Saturday, October 03, 2015

The Martian is for space buffs

I enjoyed the movie about Apollo 13, but was disappointed that many scientific and technological matters were complete unexplained, such as the cause of the failure that is the whole basis of the movie.

Then I read reviews complaining that the movie did not spend more time dwelling on the feelings of the astronauts' wives back home.

There are millions of wives who have waited while their husbands went to war or other dangerous activities. We do not need rockets to tell that story.

The new movie The Martian is partially inspired by the parts of Apollo 13 that show solving provlems. It skips the shots of anguished family back home. This is a movie about astronauts being astronauts, mission control engineers being engineers, and NASA being NASA. Sure, it is fiction, and has some over-dramatized events and sentimentality. But this is a movie for people who dream of a NASA trip to Mars.

I haven't seen any reviews yet, and I am guessing that some will complain it lacking character development, or other complaints about the plot being more about space travel than human relationships. I bet that the movie does well. There are plenty of other movies about human relationships.

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