The Chinese come to the rescue of NASA and the movie literally concludes with one of the American heroes fist-bumping a Chinese astronaut on a joint mission back to Mars. It's a sad reminder of how bad the new cold war has become in just a few years.
2015: :wholesome: We can explore space together! :solidarity:
2022: President Xi is going to invade Taiwan at any moment LAUNCH THE NUKES NOW! :guts-rage:
:sadness:
I never saw the movie, but I did read the book before the movie came out when it was on everyone's lips. Couldn't stand the book. Not for political reasons, it was just kind of a poorly written book. It's been years now so I don't remember the specifics. I just remember I thought the narrative had low emotional stakes overall, and was overly concerned with random details. The main character is one of the first people to walk on Mars, is abandoned there by his crew accidentally, and then his internal monologue mostly just sounds like some guy from one of those "I fucking love science" videos from 2009. Overall just a boring and pretty amateurish book, decidedly not to my tastes.
It was gratingly "I fucking love science".
Whatever, it did its part in encouraging more kids to take an active interest in space. Pure popcorn read that's about as high quality as Ready Player One but at least it tries to do something other than yell out intellectual properties for 200 pages.
I still enjoyed it. Much more on this viewing than my first one in the theaters. I actually do love science (I am a scientist), and I appreciate how accurate the sci-fi in the film was.
What I meant was that the protagonist was kind of annoyingly redditor at times, for example I'm pretty sure at one piont he literally says "I'm gonna science the fuck out of this."
I was nerding tf out when they were on the orbital maneuver subplot because I've been binge playing Kerbal Space Program for the past month.