• Aussiemandeus@aussie.zone
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    1 day ago

    I was speaking to my wife earlier this week saying “shit I wanted to go see that movie about the book I read a couple years ago but it’s already left the cinema” looked it up and it hasn’t come out yet so I put a reminder in my phone for next year for when it comes out.

    It very well might be the last movie I ever see in the cinema

  • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The book was soooo good. Easily one of my favorites of all time. I hope the movie doesn’t suck!

    • wjrii@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I actually think The Martian was better as a movie. I think I’m rare in going that far, but most people seem to think it was a pretty solid adaptation. Weir has improved as a writer, and so PHM has more to work with but it’s playing with a lot of the same techniques, so I’m optimistic this movie will be decent or better.

      They clearly felt like they couldn’t even market the movie without revealing one of the major spoilable plot points, and frankly I’m sympathetic, but I’m curious how they’ll handle the other.

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        I don’t agree about the movie being better, mostly because I think getting Mark’s inner monologue made much of the humor land so much better than the vocalized stuff in the movie. And they had to handwave a bunch of the more technical sciences and engineering that I found genuinely interesting in the book. But it was very cinematic and a pretty solid adaptation.

        I expect PHM will have to do some more handwaving on the science, which will be unfortunate, but I also think Ryan can deliver on the humor a bit better than Matt did, so I am anticipating that to work quite well. I feel like Ryan’s personality will be a good foil for both the ultra series nature of the threat and the characters dealing with it and the more out there sci-fi elements in PHM (compared to The Martian).

        • wjrii@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I don’t agree about the movie being better, mostly because I think getting Mark’s inner monologue made much of the humor land so much better than the vocalized stuff in the movie. And they had to handwave a bunch of the more technical sciences and engineering that I found genuinely interesting in the book. But it was very cinematic and a pretty solid adaptation.

          That’s certainly fair, and probably more common among people who’ve gone into both with an open mind. There are certain things that books simply explore better than films, and the more in-depth “Swiss Family Robinson” competence-porn and meditation on isolation did work very well. Someone who wants that particular story with more depth and different pacing can always make a good argument that the book is better," but I do sometimes like to gently push back on the notion that any book is inherently better than its adaptation, not to make you a straw man or anything. :-) Also, for the record I really liked the book a lot.

          I thought Damon did a very good job with converting the monologue into video messages and very much caught the spirit of the character. I honestly didn’t miss the rover ride, which dragged and made an already constrained story positively claustrophobic, though the science and geography it showed was obviously core to what Weir wanted to do. I also just had a personal bugaboo where I struggled with the fact that every book character other than Watney was drawn thinner than thin and had clunky dialogue, so I found it a chore to wade through their scenes. The script doctors and professional actors made them much more palatable in the movie.

          I think first-time-novelist Andy Weir just didn’t really have more than one character in him at the time, and that character was his “juiced” author-insert. You can see him stretching his literary wings in Artemis but it falls flat in many ways, though that setting could result in a really good project of its own if they tweaked the characterizations some. PHM was nice because it kind of took a more incremental step of giving the author insert more flaws, making genuinely excellent use of his second character, and making the “plot device humans” comfortably deliver exposition and obstacles from the sidelines without being distracting.

      • Jimbabwe@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Meh. Trailers are dumb begin with. I typically don’t watch them at all. I watched a few seconds of this before deciding I was 100% going to watch this movie, so I closed it.

        In this particular case, I think the existence of the co-star isn’t really a secret worth keeping because their evolution as friends is what makes the story so great.

          • wjrii@lemmy.world
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            2 days ago
            1. Spoiler tags.

            2. You’re not going to get anybody to agree to “Trust me bro” on keeping the 8-figure alien VFX out of the marketing. Spoiling Rocky was pretty much a pre-condition to this being done as a big project, and…

            spoiler
            1. I think you may be close-watching the trailer and adding in your own knowledge of the book. They clearly show he’s reluctant, and the book does the same thing, but the shock of the reveal is that he was so scared he actually said No and they pressed-ganged him. I don’t think the trailer gives that away at all. If anything, I’m worried they’ll leave that element out if it didn’t test well.
  • snugglesthefalse@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    It was a fun book though I feel like the ending could have somehow been more. I think I liked the martian most and maybe Artemis a bit more than this one but he does space-puzzle books well.