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gohmak posted:What a poo poo dad. Well the divorce might not have been his decision. It is an interesting moral quandary though; do you spend another two years away from your kid who probably is young enough that he doesn't even remember you, or do you let a good friend starve to death millions of miles from home? It's just kind of glossed over in the movie, but I guess you can tell from the ending that his wife would rather he let Watney die.
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Oct 27, 2015 21:06
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Baron Bifford posted:I think missed the detail, but how did Matt Damon provide sunlight for his potato crop? Did he have sun lamps in the base? I believe I recall him saying that the lighting they used was meant to emulate sunlight for the physical and psychological health of the astronauts, so he was able to use that for the potatoes.
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Oct 27, 2015 22:53
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Nail Rat posted:Well the divorce might not have been his decision. It is an interesting moral quandary though; do you spend another two years away from your kid who probably is young enough that he doesn't even remember you, or do you let a good friend starve to death millions of miles from home? It's just kind of glossed over in the movie, but I guess you can tell from the ending that his wife would rather he let Watney die. On the other hand his wife knowingly married an air force pilot who probably spent most of his career deployed before he landed an astronaut gig. I mean, no one would be 100% fine with having their husband spend so much extra time away from their family, but I'd wager a military family would be better equipped to handle the time apart than a civilian one.
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Oct 27, 2015 23:57
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So something I just don't understand. They have to abandon the mission and evacuate Mars because a large storm is coming through with winds strong enough to possibly tip their escape vehicle over, which would leave all of them stranded on Mars. This is a possible contingency that everybody knew about. Watney eventually gets off of Mars by using the escape vehicle from a future Mars mission. It is kind of half-assed explained in the movie, NASA plans ahead really far in advance so they land the MAVs years into the future of when the manned missions are due to arrive. This makes absolutely no sense to me. If you know the escape vehicle is susceptible to getting blown over by a strong gust of wind, why would you land it years before you need it? I enjoyed the movie quite a bit overall, but that seems a pretty major plot hole with the entire premise.
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Oct 28, 2015 18:37
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Simplex posted:So something I just don't understand. They have to abandon the mission and evacuate Mars because a large storm is coming through with winds strong enough to possibly tip their escape vehicle over, which would leave all of them stranded on Mars. This is a possible contingency that everybody knew about. Watney eventually gets off of Mars by using the escape vehicle from a future Mars mission. It is kind of half-assed explained in the movie, NASA plans ahead really far in advance so they land the MAVs years into the future of when the manned missions are due to arrive. This makes absolutely no sense to me. If you know the escape vehicle is susceptible to getting blown over by a strong gust of wind, why would you land it years before you need it? I enjoyed the movie quite a bit overall, but that seems a pretty major plot hole with the entire premise. I think the idea was that it was a freakishly powerful storm. Think of it like having a building that can stand up to a category 4 hurricane. There's always the possibility that a cat 5 will ruin your whole day, but chances are excellent that that won't happen in the next two years.
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Oct 28, 2015 18:48
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Simplex posted:So something I just don't understand. They have to abandon the mission and evacuate Mars because a large storm is coming through with winds strong enough to possibly tip their escape vehicle over, which would leave all of them stranded on Mars. This is a possible contingency that everybody knew about. Watney eventually gets off of Mars by using the escape vehicle from a future Mars mission. It is kind of half-assed explained in the movie, NASA plans ahead really far in advance so they land the MAVs years into the future of when the manned missions are due to arrive. This makes absolutely no sense to me. If you know the escape vehicle is susceptible to getting blown over by a strong gust of wind, why would you land it years before you need it? I enjoyed the movie quite a bit overall, but that seems a pretty major plot hole with the entire premise. Yeah, it's a massive plot fail right off the bat. Such a storm would not be physically possible on Mars, and simultaneously if it were, NASA would never send a lander that couldn't survive it. It had me almost laughing out loud at the absurdity of it. Once I gave up trying to believe he was actually on Mars it was a lot easier to enjoy it. That's completely on Weir as a failure of imagination. If he couldn't come up with a plausible scenario for Watney getting left behind on real Mars, he should have punted and gone for some other planet. He seemed to build the entire plot around the slingshot maneuver to get back to Mars and didn't try too hard on stuff other than that. Bottom line, it's a Hollywood Sci-Fi movie. Don't look too closely or you'll tear your hair out.
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Oct 28, 2015 18:54
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Deteriorata posted:That's completely on Weir as a failure of imagination. If he couldn't come up with a plausible scenario for Watney getting left behind on real Mars, he should have punted and gone for some other planet. He seemed to build the entire plot around the slingshot maneuver to get back to Mars and didn't try too hard on stuff other than that. Then it wouldn't resonate as powerfully with people because Mars is actually our next destination, and we're dragging our feet getting there. If it was some fictional planet or one that few people have ever heard of, it would never have worked. People who don't care about space know at least something about Mars due to a couple decades of robots sending pictures that get put up in the news; they generally know just about nothing about Venus, Europa, Io, or any world like those with more dangerous weather (also it makes the travel and human presence less plausible and less based in real science, so it's kind of six of one and half dozen of the other).
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Oct 28, 2015 19:10
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The wind storm is unleashed by god-aliens, as illustrated in Mission To Mars, Prometheus, and Exodus: Gods And Kings.
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Oct 28, 2015 19:37
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Although not explained in the movie at all, there's a very good reason they landed the Ares 4 MAV beforehand. The MAV creates its own fuel using chemical reactions and Martian resources (in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU). This allows them to significantly reduce the weight they have to send if they don't have to loft all the fuel too. This is a very slow process, so they have to send it there long beforehand. In the book, Watney boosts this process by helping create fuel with the water he has( and his piss) once he arrives at the Ares 4 MAV.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:05
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, it's a massive plot fail right off the bat. Such a storm would not be physically possible on Mars, and simultaneously if it were, NASA would never send a lander that couldn't survive it. This keeps getting brought up as though it's something people should actually care about, rather than a minor quibble exclusive to the worst loving kind of nerds possible who want to pat themselves on the back for their knowledge (or more likely, their ability to regurgitate some article) of atmospheric pressure on Mars. It's a visually impressive scene that gives a rational reason for a living crew member to be left behind.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:11
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JohnSherman posted:This keeps getting brought up as though it's something people should actually care about, rather than a minor quibble exclusive to the worst loving kind of nerds possible who want to pat themselves on the back for their knowledge (or more likely, their ability to regurgitate some article) of atmospheric pressure on Mars. It's a visually impressive scene that gives a rational reason for a living crew member to be left behind. It's a visually impressive scene that gives a rational reason for leaving a crew member behind on some planet other than Mars. Since "being Mars" is a central element of the plot, though, it's a really bad scene. Your own ignorance doesn't change that. It just makes you gullible.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:24
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Deteriorata posted:Yeah, it's a massive plot fail right off the bat. Such a storm would not be physically possible on Mars, and simultaneously if it were, NASA would never send a lander that couldn't survive it. Fukushima
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Oct 28, 2015 20:26
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Deteriorata posted:It's a visually impressive scene that gives a rational reason for leaving a crew member behind on some planet other than Mars. Since "being Mars" is a central element of the plot, though, it's a really bad scene. Christ you must be awful to watch movies with. Why does it matter? How would a more realistic cause for a mission scrub have resulted in a better (note that I'm not saying more realistic) film? Other than preventing you from being able to masturbate furiously to your own inflated sense of intelligence, there's no actual reason for a rewrite when "freak dust storm" works just fine.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:42
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JohnSherman posted:Christ you must be awful to watch movies with. Good movies can have major plot holes. Most of them do. Pointing them out is not particularly unusual. It would be like watching Gladiator and noticing they're wearing Keds instead of Roman sandals. It's still a good fight scene, but some of the authenticity is gone.
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Oct 28, 2015 20:56
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I don't care whether storms are possible on Mars, because in the universe of the film they are. That's fine with me. Not preparing the MAV for such an event, though, is kind of stupid. But I don't really care that much about that, either. Maybe I'm just a simple man who likes watching Matt Damon do science-sounding stuff.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:06
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Deteriorata posted:It's a visually impressive scene that gives a rational reason for leaving a crew member behind on some planet other than Mars. Since "being Mars" is a central element of the plot, though, it's a really bad scene. We do know mars has underground gas pockets, which occasionally outgas. Curiosity has even spotted extremely localized outgassing of methane. Maybe they got really unlucky with where they set down, and a bunch of subsurface poo poo chose the wrong moment to get feisty. Perhaps they even were the ones responsible for pushing the local area out of a metastable state, and the problem is (ironically) one of their own devising. The point is that what happened is some totally unexpected bullshit - if it was something that people would reasonably expect on mars, they'd have had better preparations for it when going to mars.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:25
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I don't really know anything about weather patterns on Mars and I don't particularly care. If in the movie Mars has frequent, severe storms with tornadoes and whatever, that's fine. It is fiction after all, and the author is free to take license. The problem is that the movie's internal logic is inconsistent, and it's a little frustrating because it seems pretty simple to fix without padding the movie out too much. Just say the Aries IV equipment is at Mars, not on Mars. It's in orbit and because of some physics poo poo they can't bring it safely down any closer to Watney than the Aries IV landing site. It maybe takes them 2 minutes to talk about it. You have a couple of short effects shot of the MAV entering the mars atmosphere then landing and you move on.
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Oct 28, 2015 21:54
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Another thing: people tend to care about inconsistencies in fiction when they deal with a field that person is very familiar with or works with a lot. An astronomer or planetary scientist is going to notice science errors like orbital mechanics, atmospheric conditions, and that sort of thing. Computer science professionals get annoyed when computers are portrayed as magical devices that can do anything (see: "hacking"). People who play a lot of videogames are bothered when fiction still associates videogames with basement nerds and Pac-man. Car nuts would notice things like the endless upshifting in Fast and Furious movies. Historians would notice incorrect clothing or weaponry or dialects in a scene. The list goes on and on- it's natural for people to want something they're passionate about to be portrayed accurately, because they care about that subject- and it can definitely kill your immersion in a fictional universe, at least for a little while, when you notice it.
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Oct 28, 2015 22:23
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I hadn't realised the trailers were so cheeky with the editing together his video logs with reactions in the Houston or wherever computer mission room so I was kind of all mentally realigned by that when I saw this. Now, I wonder, it doesn't happen in the film, but in the book does he take those mpegs home on a USB stick or whatever? Because it kind of seems like he should as they surely represent the most valuable training/marketing/whatever material NASA will ever get out of this whole thing. Maybe the spaceship sees the updates when it reappears around Mars and auto down(up?)loads them? I have real issues in my data restricted life of devices suddenly seeing things and swamping the connection with nonsense unregulated and could totally see Martinez's control of the MAV being lost due to the rover updating it's GPS with new Mars maps over the connection as soon as it saw them reappear. Probably a different movie. My immersion was unaffected though.
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Oct 29, 2015 00:11
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Powered Descent posted:I think the idea was that it was a freakishly powerful storm. Think of it like having a building that can stand up to a category 4 hurricane. There's always the possibility that a cat 5 will ruin your whole day, but chances are excellent that that won't happen in the next two years. See humans show up on a previously pristine planet, start doing their bullshit science stuff, driving around these big oversize cars, and suddenly storms are getting more powerful and it leads to the abandonment of the entire planet. The science is settled, people. I also saw not a single living polar bear on that whole planet.
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Oct 29, 2015 00:22
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NotJustANumber99 posted:Now, I wonder, it doesn't happen in the film, but in the book does he take those mpegs home on a USB stick or whatever? Because it kind of seems like he should as they surely represent the most valuable training/marketing/whatever material NASA will ever get out of this whole thing. Maybe the spaceship sees the updates when it reappears around Mars and auto down(up?)loads them? In the book they're text in a computer, not video. (Which is pretty unsurprising. Video as the main format of a book is as awkward as a lot of text in a movie.) And I don't think it's ever really specified, but he could have pretty easily uploaded his logs once he got to the MAV, or kept a copy in his spacesuit during launch. Come to think of it, he writes an entry once he's aboard the Hermes, and doesn't mention that he's starting a whole new one, so presumably he still has it.
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Oct 29, 2015 01:28
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JohnSherman posted:Christ you must be awful to watch movies with. Part of the enjoyment of this sub-genre of sci-fi is realism as an end in and of itself. An egregious mistake in physics can deter from this goal and thus take away from the enjoyment, in a way that wouldn't happen for the same viewer with, say, Star Wars. For a different viewer who doesn't care about that, it may "work just fine" as you say.
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Oct 29, 2015 01:34
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A couple of things to consider: -Weir stated he didn't want the crisis to be man- made. This disaster wasn't solely due to equipment failure or pilot error. It makes the story much more about man vs Mars. It's true the storm couldn't really happen the way it was described, but far more other details were done right to the level of detail few other writers attain. -Potatoes growing in the hab would likely fare far better under artificial light, because since Mars is further from the sun than earth, the plants would get less energy. By keeping the lights on most of the time the potatoes would likely grow faster which is critical for Watney to avoid starving to death.
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Oct 29, 2015 02:00
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Simplex posted:I don't really know anything about weather patterns on Mars and I don't particularly care. If in the movie Mars has frequent, severe storms with tornadoes and whatever, that's fine. It is fiction after all, and the author is free to take license. The problem is that the movie's internal logic is inconsistent, and it's a little frustrating because it seems pretty simple to fix without padding the movie out too much. Just say the Aries IV equipment is at Mars, not on Mars. It's in orbit and because of some physics poo poo they can't bring it safely down any closer to Watney than the Aries IV landing site. It maybe takes them 2 minutes to talk about it. You have a couple of short effects shot of the MAV entering the mars atmosphere then landing and you move on. Ares 4 wasn't close to Ares 3, it was iirc hundreds of miles away. Presumably planetary weather on Mars is similar enough to that on Earth where some weather can happen frequently in one place and not at all in another.
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Oct 29, 2015 03:31
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Presumably Ares 3 landed at its site years before Watney and his crew got there. It's a bit of a Catch-22. If the atmosphere on Mars can produce catastrophic storms like that, it doesn't make any kind of sense that NASA would land the MAVs years in advance of when they would be used. Entire missions would run the risk of being canceled before the astronauts even left Earth. On the other hand if the atmosphere on Mars can't produce a catastrophic storm then you can land the equipment well ahead of time, but then there's no plot to the movie.
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Oct 29, 2015 04:13
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The book actually mentions that one of the last things the Ares 3 crew did before landing on Mars was to remotely land the Ares 4 MAV from orbit so it could start its important job of making fuel. Also yeah Schiaparelli Crater is 3200km (nearly 2000 miles) away from the Ares 3 landing site (Acidalia Planitia)- as the crow flies, that's roughly the distance from NYC to the Arizona/New Mexico border, or a little less than the distance from Madrid to Moscow. That's a not insignificant distance.
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Oct 29, 2015 04:50
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Saw this with the wife after having read the book a few months ago. We both loved it, and she is fairly anti-scifi in her tastes. The whole storm/MAV thing doesn't really bother me. It's unrealistic, but not egregious. What did stick outlike a sore thumb was the insane scale of the Hermes and the Hab. The large IKEA furniture in Hermes was laughable. This thing is built in orbit, in the near future, and they opted to build huge open spaces filled with giant desks and useless space. Sorry, long trip or no, that isn't happening.
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Oct 29, 2015 05:13
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Such disastrous storms are probably so rare in-universe that the best plan probably could be "hope one doesn't happen, and if it does, abort." If the cost of designing and sending five MAVs that could survive such 1-per-1000 year storms would be greater than the cost of simply sending an extra MAV, then don't bother. If it gets tipped due to a freak storm, they'd either delay Hermes' launch until a new MAV gets to Mars or, if Hermes was already on its way when the MAV gets wrecked, pass right by Mars and try again next time. Worst that can happen is a freak storm while they're on the surface, and note that they already had pre-set abort limits for wind speed; Lewis scrubbed the mission really quickly, it just turned out the thresholds were too loose. (Obviously Ares 4 and 5 will have set even stricter tolerances for dust storms.)
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Oct 29, 2015 06:19
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To counterpoint that, there is passing reference a few times that NASAs Mars missions are in a severe budget crunch. Ares 5 was scheduled to be the last mission, and Chiwetel's character early on was cynically talking about how they could use the disaster to maybe get the budget for a 6th mission. They can't afford to scrub any missions.
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Oct 29, 2015 07:42
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eyebeem posted:Saw this with the wife after having read the book a few months ago. We both loved it, and she is fairly anti-scifi in her tastes. Pretty much everything is filmed roomier then in the books. Eg the airlocks. Which are closer to coffin sized in the original work. But that doesn't go well with cinematogroahy. As for the realism of it, large open spaces like that would be good for interplanetary flights. Assembling a large volume in space is easy. As long as you can lift the weight of each part up there one at a time. Giving them that much extra air and water is a good idea. As for what they really had for living room, it was just the four rotating segments that had any appreciable openness. Very much like a submarine. From my own experiences on a submarine having 90% of everything packed nut Tobit works great if there's the 10% where people can sit around and eat and watch a movie. The rest of Hermes seemed like a slightly expanded ISS, just given the apple style treatment. On the other hand you have the real plans for SpaceX's Mars Colonial Transporter. Which from vague statements and rumors gives everyone the roominess you'd expect in an SUV. Like two 747s welded together. Very much like a submarine.
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Oct 29, 2015 13:16
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Ultimately, we may well end up with large open spaces on spacecraft and planets being produced as a result of inflatable modules. Much like the book Hab. A small inflatable technology test module is going up to ISS next year.
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Oct 29, 2015 13:20
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Large open spaces is definitely a feature of the inflatable modules being R&Ded by companies like Bigelow for use in spacecraft, habitats and space stations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace They've done presentations where they propose spacecraft with inflatable modules large enough that Orion CSMs can pass through an airlock and be serviced in a kind of maintenance bay.
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Oct 29, 2015 13:36
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Three important notes are being missed here on the MAVs. First, in the book they have to be set up. They are pre-deployed to Mars but have no oxygen or nitrogen inside, and it's possible they aren't standing or oriented either, or maybe they're even in a descent shell. It's possible the MAV is less knock-over-able or less knockover-damage-vulnerable in post-deployment form than in launch-ready form. Second, the MAV can self-diagnose. I don't remember if it said it in the movie, but in the book they're pretty explicit that the MAV is in constant communication with NASA once it's on Mars. If there's a freak storm and the MAV falls over then NASA can go "OMG UOK?" and if the MAV replies "LOL YAH" then the Ares Whatever crew can just right it when they get there. Third, each Ares mission drops the next Ares mission's MAV as a first order of business upon arriving at Mars. If Ares 3 gets to Mars and the Ares 3 MAV is dead, they can drop the Ares 4 MAV at the Ares 3 site, then transfer the ascent fuel from the dead Ares 3 MAV to the Ares 4 MAV. At that point they just have to deploy a new Ares 4 MAV which they could presumably do the same way they deployed the Ares 1 MAV: From Earth, via direct injection, without a Hermes to chauffeur it. Really even if you accept that sometimes Mars has wind events capable of knocking over the ascent vehicle the design of the missions is still pretty solid.
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Oct 29, 2015 17:00
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Tunicate posted:We do know mars has underground gas pockets, which occasionally outgas. Curiosity has even spotted extremely localized outgassing of methane. Maybe they got really unlucky with where they set down, and a bunch of subsurface poo poo chose the wrong moment to get feisty. Perhaps they even were the ones responsible for pushing the local area out of a metastable state, and the problem is (ironically) one of their own devising. So what you're saying is that the dust storm was a large planetary fart. I can live with that.
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Oct 29, 2015 17:11
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Luneshot posted:Another thing: people tend to care about inconsistencies in fiction when they deal with a field that person is very familiar with or works with a lot. An astronomer or planetary scientist is going to notice science errors like orbital mechanics, atmospheric conditions, and that sort of thing. Computer science professionals get annoyed when computers are portrayed as magical devices that can do anything (see: "hacking"). People who play a lot of videogames are bothered when fiction still associates videogames with basement nerds and Pac-man. Car nuts would notice things like the endless upshifting in Fast and Furious movies. Historians would notice incorrect clothing or weaponry or dialects in a scene. This is inexcusably terrible and hypocritical behavior though. It's straight-up childish because it is them saying "I only care if it is something I, personally, care about." Rather than being interested in telling the story or understanding that fiction functions under certain rules they only care that it is inaccurate about their particular toys. This is why it is childish. They don't actually care about accuracy and are perfectly willing to accept inaccuracy in other matters. That means they're not actually interested in realistic universes, just that their particular bugbear is catered to. Those people shouldn't be catered to because they're not actually interested in legitimately improving the verisimilitude of the story. If they were we'd get a lot more people rejecting 99% of courtroom scenes in film for example, which even a complete layperson can tell are hilariously fake in interests of being appropriately dramatic. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Oct 29, 2015 |
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Oct 29, 2015 17:33
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double nine posted:So what you're saying is that the dust storm was a large planetary fart. Yes, and as a corollary to that, the ones who smelt it, dealt it.
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Oct 29, 2015 17:39
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Plastik posted:Third, each Ares mission drops the next Ares mission's MAV as a first order of business upon arriving at Mars. So who placed the first MAV? Answer THAT, evolutionary scientists 
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Oct 29, 2015 18:00
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I think I might not have worded that correctly to get my idea across. It's not that they only care about inconsistencies if they're in their fields, it's that they might not even be aware of others because they're not familiar with that subject. A historian probably isn't going to notice badly portrayed orbital mechanics, and an astrophysicist probably isn't going to notice that the Romans are wearing anachronistic clothing for their time period. To each of them, their respective errors are glaring inconsistencies- but they have no idea when presented with a different piece of fiction and can easily take it at face value because they don't recognize an error that would be totally obvious to someone else.
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Oct 29, 2015 18:59
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Luneshot posted:I think I might not have worded that correctly to get my idea across. I guess to me that does come across as only caring about inconsistencies in their own field. Anyone who is even remotely paying attention can recognize the glaring flaws in even realistic police procedural or whatnot but it wouldn't get the same response. It's perfectly fine to recognize that something is unrealistic and there's nothing wrong with films being as accurate as possible but that isn't the primary goal of even 'realistic' films which are focused on narratives. And I honestly don't think there's anything wrong with being aware of these flaws or even pointing out they exist, but when someone gets angry or aggressive about it then it starts feeling silly. When someone start talking about how you were laughing out loud at the absurdity of it and how people are is gullible and ignorant, it makes them sound like this guy:  You, I, and everyone else have enjoyed films that have blatant, glaring and occasionally absurd inaccuracies in service of drama, themes and plots. That includes films that are based on real events or praised for their general realism. There's nothing wrong with that, unless you're trying to use fiction as basis for reality. (And if so thank you for reading my post, Judge Scalia.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Oct 29, 2015 |
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Oct 29, 2015 19:21
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Imagine a movie botching something basic like gravity on Earth disappearing for a scene with no explanation, it would break immersion for the whole audience. A big inconsistency in some field like chemistry or computer science can feel just as bad to someone who's an expert in those fields. But most people aren't going to be bothered by the hydrazine scene, and if it needs to be pointed out to you, it shouldn't bother you at all.
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Oct 29, 2015 21:58
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