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:
Jackie Chan should do a martial arts remake of a fistful of dollars and call it Beijing Bucks.
He's almost 70, yeah :sadness:
He has like 4 movies coming out this year, lol. Idk what recent Jackie content is like, I imagine he's not still putting his body through the stuff he did in the 80s and 90s tho.
They still need that money and go out of their way not to offend Beijing. Funny example is Maverick. The hogs loved that the film kept Maverick's jacket with the Taiwan flag on it. Unlike the first film where we were clearly doing battle with the Soviet Union, in Maverick China is non existent. I don't think Maverick played in China, but Paramount did not face the wrath of the Chinese Film Bureau and chose Iran as the antagonist.
I choose to believe Maverick exists in some alternate universe. Since while the target makes sense as Iran, Iran doesn't have Su-57s.
Love how he just suddenly knows how to fly an old Soviet aircraft better than people trained in it and equipped with Su-57s
The plane they stole was an F-14 Tomcat which is an American plane, I think it was the primary jet in the original movie. After a brief google search the Iran connection may be stronger than I thought, I guess the US gave a bunch to the Shah before the revolution and Iran continues to operate them. So the Su-57 is the only thing making me think not Iran since they're Russian and they don't have very many.
At no point did anyone in the movie question the fact that the people they were fighting had American planes?
Nope lol But hey, cool jets! Don't think about the consequences of US imperialism.
A WW2 movie, but the Nazis are all driving Ford trucks and no one questions it
the Nazis are all driving Ford trucks
That did happen:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_V-3000-Serie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Germany#Ford-Werke_AG_later_Ford-Werke_GmbH
Yeah it was kind of hamfistedly shoved into movies - honestly it doesn't really seem like it serves an important plot point in The Martian either.
For an example of a film portraying the exact opposite, see Arrival (2016), where the EVIL TRIGGER HAPPY CHINESE are shown as being quick to suspicion, hawkish, unreasonable, and uncompromising. Also a scene involving Forest Whitaker that I personally find rather ick
quick to suspicion, hawkish, unreasonable, and uncompromising
Every time Americans try to criticize China, they just describe themselves
When they revealed that
:posadist-nuke:
the Chinese translated the aliens' message as "use weapon" instead of the "bring tool / weapon" interpretation the Americans came up with
my first thought was "in reality, this would be exactly reversed."
To be fair to that film, the US were full of far-right terrorists trying to blow up the aliens, and it was actually the Chinese general hearing his own dying wife's words read back to him that brought about the cooperation.
That said, yes, they are depicted as all those other things during all the rest of the movie
That really took me out of the movie. I’m sure it’s in the book as well, but no military on earth would be itching to fight aliens. That’s ridiculous.
There's not really any of the military shit in the original story. It's a short story and much leaner.
I struggle to remember every detail, but, Forest Whitaker plays an american Colonel(?), and explains why it might be preferable to attack and kill the aliens totally unprovoked by explaining through analogy how the landing of the american colonists "didn't work out so well for the indians", and not a wink of irony all throughout.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-space-idUSKCN0XJ1C2
Apparently the US forbids space cooperation with China. Figures.
No. Sci-fi nerd writers are less jingoistic than the US government and probably weren't even aware of the fact.
Sci-fi nerd writers are less jingoistic than the US government
Sometimes, sometimes it's the other way.
iirc they have a line in the book about keeping the talks between space agencies, as the governments of both would just get caught up in politics
There's one of those cheesy 90s Christian movies (maybe it's The Omega Code), where the US and China (not even Taiwan, they use the current PRC flag) team up against the Antichrist's military.
You tankies want to criticise the US military, but what if someday we team up with China to defeat the antichrist's military? Isn't that a good thing? Don't we need an F-35 to defeat the antichrist?
Don’t we need an F-35 to defeat the antichrist?
look, i'm sure the antichrist doesnt need help this badly even when faced with two countries
Slaps V-22 Osprey, wing falls off
This bad boy can fit so many demons in it.
Isn't there some bible part where god could help the Jews defeat some enemy because they had iron chariots? Reject modern armored vehicles, return to chariots
If you look at the movie in that specific period of Hollywood, they were casting big chinese stars or actors in movies to cater to the Chinese market (this, Independence day: Resurgence, the Meg, etc) . In reality, NASA barred China from joint space project, which forced China to develop their own space program that is partially based on Russian/Ukrainian tech
The depiction of the Chinese is also anti CPC cause it implies that only scientists are good and the party is bad and that the secrecy hurts the people.
While ignoring all the secrecy the US got.
Where are you taking about? The US never hides new technologies from the world!
NASA barred China from joint space project
If I recall, NASA are barred from working with China due to a law passed by congress. The decision wasn't theirs to make.
Hollywood wasn't pro-china at the time so much as there wasn't a huge domestic penalty, and it helped the box office numbers in China to depict China and depict it positively.
I think there was always going to be a pivot against China in the US, but boy did Trump really accelerate that.
There's also the fact that the movie was based on a rather successful novel, and China saving the day is what happens in the novel. Not that this would stop Hollywood from transforming it into another piece imperialist propaganda, but the contrast would make it stand out as such. US propagandists work best when they get to write the script. If the story is already written and already known to the public, they'd rather avoid it than make it obvious what they're doing. Narrative changes between prose and motion picture tend to be something people fixate on, even when there's no ulterior motive at play.
No it’s not.
China space plays a role in that they willingly scuttle their planned launch to help NASA as they have a rocket ready.
NASA actually refuses the mission due to the risk of the space ship and the crew. The astronauts and some ground control basically YOLO it so NASA has to help.
The book is clearly about the risks we should perform to rescue those in need instead of shrugging and letting people just.. die.
I enjoyed The Martian. I dunno if I'd ever read the book again but I might re-watch the film some day.
I really liked it, and the book was very entertaining. It perfectly straddles a line between being appealing to redditors and being enjoyable to regular humans.
It perfectly straddles a line between being appealing to redditors and being enjoyable to regular humans.
From the same author, Artemis was OK; but Project Hail Mary was above The Martian, and also extremely entertaining. They're easy-to-read books that are fun - not much more than that but that's perfectly fine.
Exactly! The Martian was a very comfortable read, just a dude trying to survive against ridiculous odds through his own ingenuity, while the world works together to assist him. It's such a positive, enjoyable story.
The audiobook version of The Martian was fantastic since it was iirc mostly audiologs in the first place
ugh i hated project hail mary, the insufferable bazinga I FING LOVE SCIENCE affect that was barely repressed in the martian comes out in full force
I get that; I was cringing more than once. But if you can tolerate that: the book is still very fun IMO.
i could not tolerate it, i really loved the martian and even enjoyed artemis well enough but project hail mary just seemed to be a distillation of all the worst parts of the author's previous works
Yeah it's really an author self insert of smart science man who does smart science things.
The amount of gravity on Mars is also quite wrong- Mars is closer to the moon's gravity than it is to Earth's, but it would've been a pain to film and make look right
plus iirc a bunch of minor details about the surface of mars that were speculation at the time but were found to be false after the book was written
yeah, i'd never expect something like this to be 100% accurate. and i've never heard of anyone being angry about it, so i assume it's close enough for all the space nerds to enjoy as well.
heavy and complex equipment that can filter out the perchlorates
Can't you just apply heat?
I liked the book when I read it, but man is the prose and narrative style annoying in retrospect. You really needed the brain disease you get from currently doing a stem undergrad to enjoy it.
More likely the future is China carrying the space program forward while American politicians campaign on shooting down Chinese space stations for easy electoral points.
Space colonization is a bad thing. Why do we need humans in the radiation abundant low gravity empty void of space? We could just send robots up there for scientific purposes, we don’t need space manufacturing or space mining or any kind of exploitation. We don’t need a human on Mars, we don’t need to send humans back on the Moon, we honestly don’t even need a space station. All private space travel is to inflate the ego of billionaires, all national space travel is nationalist propaganda. There is no logical reason to launch rockets when there’s poverty, all the necessities that we get from the space program like gps and weather data, that could be done by a multinational organization, we could significantly downsize the space program, remember it’s just an extension of the military industry.
Word. We're all just sitting around waiting for death. At some point you do stuff just to have something to do.
Let’s work on eventually expanding life beyond one planet. Lifetimes of work. The space race has given better technology for terrestrial purposes. It will continue to do so.
Without communism we get Gundam in the bad way, or Elysium. Only global humanity working together can expand safely beyond the gravity well without tyranny of Earth or of The Space.
Colonization and communism are incompatible. Just because we can launch a rocket into space does not mean we should. Space colonization is just an endless cycle of raping the natural resources of the cosmos to sustain unsustainable human growth. We need to embrace an antinatalist approach to space, research is good, learning is good, going up there to live and breed is not good. Anyone born in space will have to deal with higher rates of cancer and deformities, you cannot consent to that. Oh and there’s the fact space would not be available to the vast majority of people, there would be nothing equal about who gets to go up, it’s either the mega rich or the most physically and mentally capable which would mean the vast majority of people would not benefit from it in any way, it would be eugenics under any circumstances. The earth has an incomprehensible carrying capacity, if humanity is concentrated entirely on the planet earth all can be equal and equitable.
Space colonization is just an endless cycle of raping the natural resources of the cosmos to sustain unsustainable human growth.
ok but if nothing lives there that seems fine?
Yeah, I guess it is. But I'll take it over the typical racist stuff!
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.
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.
