel to try and get information to stop a second, larger terrorist attack.
WALL E - In the distant future, a small waste-collecting robot inadvertently embarks on a space journey that will ultimately decide the fate of mankind.
The lack of vehicles for SF delivery have at times impeded literary acceptance and broader adoption -- take H.P. Lovecraft for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Literary
Format adaptations have catapulted some great SF into the pop culture stardom:
The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, and though looked upon favorably, it is rarely mentioned today without also mentioning the 1938 radio broadcast.
The Wizard of Oz (Baum 1900) is more famous for its 1939 film.
In more modern times, Johnny Mnemonic (1995 film from "Burning Chrome", Gibson 1986), Snowpiercer (2013 film from "Le Transperceneige", Lob and Rochette 1982), and The Martian (2015 film from "The Martian", Weir 2011) have all increased SF visibility through film adaptations.
Without format shift, would general SF readers have pursued these works independent from the film? Probably. Would these works have entered pop culture and have been sought by the everyman, even the ones who don't routinely buy books or enjoy reading? Less likely.
TBH, the masses know The Expanse mostly from TV show. But the show indeed is good, and while it has some differences from the books, it mostly stays true to science, even in very minor VFX details.
This is an unpopular opinion, because I've seen here how people like to hate on Gravity and stuff, but I feel like we're seeing a new trend in sci-fi movies/shows - Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and now The Expanse, despite their various levels of science/plot tradeoffs, all are much more faithful to physics than what came before (with a honourable exception of Space Odyssey), and they do a great job at showing you can have a great sci-fi appealing to general population that sticks to how real space travel works.
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That saids, The Expanse novels are 11/10 Even Better Than On TV, and I highly recommend them. Can't wait for the next one coming out soon(ish).
"The Martian" is really good book, and I loved the movie. I am looking forward to Andy Weir's new book. But ... I wouldn't put "The Martian" in the scifi AI category.
Andy Weir's "The Martian" is my favourite book. I've read it about 5 times, and I've never read a book twice before. The movie was a decent adaptation, but it's not near the quality that the book was.
It's half novel, half related series of 9 short stories, but Accelerando is great. The Martian by Andy Weir (movie based on it) was quite good. Daemon I think also qualifies, though it's SF dressed up as a thriller. Oh, Blood Music by Greg Bear probably counts? Except maybe the ending?
Tempted to mention The Diamond Age, but not sure that qualifies as "Hard", though closer than some other Stephenson maybe...
I think it's a stretch by far to call either Interstellar or 2001: A Space Odyssey most scientifically accurate movie. Using a correct simulation of black hole is one thing, but this alone does not make necessarily make it very accurate. This is not the first time I am seeing this, and I don't know it pops up everywhere. There are parts in the movies which make me cringe, like bending gravity by hands inside a black hole, and giving some strange bar code. Or the highly incorrect approximation of probability from TARS. If I were to select an interesting scientifically accurate sci-fi movie, I would select martian or primer. The later is more consistent than what is evident on watching it for first time.
Based on the website address, I thought the article would be about written science fiction, which continues to move forward if you ignore recommendations from people who don't actually like science fiction. I think "The Martian" counts as moving forward, but I'm much less happy with most of the books Amazon recommends for me.
But the article is about television. I really am not qualified to say much about television other than until very recently, it was very hard to have a hit TV show that only appealed to a niche audience. A series faithfully based on "The Martian" isn't likely to get a slot in prime time. The closest you'll get is so-called soft science fiction, which presents stories that happen to be set in unfamiliar locations (usually space), but where science has no influence on the story.
Maybe there's a chance now, with a very different distribution model, but even if hard science fiction fans can be perfectly targeted through Netflix or Amazon, special effects will keep production costs high.
There is massive problem in the culture about value of sleep. The culture implicitly defines mentality where working hard without much sleep is somewhat heroic. Therefore according to the culture (again implicitly) those who sleep a lot are lazy.
Hard working heroes who sacrifice sleep from time to time displayed in popular films. Take for example three films Micro Men [1] and The Martian [2] and The Social Network [3].
In first two films, hard working heroes don't "waste" time on "useless/unproductive" sleep and instead drink lots caffeine.
In corporate culture it's often the same. Since 2006 till 2008 I worked as a technical support engineer and I often had to work at night. Sometimes, I took two hours of sleep (in an office's couch) from 4 AM till 6 AM. After these two hours of sleep I would be energized and work really productive till 9 AM. But the company decided to impose strict ban on sleeping in office and instead put coffee machine. As I expected my performance fell significantly no matter how much coffee I took. So the company put stupid discipline over actual performance.
In 2014, I had insomnia so I couldn't perform well at work (again no matter how much coffee I took). I went to corporate doctor (a doctor assigned by company). She looked at me and said that I don't have bruises under my eyes, so I'm totally fine. More than that she actually didn't take any my complaints seriously and instead assumed that I'm lazy.
Nowadays, I mostly sleep well and I almost don't drink caffeine. Sometimes, my insomnia came back. Since I participate in algorithm contests and I know very well that no matter how hard I try to work hard without enough sleep I do not perform well in algorithm contests.
The mentality that working hard is opposite to good sleep is most irrational, harmful and widespread yet very implicit thing in the culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Men
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_(film)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Network
I mostly agree with the author's premise: we need to take a step back from the digital (Internet, social media) and return to the chemical/material/physical world to drive future productivity growth. That's what drew me to research advances in the embedded industry - working with companies that fuse physical and digital in safety-critical/industrial products every day.
His 2 calls to action:
(1) for the readers of his blog to spend more time thinking about industrial problems (how to build an aircraft, run a cargo ship logistics company, "meditate on the importance of steel in the economy")
(2) for VCs and investors to fund morale-boosting celebrations of industry, such as world fairs and more movies like "The Martian".
I think #1 is unrealistic - a lot of highly-trained people get paid to do this already, and as productivity growth slows, the need for efficiency in these industrial processes has only increased. That's why the ML implications of IoT are so heavily touted by all major players across automotive, A&D, industrial automation, energy & utilities, transportation, logistics, etc. I don't think it would help much for everyone to go about their day thinking about how HVDC electricity grids work, or how gasoline is synthesized from petroleum.
I think #2 would be helpful right now given the current political/media climate, but needs to be done extremely carefully. If done quickly/wrong many would be angry - look at the latest SV and QE-funded propaganda, so out of touch with the 99% of people in the rest of the country, can't solve pressing social and economic issues so they are making up some fantasy-land "world fair" to celebrate companies and people that stand for what the majority of the country perceives as social and moral decay.
Overall I feel where the author is coming from, but I think this piece is a bit out of touch with reality - maybe hence the "optimism" bit in the title :)
On the contrary, I have been getting into modern science fiction after being raised on my dad's collection of Asimov/Clarke/Heinlein/etc. and the modern stuff is great. Check out Vernor Vinge, Greg Egan, Kim Stanley Robinson. None of that is science fantasy. If anything, I'd say that science fantasy is less popular now than it was two or three decades ago. Look at the popularity of modern TV and movies: Arrival, The Martian, Gravity, The Expanse, Interstellar. Three of those are complete hard science fiction and the others are more in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact than Star Wars.
This was the most annoying thing about the film The Martian for me.
Everyone crows about the science, but I've not heard anything about the psychological trauma someone marooned and isolated on an alien planet for several months would go through.
I imagine it would be something on a par with the Dancing plagues of Strasbourg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518
But without the cheesy disco music.
Exactly the same with my Echos.
The problem with asking these things questions when you are in a group of people is that now the whole conversation pauses to hear the damn answer. And then there is the 5-10 second processing time and the very slow non-interactive answer. It's just so much more efficient to have one of the people in the conversation whip out their phone and use Google, then say the answer when it's ready. Especially if the answer is not "Who was the start of The Martian" but something like "How closely was Lincoln the movie based on historical events?"
I will say, I also use my main Echo to play music. It is really nice that way, though song, artist, and playlist name recognition is atrocious. "Play Top Hits" and "Play Today's Top Hits" produces completely different result. Don't you know what I mean Amazon? Don't you know what I mean?
My kids (turning 4 soon) have figured out how to use it too, which is kinda neat.
I envy you. Could we import that style to Europe sooner?
The juice bottles from "The Martian" movie are the epitome of consumer product design for me:
https://media1.giphy.com/media/11bglU5OG7SJAk/giphy-facebook_s.jpg?t=1
(I apologize for the crappy image; I'm nowhere near a copy of the movie to make a decent screenshot)
No bullshit. Just the product name and necessary information about its content. No useless colors, no pictures of animals, smiling faces or other crap. There are days I dream of starting a food company just to make food in such packaging.
On a related note, I very much like the fact that "The Martian" movie uses RTG as a life saving device and the best car climate control ever. It helps with the public perception that it's not that dangerous.
I think this stems in part from the "oh I'm so bad at math" culture we have in the US, where its almost expected that most kids won't be good at mathematics. The side effect of this, imo, is that fields that are close to math or dependent on it (physics, stats, CS, etc.) pick up a piece of that stigma and idea that its acceptable to be bad at these things.
I've seen occasional articles about quants on wall street and how a good number of them are Russian/Eastern European (this kind of thing - https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-01-21/how-russia-has-lost-its-mathematical-minds-to-the-west ) and I feel this is another directly related element - having a strong math culture allows you to have a strong CS culture.
I've been happy to see that in the last decade, the US is starting to start bringing the pieces we need to get that kind of culture back - the popularity of startups and programming with the media that bring them to the attention of the average person. Space is cool again, and movies like "The Martian" are, imo, absolutely critical in making science/engineering something worth striving for. Hopefully we'll see some of this trickle down to our educational systems in the near future.
Seul sur Mars (The Martian, in French)
It is really boosting my understanding of the French language, and giving me more confidence to speak it.
It's a simple story that's easy to follow, especially having read the book in English and seen the film a couple times. And really, how lost can you get? If you can't follow a paragraph or to, chances are he'll still be stuck on Mars for a while and you won't have missed much.
It's written in an informal, conversational style, using language that real people might use. I find myself reading a phrase that translates back to a saying I've used in English. Ah, looks like they use that in French too. I'll add it to the repertoire.
I can pick it up after a while off and quickly get back in to it without explanation. Hmm... this looks like the part where the guy is stuck on mars...
And as a bonus, it's kinda hard work to read in a foreign language, so if I pick it up in bed it's guaranteed to put me to sleep inside of half an hour.
Highly recommended.
There are some books I keep coming back to when I am "feeling lost and/or hopeless", when my "back is up against the wall and/or feel cornered", when I feel like I have "hit rock bottom" or I just need to "escape reality"... This list contains books I have read/listened to more than a couple times:
!For inspiration:! 1. Loosing my virginity (Richard Branson) - Richard Branson's Autobiography. From student magazine to Virgin to crazy ballooning adventures and space! I keep coming back to this when I feel like I need a morale boost. There isn't an audible version for this book, but there is a summary-type version on Audible "Screw it, Let's do it"- does a good job curating the exciting parts.
2. The Everything Store (Brad Stone) -AMAZON and the man leading the massive team behind it. Jeff Bezos is quite easily one of the most important and influential people in the world. His relentless pursuit to build Amazon (& it's various products) amid constant setbacks, losses and naysayers... I personally use Amazon and their products every day. It's a really interesting view of how things are run backstage.
3. Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - One of the most popular books in the Valley. Almost all startup founders I have met has read this. They usually have a very polarized view of Jobs after reading this. Take the good stuff and leave out the bad/crazy. Jobs was a very polarizing person and so is his biography...This is a very long book. "The second Coming of Steve Jobs" by Alan Deutschman is another really good book and a much shorter read and not super-polarizing (leaves out some of the crazy stuff from early life). Other notable Steve Jobs books I have read & highly recommend: Becoming Steve Jobs & The Steve Jobs Way.
4. Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) -Another polarizing book. I am a Spacex & Tesla Fan-boy. I picked this up in 2015 the day it was launched! I have read this at least half a dozen times by now. Hard-work, perseverance and creativity to the max. A must read for every entrepreneur.
5. iWoz (Steve Wozniak) -If you are a technical-founder, this is a must read! Gives a very interesting view of- behind the scenes at Apple during its inception and early years. I was really moved by how humble Woz was/is and I am inspired by his problem solving approach.
6. How Google Works (Eric Schmidt, Alan Eagle & Jonathan Rosenberg) - A very good book to read after/before this: "In the Plex" by Steven Levy. Hands down the two most important / influential books while you are starting something new. I read these while I was contemplating conceiving my startup and giving up the "safety" (illusion of safety) of a "normal-job". A must read for anyone planing to start a company and want to take it to the stratosphere (or higher)!
7. Dreams from My Father (Barack Obama) - Another polarizing personality. A short but powerful memoir by Obama. This gives a unique insight into Obama's thought processes. Most people can relate to this and every "Leader" must read this. It really helps clear some of the fog on- what makes an effective leader.
!Business & Management:!
1. The Upstarts (Brad Stone) -An amazing story about AirBnB and Uber. Culture is key and culture is defined by the Founders and the first few hires. The two companies are extremely similar in many ways (timing, shared economy, disruptive) but radically different in the way they are run. This came out earlier this year and is probably one of the best "startup-books" of 2017!
2. Zero to One (Peter Thiel) -A very short book, a must read for every entrepreneur. Dives into "first principal" thinking & execution. A very good read after/before "Elon Musk" the biography by Ashlee Vance.
3. The power of Habit (Charles Duhigg) -I have always wondered how successful people get so much done. They have the same amount of time as everyone else, but they are able to get so much more done...how? This book answered that question. Ever since, I have been using "Habits" as my ultimate personal tool. Day & night difference when you figure out how habits are formed how they are broken and how you can influence the process. A good companion book (from the same author) "Smarter Faster Better".
4. How to win friends & Influence people (Dale Carnegi) - I bought this book freshman year in college. I tried reading it then and gave up / got bored after the first few pages. I really wish I had actually made an effort to read the whole thing. It sat on my shelf collecting dust. Luckily I picked up the book again and gave it another shot. I read this during a particularly "rough-patch" at our startup- really helped me cope with the "situation". What was once a boring book is now scribbled with notes, bookmarks and highlights. A very useful life-guide.
5. How to win at the Sport of Business (Mark Cuban) - A very entertaining yet eye-opening book. It is very short, finished it in a couple hours. A must read for every entrepreneur. I keep coming back to this when I feel like things are going dreadfully slow and I need a boost. If you follow Mark Cuban's blog, skip this. It is mostly a summary of his blog posts.
6. Finding the next Steve Jobs (Nolan Bushnell) - Finding good talent and retaining it is probably the single most important thing you will do as startup founders (especially if you are the CEO). Many things in this book seem obvious (if you are familiar with the Silicon-valley culture). A good read before you set out to hire your dream team of "rockstars". A good companion book: "Outliers" By Malcom Gladwell.
7. The hard thing about hard things (Ben Horowitz) -Are you in a startup? If the answer is YES, then read this NOW. Ties well with "Finding the next Steve Jobs". I wish I had read this before I started my company. I have lost track of how many times I have listened to this audio-book.
8. Start with the Why (Simon Sinek) - Mid-late 2013 I came across Simon Sinek's ted talks on the golden-circle and my mind was blown. I bought the book the very next day and I keep coming back to my notes whenever we are starting a new project. Get the "Why?" right and the product will define itself. This is true for building companies as it is for building great products. A must read for every entrepreneur.
9. Art of the Start (Guy Kawasaki) -Getting ready to pitch? read this! Also watch Guy's many presentations/talks on YouTube. A good companion book- "Pitch Anything" By Oren Klaff
!Escaping Reality! 1. Hatching Twitter (Nick Bilton) -Sooooo much drama! Definitely learnt what not to do! Very interesting read.
2. The accidental Billionaires (Ben Mezrcih) -I have heard that not everything in this book is "completely-true" (more distorted than others...) but still a great read!
3. The Martian (Andy Weir) - Hands down the best science fiction book I have read. I have lost count how many times I have listened to the audio-book (probably >15). I want to go to MARS!
4. Harry Potter Series. -My go-to "background noise". I read the books as a kid. I use the audio-books to tune out the world when working on stuff that does not require my full attention (Listening Goblet of Fire as I type this)...
5. Jurassic Park || The Lost world (Michael Crichton) - Read the books as a kid. I usually listen to it while I am traveling. Still gets me as excited as it did when I first read the book. (The movies are nothing compared to the book...)
6. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) - I am looking forward to reading the entire series. Read it once, listened to it many times (lost count). I love Space!
7. Ready Player One (Ernest Cline) -I picked this book up while I was working on a VR project back in 2014. An excellent book for re-reads and a nice place to get some inspiration.
!Other honorable mentions:! Actionable Gamification (Yu-Kai Chou) I invented the Modern Age (Richard Snow) Inside the tornado (Geoffrey Moore) Jony Ive (Leander Kahney) Sprint (Jake Knapp) The lean startup (Eric Ries) The selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins) Titan (Ron Chernow) The inevitable (Kevin Kelly) The Innovators (Walter Isaacson) Scrum (Jeff Sutherland)
!Most if not all have an audio-book version!
If you are in a startup or plan to start one soon, reading/listening to books should become a routine. I try to get through at least one book a week, sometimes two.
Good luck!
That was one of the two things the author used artistic license on, the other one being unrealistically good radiation shielding on Hermes. The movie took at least one other liberty with science - they explicitly decided to ignore lower martian gravity, as they would make shots much more difficult/expensive, for (in their opinion) little added value.
KSP was possibly my best entertainment spending ever. It definitely is the best game for me in terms of costs / time played. If you haven't played it yet, do yourself a favour and buy it now. If you have a kid with even tangential interest in space, get a copy for them.
Side effects of playing KSP include:
- getting an intuitive feel for basic orbital mechanics
- finding yourself reading up on actual math to better understand what's happening with your rockets (and how to build more efficient one)
- no longer being able to watch most space movies due to frustration caused by the filmmakers not grokking basic orbital physics
(RE the last point - after Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian and The Expanse series, getting basic spaceflight wrong should no longer be accepted in popular media. Looking at you, makers of The 100.)
But Martian movie made more than the money spent on it.
The phrase "cost to make" is a problem here. Most of the millions in movies are spent to claim a share of a fixed-size amount of our collective attention. You could "make" an identical video artifact for a small fraction of The Martian's budget. It just wouldn't get seen.
No offense to the Martian mission but I probably got better enjoyment and insight out of the movie so far than the actual mission. Not that it is or should be the only metric, but is the metric that matters to me today.
I know, I saw Matt Daemon grow potatoes on Mars in an in-flight documentary called "The Martian".
PG-13 movies are allowed two uses of the word "fuck." The Martian had Matt Damon use them fairly early on, first, when Watney yanks the piece of the antenna out of himself ("FUCK!"), and second, when he makes up his mind to survive ("Fuck you, Mars"). They allude to its use in many other places, though, such as the memorable shot from outside the Rover where you can clearly see his lips saying "What the fuck? What the fuck?" Then there was some "censored" text in the chat logs, a reference to Watney telling the botanists to "have sex with themselves," and so forth.
You're right. But I did enjoy movies like The Martian (2015), and Gravity (2013).
I did mention that we're supposedly going to get some big-budget sci-fi movies this year, but that's only just this year, and also this year has only started, so there's no guarantee it'll happen. Where have all these movies been for the past 15 years or so? The only ones I can think of are a couple of Tom Cruise movies (ugh), Prometheus (based on 1970s franchise), and The Martian. Given the easy availability of CGI, it's really curious why there's been such a dearth of space-based sci-fi, and personally I think it's because our society has basically lost all the optimism it had back in the 60s-80s.
Consider 8 had a $306,000,000 budget, 9 had a $200,000,000 budget. I have no problem saying it was profitable, but so was The Land Before Time 9. When a movie pulls in ~1/2 has much as the previous film it's a sign.
http://www.the-numbers.com/market/2016/top-grossing-movies
Just looking domestically we have Finding Dory (squeal), Rogue One (franchise), Captain America: Civil War (squeal), The Secret Life of Pets (kids movie), The Jungle Book (kids movie), Deadpool (franchise), Zootopia (kids movie), Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (franchise), Suicide Squad (franchise), Doctor Strange (franchise), Moana (kids movie) etc. Down at #14 The Revenant was at least nominally an original movie, though very similar to several other films.
I don't think any of these where bad for what they where, but there was nothing new for the 14-40 group. 2015 had #6 American Sniper, #9 The Martian, but was again mostly rehashed movies until #17.
Gravity was spectacular in 3D, but I have a much larger list of films (many of which aren't great) that have immersive and not distracting 3D. Off the top of my head:
Life of Pi
Pretty much every Marvel movie
The new Star Trek films
Star Wars: Episode VII
The Martian
The Hobbit films
How to Train Your Dragon and sequel
Finding Dory
The LEGO Movie
I've certainly seen movies where that was the case, but The Martian in 3D was amazing. I also thoroughly enjoyed Doctor Strange 3D, though that was on IMAX laser projectors, which are amazing by themselves.
Well I guess there are different kinds of science fiction - sci-fi that's obviously fiction and doesn't try to pretend to be realistic - Alien, Star Wars, etc. - I'm fine with this - it's just the author taking you in to his own fantasy world - just like Game of Thrones doesn't try to describe how dragons get to be aerodynamic or explain the white walkers superior strength by using dumbed down science.
Then there's Sci-Fi that's actually beleivable - like The Martian - I'm OK with this as well.
But then there's this pseudo-sciency trying to look serious while actually being BS part like Interstellar, The Arrival, etc. The main point of science there is not to be a fictional setting but trying to give a feeling of realism trough sci/techbabble. I don't even mind cheap sci-fi drama movies, for example I liked The Fountain, but when they try to pretend they are realistic that's what breaks the immersion for me completely because I start to critically evaluate the plot and it just falls apart.
Yes, the book is great.
The movie had other good things, like PVS/Lisp code in a spaceship ;-)
http://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/115255/what-programming-language-is-used-in-the-martian
https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/3nnvnp/fluff_anyone_else_notice_lisp_in_some_of_the_code/
https://github.com/nasa/pvslib/blob/master/power/exponentiation_aux.prf
On a side note, I'm guessing many of us have seen the movie "The Martian", but whether you enjoyed it or not, I would highly recommend the novel. The detail that goes into how he survives is amazing, which is somewhat missing in the film.
Don't get what's "great" about these movies. According to IMDb, the ratings are: Synchronicity: 5.5 Lazer Team: 5.7 Southbound: 5.9 The Witch: 6.7 10 Cloverfield Lane: 7.3 Midnight Special: 6.7 The Lobster: 7.1 Hardcore Henry: 6.8 Elstree 1976: 6.1 High-Rise: 5.7 TMNT: Out of the Shadows: 6.0 Swiss Army Man: 7.1 Kubo and the two strings: 8.1
Surprised I didn't see any of the following on that list: ARQ (6.4), Project Almanac (6.4), Self/Less (6.5), Chappie (6.9), Star Trek: Beyond (7.2), Ex Machina (7.7), Train to Busan (7.6), The Martian (8.0).
> But you will go to the movie anyway, fully knowing that it will not meet your expectations... ;)
Yes :( Same with the Martian. The movie was good, but the book was just fantastic.
I did, just saw the film last night.
This is a rare case where the film has preserved the feeling and the central concept of the story fairly well, but the film changes the plot significantly in order to do it. I wasn't entirely able to predict the plot as it unfolded based on prior knowledge of the written version, unlike with The Martian.
I still like the written story better, but the movie stands on its own as a great movie, and I'm happy with their take on trying to tell the same story a different way.
A bit weird, once the article loaded it automatically scrolled me to the end for some reason.
The article strikes me as a bit unfocused. Although I only skimmed it.
I've personally grown a bit tired of most TV shows and movies. I still consume my fair share of media, but I've slowly been shifting my focus more towards book series (or more specifically, audiobooks). I'm not interested in watching TV shows that don't have an overarching plot or direction, with the major example of this being Lost. So far my experience has been that you tend to get a more cohesive story.
If you've grown weary of watching TV, I'd suggest trying out audiobooks. You can even listen to em while you're out walking about, driving, or eating alone. I've had an Audible subscription for a few years now, and I seriously love it. Maybe I still have really shallow tastes, but so far I've found that if you pick up any book with a few thousand ratings and 4 to 5 stars, it'll probably be really good.
With that said, I'm a huge sucker for movie adaptations and I'd probably watch the adaptation for most of the books I've read. Even though they'll often butcher huge parts of the story (totally understandable, different mediums), it's really enjoyable to contrast your own imagination with that of the creative staff in the production. The most recent example of this for me was The Martian. My mental image of the main character was consistent while I read the book, but when I watched the movie I realized I hadn't accounted for the fact that he was starving.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
One reason this may be interesting to HN readers: There are many stories, and I'd even say it's well established, that Hollywood films are edited to please Chinese censors. Effectively, the Chinese government censors many U.S. movies.
For example, per a recent NY Times story, the head of Disney went to China and apologized to the government for "Kundun" (about the Dalai Lama) and promised they'd never make another film like it.[0] When was the list time you saw a Hollywood film critical in any way of China? I've read about many recent script adjustments: For example, the Mandarin in the recent Iran Man movie being changed to a non-Chinese character, or the gratuitous product placement of the Chinese space agency in The Martian.
Now a leading Chinese businessperson, who regardless of his views (I don't know either way) is subject to pressure from the Chinese government, has a seat on the board of Spielberg's enterprise.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/business/international/china-disney.html
Coincidentally, I'm watching The Martian right now after reading the book last week. I have to agree, the movie just does not capture the same sense of surprise and careful attention to detail as described in the book. The sets are nice though, and it's pretty cool to see how the production team visualized the scenes and hardware compared to how I had imagined them. Seems like there could be some scientific inaccuracies too (e.g. hab repairs with only hardware store plastic film and duct tape).
Overall, I'd say Interstellar works much better in movie form, although perhaps that is partly due to the scale of the concepts it employs compared to The Martian, which is smaller and more technical.
For some reason I didn't really like The Martian (as in the movie). I guess after having read the book there just wasn't any surprise left, and I felt that this sort of story just works much better in book form. I prefer Europa Report over it. IMO Interstellar is the big popularizer of hard sci-fi though, or wouldn't you put it in that category? For me it took its liberties in just the right places where it's justified due to lack of more knowledge.
That was a great hard scifi movie. I hope with that and The Martian, hard sci fi in film becomes very popular.
At home when I'm all plugged in, I have 3 Chrome windows, each with multiple tabs, spread across my PLP setup. Whenever I pop into a client, and awake from sleep, you can almost see the battery draining in real time. Edge to the rescue; and I'm glad they're putting the pressure on Google to do better.
Pro Tip: You think Edge saves your battery? Sheeeeit....Try using the Movies & TV app vs VLC someday. M&TV is a certified power miser - I caught up on several TV shows plus The Martian on a flight from Montego Bay to Frankfurt a few months ago, using my Toshiba Encore 10" tablet that isn't exactly known for its battery life.
An old and maybe not terribly popular one is Enemy Mine. There are bad guys, but they're humans, and they only play a role near the end. But they aren't primary to the story. It's mostly a story of two people thrown together in a shitty situation and learning to get along despite their initial hatred for each other.
There are lots of scifi movies where the story only barely, rather than primarily, deals with the idea of good guys versus bad guys, if it puts them together directly at all. Moon, The Martian, Gravity are recent ones. Interstellar, in its way.
Less true of fantasy which pulls its stories from the idea of grand epics with noble warriors fighting monsters and villains.
Action movies without an idea of good guy and bad guy is a challenge. Maybe I'll think of one while I lie in bed tonight but off the top of my head there aren't any occurring to me.
Nice to read about a new breakthrough in botany. The field doesn't get much attention at all. Maybe now it will benefit from the popularity of Martian, the movie.
OK well give your responses and time to think about it, yes I suppose in the back of my head I am thinking "what the?".
If I was at MIT I would want the speech to be from someone respected for their achievement in the world of intellectual endeavor.
It feels like it cheapens the institution to bring in an actor.
Now I will say I like Matt Damon's acting, and as far as Hollywood stars go, he comes across to me as if not the smartest, then one of the smartest, and that is certainly something to offset the cheapening of the MIT address.
My original observation remains the same though - actors are at the top of our society in terms of the amount of attention and adoration given by the community, sports stars a close second.
And may I say "The Martian" ..... well no-one does onscreen intellect/science like Matt Damon. What a great movie.
I think maybe somewhere deep down the thing that bothers me about this is that MIT is saying in an indirect way "if you can act really smart then you are on equal footing with people who are really smart". i.e. we value "the appearance of smart".
I thought I was the only one.. yes. Up - it said more emotionally in those first 10 moments with no dialog than most movies do in 2 hours.
The recent Jungle Book was similar, my eyes were misty the whole movie. The Martian had similar effects.
I hardly ever cry otherwise.
Given Elon's sense of humor I'm guessing these 'red dragons' would have a bunch of instruments to insure the mission success and collect data on the environment around them, and to have something like several boxes of vegetable seeds or hard candy. Basically something that a future visitor would enjoy having and might not have thought to bring along. If he was a fan of the Martian if could be a flash drive with movies and music.
>But it adds to this a pinch of glib frivolity and a dash of unembarrassed ignorance. Its rhetorical tics include a forced enthusiasm (a search on Twitter for the hashtag “#sciencedancing” speaks volumes) and a penchant for profanity. Here in Silicon Valley, one can scarcely go a day without seeing a t-shirt reading “Science: It works, b—es!” The hero of the recent popular movie The Martian boasts that he will “science the sh— out of” a situation. One of the largest groups on Facebook is titled “I f—ing love Science!” (a name which, combined with the group’s penchant for posting scarcely any actual scientific material but a lot of pictures of natural phenomena, has prompted more than one actual scientist of my acquaintance to mutter under her breath, “What you truly love is pictures”). Some of the Cult’s leaders like to play dress-up as scientists—Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson are two particularly prominent examples— but hardly any of them have contributed any research results of note. Rather, Cult leadership trends heavily in the direction of educators, popularizers, and journalists.
As much as I think the essay is great, this paragraph is a terrible ad-hominem argument for the existence of a "cult of science" or why it is dangerous. It doesn't matter if people wear xkcd shirts, Matt Damon uses profanity with "science", or if people like a facebook page. Laypeople having fun with "science" does not make a cult. A better argument would be to show how people cargo-cult science, and why it causes problems with science. The author fails to do both.
IFL is dangerous not because it is only pictures of scientific phenomena, but that bullshit is constantly posted on the page to be consumed by laypeople. The cult of science is dangerous because it has failed to teach people how to properly evaluate claims, and believe anything with the word "study" in it. Woo-pushers have appropriated the vocabulary of science indistinguishable to a layperson. Andrew Wakefield resurrected long dead pandemics by falsely publishing in the Lancet. This is what makes the cult of science dangerous, not the word "bitches".
The Martian isn't scientifically accurate, though it's closer than a lot of other stuff. The entire plot device of the storm at the beginning, needed to give a reason for Watney to be abandoned on Mars, was total hogwash: Mars doesn't have an atmosphere thick enough for that. Some other things were questionable too, like the rescue at the end.
Personally, I'd like to see some more movies that really are scientifically accurate, about things in space near the Earth, perhaps one set on the Moon showing a colony there used for asteroid mining and ore refining.
Oh, I know that, and I love the book and movie, I just thought that it was ironic that it was a talk with Andy Weir.
As science progresses, he could in fact publish new editions of "The Martian" with the relevant stuff corrected, a la Ridley Scott's numerous editions of Blade Runner, or, God forbid, Lucas' editions of Star Wars.
If you haven't yet, listen to one of the recent episodes of Star Talk Radio (Season 7, Episodes 4). They have Any Weir, author of "The Martian", and Dr. Jim Green, Director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division. Dr. Green describes how they now think extracting water from the Martian soil may be as simple as heating up soil. Supposedly, the Martian soil contains roughly 35 liters of water for every cubic meter of soil.
The selection on Netflix started out bad years ago and declined from there. I've started using VidAngel for almost all of my movie streaming lately. They've got a great selection of movies/shows including new releases (e.g., The Martian, The Big Short, The Good Dinosaur, etc.) that I can stream for $1 (or keep if I prefer). The filtering is a nice bonus (no more JarJar Binks). They even have a "Not on Netflix" section.
I realize that the above sounds like an advertisement. It's not meant to, I truly use it daily.
http://www.vidangel.com (naked link) or https://www.vidangel.com?vip=c5smk9fr71 (referral link)
I expect that enabling custom categories could lead to this being useful in ways that you'd never expect. For example, people with misophonia HATE the sound of people chewing loudly. It's not uncommon (the misophonia subreddit has 8,000 subscribers). I'd love to use your filter to mute the audio (and simultaneously turn on the subtitles, if possible) when there are misophonia triggers in movies. People with misophonia are already interested in movie warnings for this (e.g. the subreddit had several high profile warnings about the triggers in The Martian).
If misophonia is a possible useful application of custom categories, there might be many others.
This is awesome. I love that there is more and more interest in space exploration lately. Hopefully real life events will soon inspire beyond what recent movies like Interstellar and the Martian have shown us.
> Apple guilty for the high-tech employment agreements, but not for working to make the same terms for their e-book store with all the publishers.
Sorry, you have it all wrong. This isn't about Apple giving the same deal to all publishers. This was about Apple convincing all publishers to give all other retailers the same deal as Apple -- and all at the same time, as a single group across essentially the entire industry, thus resulting in price fixing and price increases.
Imagine the absurdity if the manufacturer of a car (motor vehicle) could dictate the terms at which their cars were sold by all retailers. Essentially, the manufacturer exclusively determines the price that all auto sellers must charge. Does that analogy make better sense? No car dealership can offer a discount because the manufacturer has exclusive control.
Then imagine that it's not just one auto manufacturer: it's all of them, all at once. That's what happened with ebooks - virtually the entire industry colluded. It's not just working to get the same terms for their publishers, it was also getting those publishers to, in concert all with each other, force all of their retailers to do the same thing. Only with the collusion of a cartel could they have achieved this, and the result was illegal price-fixing that harmed consumers.
Competitors are not allowed to collude, and not allowed to collude to raise prices. Competitors have no legitimate business to meet and discuss with each other and make agreements about what price they'll all offer together, as that's an illegal cartel, yet that's what happened as a result of the conspiracy that Apple led.
> The publishers did raise prices, but they just wanted for the possibility to do so anyway
Publishers always had control over the price at which they sold their books to retailers. They just did not have control over the price at which those retailers subsequently resold them to consumers. And why should they? When books were historically sold at wholesale price for 50% of their retail price, why should a publisher stop a retailer from competing on price, by offering (say) a 190% markup rather than 200%, if the retailer has a more efficient operation? Once the book is "handed off" from the publishers to the retailer, what legitimate reason is for the publisher to control that transitive resale -- and why should the publisher have control over all of those resales among all retailers? That is the cartel that Apple brought about.
Imagine if the manufacturer of a toothbrush had the power to force all stores that sell it to have the same price. Why should they have that power? Why can't stores offer a discount if they have a more efficient supply chain, or more insightful pricing strategy? And then suddenly all toothbrush manufacturers in the entire industry did the same thing at the same time? I hope this paints a better picture of what happened with Apple and ebooks, and the reason why they were convicted of illegal collusion to fix prices.
The true reality of the situation, in my opinion, is that with the advent of the Internet, the incremental value of publishing has begun to drop. Authors are increasingly required to deliver fully complete and ready-to-publish manuscripts, rather than handing off a draft to the publisher for editing and typesetting. Furthermore, individual authors are better able to market themselves and generate interest online than in the older days when advertising had a higher cost, and required printing a large order of books up front and buying retail space. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper for authors to offer books online themselves. Consider what's happened with books like The Martian: it was (as I understand it) self-published as an ebook, and then gained a following, and eventually Hollywood bought the film rights. The value added by a publisher diminishes if they're not printing and distributing your physical book - they become a publicist. So, publishers saw the reality for what it was, and saw that their industry was all trending toward undifferentiated "perfect competition". They reacted to the situation by cooking up a collusion across the industry to conspire to keep prices artificially higher than they otherwise would have been, using the combined market power of their collusion to bring it about.
At least in The Martian book/movie there is something about the topic.
I recently read "The Martian" and was impressed at some of the creativity and attention to detail.
(Not seen the film, so I've no idea how well that compares.)
There was a story published about that potential rescue mission recently [1]. Briefly stated, the complexity involved in getting Atlantis up there in time to rescue the Columbia crew members makes the rescue plans depicted in the book/movie The Martian (the Iris probe, and the Rich Purnell Maneuver) look completely safe and sane. Any delay at all in getting Atlantis up would probably have made it too late for the Columbia crew, as their lithium hydroxide canisters would have run out and they would have choked to death on their own CO2. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board came to similar conclusions in their own report [2].
It would have made for great drama. But either having Atlantis get up there too late to save the Columbia crew, or, even worse, losing Atlantis as well, would have been a PR disaster from which NASA might well not have recovered. Hell, they barely recovered from Columbia as it is.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/02/the-audacious-rescue-plan-that-might-have-saved-space-shuttle-columbia/
[2] http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/caib/html/start.html
After watching the movie, "The Martian," I wondered why anyone would want to live there... at least the first 1,000s of people.
It's not hospitable to humans and we as humans will need to create a vaccuum tube like city that if penetrated could kill all who lived in it.
This thought might be way off per seeing one movie, so I'd love to hear someone tell me otherwise..... like why inhabiting a inhospitable planet to humans is a good idea.
The main issue with ads is message saturation. Like how my wife decided to buy me (for xmas) Star Wars tix so we could both go see it.
Yes, I thought it was ok, but she had to hire a babysitter and in the end, if I'd been asked prior, I would've said no, or asked for a better movie (like The Martian).
I have the feeling ads almost always sell you something you'd have been better off not buying anyway.
Haven't watched Interstellar. But Gravity is a (bad) joke of a movie, both from a scientific standpoint and as a movie in general. It's just a bad space action movie with very cool CGI. You say "there are some issues with" - no, the whole thing is a mess. They're using spacesuit rockets or a fire extinguisher to move between orbits that are extremely far apart, this is a physical impossibility that is central to the plot. But it managed to make me furious from the very first scene, with three people outside the spaceship during an EVA, and Clooney floating playfully around the spaceship, untethered. This is reducing the majesty and terribly unforgiving nature of space to a kindergarten playground.
Same feeling for "The Martian". The Martian base and the spaceships look like youth hostels, the astronauts an unruly bunch, but more than everything, there is no feeling whatsoever that we're looking at people dealing with something alien. It's the usual ingenuous american guy playfully overcoming difficulties that end up looking more or less trivial, like traversing hundreds of kms of Martian desert, growing potatoes (under artificial light!), surviving a Martian night while unconscious with no protection from the cold... Just have a look at the Martian landscape as depicted in the movie:
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/martian-gallery2-gallery-image_0.jpg
(hint: like a holiday destination in a hazy day) and at how it looks for real:
http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA18614.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/03Q5l.jpg
I need to rewatch Primer - it managed to twist my mind into a knot, so I honestly say I didn't understand much of what was happening. Moon is on my list, of Pandorum I haven't heard. Thanks for the titles, I'll definitely see them :).
RE shortening, I remember watching Ender's Game and leaving cinema angry, because the movie had compressed the book so much that I felt it won't make any sense for a person who hadn't read the novel. I now imagine that the Martian may have seemed similarly poor to you because of that. If you happen to read the book and find the text being crap, please get back to me, I'd really like to hear your perspective.
We, or rather - some of us - are talking not books, but book+movie combo. The Martian was quite a thing among space geeks even before the movie was announced, and doubly so after the story broke - so, like me, they probably implicitly assume others read the original too. I guess it's a lesson for me for the future, to bring up explicitly whether one had or had not read the book :).
You're right, I haven't read the book, the movie was my first exposure to this (unfortunately apparently?). To say it compresses it strongly better words so many of my issues with the movie than I could have put it. (in that it seemed like a series of set pieces attached together by musical interludes; echoing your lack of character development as well)
To answer the question from your other post, my "holy trinity" is Primer, Moon, Pandorum. (the first two on a pedestal above the third, but the third manages to fit in being an "action" movie without going too far down that road such that I can't but love it.)
If we're talking books, that's an entirely different discussion, and seems to be the one most people want to have when bringing up The Martian. I've certainly felt the same about some of my favorites. (I recall the whisper of a Foundation movie that made me want to run and hide)
Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades?
Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera).
Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too).
And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.)
--
> Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard.
Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards.
> Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component
Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense.
And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible...
http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-review.html
I'm really sorry you didn't enjoy the Martian but they specifically introduced his character to be like that to the point the other astronauts talk about his personality.
Don't forget that he was on his own with a big delay in communication. So from a science perspective, he's talking to himself so why would he be formal checklist guy, and from a movie perspective they have switched the inner monologue of the character to be an external one into a 'video diary' to make the story watchable. It's a story telling device.
While there are movies deserving of ire the Martian isn't one of them and definitely not for the yelling and screaming.
I'm kind of surprised by you're not liking the martian. Have you read the book? I read the book (but haven't seen the movie yet) and its definitely on of the harder sci-fi books I've ever read. With the exception of the flexibility of space suits and problems with a benzene reaction, the physics, chemistry and biology are pretty good. Maybe this didn't translate to the movie as well (which might have been nigh impossible) or was glossed over in an unsatisfactory way.
And as for the astronauts, I've actually heard that astronauts find the attitudes reflected exactly right. All from a guy who didn't know any.
>I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?
Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations)
Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.
I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper.
A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard. Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
Oh boy, you fucked up now. Here are the books I read this past year that I felt were "Good", starting from the most recent :
To Kill A Mocking Bird (Insanely good)
True Grit (Insanely good)
The Little Friend (Good)
Priceless (Very good, about art theft)
The Secret History (Insanely good)
Ready Player One (Good, nerdy)
Shadow Divers (Very good, history nerd book)
Diary of Anne Frank (Very good)
Unbroken (Very good, way better than the movie)
With The Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (Very good)
Seveneves (good, but I'm a Stephenson fanboy)
The Martian (Very good, but just watch the movie).
I read a bunch of other stuff, but that's what I found really "good" this past year.
Dunno why your post was tagged as [dead], I vouched for it to un-[dead] it. You make some reasonable points. Indeed the book isn't going to win the Man Booker Prize or a Nobel Prize for literature, but it's a fun fast read. At least that was the case for me and that was back when the story was available free on Weir's website and as a 99p download for the Kindle in early 2013.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130115160130/http://www.galactanet.com/writing.html
I was very pleased for Andy when he got picked up by a publisher, it's nice to see an amateur author get some recognition for their writing passion, and even more pleased when I found out Ridley Scott was going to make a movie.
I've read a lot of SciFi over the years (including many 600-1000 page tomes by popular authors where I wished I could get the time back) and whilst Andy Weir isn't quite in the same league as Iain Banks or Alastair Reynolds (who incidentally have a a few duffers in print), there's space for The Martian, even if the character of Mark Watney is a wee bit two dimensional. Not everyone might like the diary/blog style of the writing, but I think it works fine, and is a good enough way of writing up Watney's challenges and solutions.
The Martian is an ok fun read and I don't think reviewers really need to come over all "literary critic" because it is what it is, a "Boy's Own" adventure on Mars solving problems with sticky tape, human poo, potatoes and other odds and ends.
At least, not on HN. However, would you put The Martian almost on par with 2001? Would you rate it more than Blade Runner? I wouldn't do either, no way.
If you interpret the rating as probability of that a randomly selected person will enjoy the movie then yes. I would probably rate it higher than both.
To be honest, I preferred the martian to 2001. Might have just been the mindset that I watched 2001 in, but it felt the like 3 or 4 films in one and sort of dragged.
Although I would rate Blade Runner higher than the martian. Your mileage may vary, one size does not fit all etc etc.
De gustibus non est disputandum. At least, not on HN. However, would you put The Martian almost on par with 2001? Would you rate it more than Blade Runner? I wouldn't do either, no way.
As for the video games space, well, I don't know it enough. But I suppose you could argue that video games are different from movies in that they require a much higher level of engagement, both in terms of time and concentration - not to mention the monetary investment. So it is reasonable that they are evaluated more thoroughly by their users and that whatever hype surrounds them has a lower impact of their final rating.
You select some odd movies to pick on. 2001 was a classic. Sure, for viewing it as a modern audience it has way too many issues to score anywhere near a 90, but for its time the score was more than warranted.
The Martian I haven't seen yet, but according to general consensus it seems to be pretty good.
Blade Runner is another classic, the fact that it didn't score in the 90's is surprising.
Some people didn't like Gravity at all, but I really did. I would easily have given it a 90 myself.
I thought the Martian was excellent. You'll notice that the user-rated % is higher than the critics, at 94%.
From the video game aggregation space, you tend to see the type of thing you're suggesting (games that are big-budget-questionably-reviewed) have _much_ lower user-scores than critics. I would be surprised if user-rated movies was different.
The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that - I suspect- the studios are perfectly able to influence the professional reviewers. Or, more probably, professional reviewers adjust their expectations and judgments on the type of movie they're reviewing. The end result is that every recent shiny pile-of-crap produced by Hollywood gets enthusiastic reviews and therefore excellent scores on RT.
Gravity: RT score 97%
2001 A Space Odissey: RT score 96%
The Martian: RT score 93%
Blade Runner: RT score 89%
If you're looking for an alternative, I use http://www.criticker.com. It calculates expected movie ratings based on your previous ratings, it's a much better way to decide what's worth seeing and what is not.
7.0 on IMDB and 69% on CSFD (the Czech IMDB equivalent). They both have a big number of viewers rating and a 100 point scale, I find them pretty accurate, which always baffles me given how subjective the questions "Do you like the movie" is. Although blockbusters might be overrated (like the Martian), I can always see why that is the case and the error isn't similar to "95% vs god awful".
Overall, The Martian got the science pretty close to right and avoided the pitfall of turning astronauts into psychopaths or portraying NASA as a bunch of uniformly suited nerds with pocket protectors. There are nits to be picked, of course. Martian gravity was not accurately portrayed for obvious reasons of cost. Winds are portrayed as having orders of magnitude more force than they would in Martian atmosphere, but it's hard to make the setup work without that. I can live with that.
The one thing that actually bothered me because it was a simple, dumb, mistake that had no real purpose or advantage for the film-makers was this: The units used are all metric, as you'd expect for NASA, except for pressure, which is reported in psi on multiple interface screens and the hab cam dash. Miles were also used in dialogue, but you can sort of justify NASA using miles to communicate with the American public. Myanmar and Liberia will probably abandon imperial before the U.S. finally does.
Here's an interview with Territory about the movie.
https://medium.com/@HcSwahn_86152/ui-stories-the-martian-efffa28e1a98
Copyright prevents creative impersonation. If I take your creative work and try to pass it off as my own--whether for profit, reputation, etc.--copyright gives you a legal tool to stop me.
Without it, anyone could get away with pretending to have done anyone else's creative work.
To illustrate with a recent example, Andy Weir wrote "The Martian," and distributed it online for free, originally. Without copyright, Crown books could have copied the text, put a different author name on it, sold thousands of copies and kept every dime. Same with the movie--they could have just copied the story and made a movie without paying Andy anything.
For what it's worth, and having read the book, I went to the movie knowing that a few of the key plot points were based on dubious science. But I still enjoyed myself quite a bit. I had to go to a 3D showing, and that was very distracting. In 3D, a lot of the beautiful Martian landscapes looked distinctly odd, with the little rover sticking out as looking very toy-like, like those tilt/shift photos you see that deliberately make a real scene look like a model. While the 3D effect on the "beauty pass" shots of the spacecrafts were gorgeous, the effect of being, apparently, inches from Jeff Daniels' age-spotted forehead was much less so. So personally I'd recommend the plain old 2D version.
In the movie "The Martian" (not a spoiler), there is a part where they describe Mars as international waters. I think it is a pretty interesting take on the subject: "There’s an international treaty (the Outer Space Treaty signed by the US and Soviet Union in 1967) saying no country can lay claim to anything that’s not Earth. And by another treaty, if you’re not in any country’s territory, maritime law applies. So Mars is “international waters.” NASA is an American nonmilitary organization, and it owns the Hab. So while I’m in the Hab, American law applies. As soon as I step outside, I’m in international waters. Then when I get in the rover, I’m back to American law."
If and when this becomes a legitimate issue, it will be interesting to see who claims what, or if it will be it's own independent place.
And yet, many movies and TV shows (including premium TV that features no commercials) feature some level of placements from advertisers, be it subtle or obvious. And everything falls victim; even The Martian has a plug for Under Armour.
I just saw The Martian. I really loved the film, but even more awesome is that NASA and JPL cooperated together consulting on the film in the hopes that it would increase interest in further space exploration.
The PR department at NASA is really cranking up the juice... Which is great!
If I type "weather" or "The Martian movie times" into google I get useful local results. But I see it being used for useless and creepy things also.
Although any moron can self-publish a book, the serious ones stand apart with professional book covers and blurbs, marketing, and multiple novels.
The ones who "trend" well often get picked up by traditional publishers or movie studios (as was the case with Andy Weir's "The Martian.")
The traditional publishing industry consists of trend-chasers, not trend-setters.
So yes, the self-publishing world is full of raw sewage, but there are some diamonds and gems in that sewage--and they usually look shiny, with endorsements and professional covers.
New trailer for The Martian.
It was a compulsively readable book, and I'm looking forward to the movie.
The book The Martian, big-budget movie coming soon, has some pretty awesome fictional-yet-very-well-informed situations of things that were so unimaginable to have an impact on anything and still caused things to go terribly wrong. Highly recommended.
Glaring omission of Andy Weir's "The Martian"
[Book](http://www.amazon.com/The-Martian-Novel-Andy-Weir-ebook/dp/B00EMXBDMA) | [Movie](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3659388/)