The Godfather’s another one where the movie greatly surpasses the book, as the original work is simply terrible.
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HAHA… oh, mercy. That’s cute but NO. The film is great but it unavoidably truncates a lot of the stuff, particularly his journey to shiaparelli crater and a lot of the setbacks and little character moments (makeshift bath) are jettisoned. First time i’ve seen someone describe it as a slog though, everyone else seems to have burned through it. As did i. Twice so far.
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Is the Da Vinci Code film better than the book?
You know that’s funny, because I had always assumed he was recording them. I just went back and looked and he says “reading these logs” twice in the first 5 pages. I guess it really does seem like he’s recording since I’d thought that despite it being made quite explicit!
I’m going to go see the movie tonight, and have been gleefully anticipating it most of this week. I’m sorry the reviewer didn’t care for the book. I enjoyed the hell out of it as both a book and an audiobook, and I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree, that our tastes are pretty far apart. It’s the best science-promoting piece of fiction I’ve read so far this century.
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You know, it’s kind of not. My hopes were high for the movie, since the plot of the book was a zippy little ball of entertainment buried beneath truly leaden, awful prose and lengthy expository sidebars. “How could it fail to be better?” I thought.
Well, they hung on to those damned expository sidebars. And somehow, the writing didn’t improve. It has some neat locations to look at, anyway.
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Oof. I like the Harry Potter books (and, to varying degrees, the movies) just fine, but that first Hunger Games novel is fairly wretched.
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I guess it wasn’t an adapation, really, but Sleepwalkers… Oh man. I really want to think that if there was a book (or an idea of a book) that that movie came from, that it would be better than that movie.
We’ve got those up here in Soviet Canuckistan as well - an adults-only, “VIP” experience.
Yeah not exactly the most relatable in the galaxy.
Yeah, my first instinct is that it’s a combination of a) that contrarian thing people do with them conspicuously being able to discern that a popular thing isn’t good after all and b) that thing where people call smartphones with a little bit less RAM than a desktop computer “unusable”. It’s not enough to say you didn’t like a book; it’s got to show your superior taste and be because the words of the book itself are incompetent.
In terms of tastes differing, the reviewer doesn’t like someone going around Mars solving problems to survive the impossible while saying shit a few times and talking about poop? Well, that speaks to something in my soul. If details don’t engage you maybe it’s a you problem. Maybe you just don’t find “nerdly [a rabbit hole in itself] details” as engaging as you’d like to believe you do.
Personally I’m a little sad they left out the nuclear bath scene and so on. I think there are more bits in the book that I would have liked to have seen Matt Damon act out.
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Hey Rob, perfectly understandable error, but the author’s name is Angela Watercutter.
I loved the book, but it wasn’t of literary allusions or subtle profundities. The scientific details just made it so much fun to read, which is something I realize is not for everyone. It’s not great literature, but it was great. Really looking forward to the movie.
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The movie is ridiculous. One minute people on earth are talking in real time to people on Mars, and later in the movie there is too much space-delay for Mission Control on earth to do anything. Mars has about 1/3rd of the gravity of earth but Matt Damon walks and maneuvers everything exactly the same there. People can program computers (perfectly) to do anything in just a few minutes including hacking the operating system and the computers give friendly messages like “Computations Correct!”. Lastly, duct tape and plastic sheeting, dried blood, and closing your hand fixes all air leaks in space. If you’re still in elementary school, you’ll believe in the science of this movie 100%. I think Dumb and Dumber had more intelligent dialogue and situations than this movie.
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Welcome! You’ll fit right in here.
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I enjoyed the film. But the people who enjoyed the book did it for the description, the puzzles, the actual measurements and attempts to determine what it would take to survive. To say it was unreadable is, well, bullshit. I read it in a day and a half and was engrossed the entire time. I just can’t agree with the central thesis of this article. The film is an excellent companion piece, enjoyable for its visuals, but much of the description and detail was lost in the transition.
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I loved the book too!!
That’s said I’m also looking forward to seeing the movie and hope it does well.
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I like a book that requires a demented physics lesson (with diagrams!) to explain the plot 
And zero mention of how many pirate-ninjas it was going to take to get to the crater.
I really enjoyed it, but in a different way than I enjoyed the book. Which is how I felt about Watchmen, too. My husband, who has yet to read the book, said he was on the edge of his seat the whole time.
And I never, ever say this (because the glasses give me such a headache), but this really might be worth seeing in 3D. Apparently there’s some shots of the martian landscape and moments in space that are really given depth by it.
You’d probably be one of those who would complain about it being too boring if they hadn’t glossed over the transmission delays. (hint: they weren’t talking in real time. Remember how people kept falling asleep waiting for answers?)
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So, having seen this last night, I’d have to say that my biggest complaint would be that the simulation of movement in zero gravity in this movie was not great. I’ve seen far, far worse, however, and thankfully there weren’t a whole lot of those scenes.
