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I'm kind of surprised by you're not liking the martian. Have you read the book? I read the book (but haven't seen the movie yet) and its definitely on of the harder sci-fi books I've ever read. With the exception of the flexibility of space suits and problems with a benzene reaction, the physics, chemistry and biology are pretty good. Maybe this didn't translate to the movie as well (which might have been nigh impossible) or was glossed over in an unsatisfactory way.

And as for the astronauts, I've actually heard that astronauts find the attitudes reflected exactly right. All from a guy who didn't know any.

Except NASA, who basically invented HACCP, would never send raw potatoes up to space.

I'm pretty sure they have before and would again for an experiment.

This is justified in the book as being for thanksgiving dinner, iirc Mark goes as far as explaining how they where treated that still allows them to grow later.

That happens in the film too. He's got all the ready meals and then finds the potatoes after checking the thanksgiving box.

Potatoes in space:

https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html

I've yet to see The Martian, but have read the book and found it pretty reasonable for the behaviour of all characters, I guess the advantage of a book is that the author can describe the internal thoughts of a character much more clearly than an actor can portray on screen. Further while I'm not rocket science (I prefer rocket surgeon, thanks KSP), my understanding is that the science in The Martian was pretty solid the whole way through.

>I was screaming at the screen for the better part of The Martian, if only for the behavior and attitudes of the acting "astronauts" when compared to actual astronauts in critical situations

Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?

I look at it like this: You can make up whatever craziness you want in your universe, but the craziness must remain consistent and follow the 'rules' of your universe.

You can violate the real laws of physics, so long as you do so consistently within the rules/laws as you've defined them. You can have 'magic', so long as the magic is used consistently.

Heck, you can even break your own previously-established rules, so long as you can explain why in way that is consistent with everything else. If you do it with foreshadowing ("there is some theoretical way to make our faster-than-light engine allow us to travel in time, but no one has ever been able to get it to work") then it might even be accepted. If you do it with no notice because it's merely convenient to the plot ("hey, I just came up with this crazy idea to make our ship travel through time, give me 5 minutes to re-route power and connect a widget and we'll be good to go"), then it's stupid.

I’m not I’d quite call it hard SF, but give the current show The Expanse a shot. It at least tries to build a somewhat plausible space society. Also has pretty good writing, characters, acting, and camera work.

From a plausibility perspective (plausibility of both the society and the characters) it’s far and away better than Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, etc.

I didn't notice any glaring problems in Ex Machina, but it's definitely an exception.

I'll admit that I gave it the pass the first time I heard about it, due to it seeming like a rehashed mish-mash of I-Robot, Her, Artificial Intelligence, and of course RUR/Metropolis. Given the positive comments in this thread I may give it a watch, thanks.

To two birds with one stone and address a sister post, my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners. Extremely excitable is the tip of the iceberg, my distaste came from a broad mosaic of their personalities and responses being exceedingly "off", largely, without even getting into a discussion on the writing/acting itself.

(as FiatMoney put it far more eloquently than I did; the demeanor of many of the "Science" individuals is just _wrong_)

> my biggest issue re: the Martian comes when you read (for a contrived comparison) the Apollo 13 transcripts. As much a life or death situation as anything that happened in The Martian, far less of my wanting to throw the "protaganist" out a window for being a nonstop firehose of bad quips and one liners.

The Apollo 13 crisis lasted a week; even then, the transcripts do contain quite a few "bad quips and one-liners". Look at page 14-16 of http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/history/mission_trans/AS13_CM.PDF for jokes between the crew just 30 minutes into the mission.

Perhaps I read their interactions differently, but even their "I need the springy jobber" and other more informal statements seemed far more professional and what I'd expect from a career astronaut than "I'm going to do the iron man thing".

My original comment was more directed at the actual crisis portions of both the movie and Apollo 13 (around the famous "Houston we have a problem" line) were drastically different. I certainly grant that a movie might not be as exciting if crisis resolution was largely reading checklists out of books and remaining exceedingly composed given the circumstance, but I'd find it a lot easier to buy into than the cacophony of yelling and cursing that took place at multiple instances during the movie.

Something additional and more tangible I remembered while writing this, I found myself agog at some of the items they had on mars; the commercial grocery store grape juice bottles were some of my favorites.

Edit: I'm normally not one to comment on this, but of all the things I've ever said, I had no idea disliking this movie would attract the silent downvote brigade so aggressively. I find this both interesting and entertaining.

I'm really sorry you didn't enjoy the Martian but they specifically introduced his character to be like that to the point the other astronauts talk about his personality.

Don't forget that he was on his own with a big delay in communication. So from a science perspective, he's talking to himself so why would he be formal checklist guy, and from a movie perspective they have switched the inner monologue of the character to be an external one into a 'video diary' to make the story watchable. It's a story telling device.

While there are movies deserving of ire the Martian isn't one of them and definitely not for the yelling and screaming.

I feel you haven't read the book yet. I recommend it. The movie compresses it strongly, and so character development is pretty much skipped. Mark Watney is a smartass by design, and he has some more funny quips in the original text, but generally you can see how his attitude changes after hundreds of days of being stranded alone, having to fight for his life against both Mars and the crappy disco music. Even accounting for his training, I can totally believe him going totally pissed when he finally contacts NASA, and they immediately start bossing him around according to some checklists. But that's the context that wasn't emphasized in the movie.

Writing this I see now that the movie itself may not feel as "hard sci-fi" as it does if you know the book - e.g. the agricultural arc was very much rushed in the movie. In the book, the protagonists takes things more slowly, and much more thoughtfully.

(And I have no frikkin' clue what's with the downvotes; upvoting to compensate.)

You're right, I haven't read the book, the movie was my first exposure to this (unfortunately apparently?). To say it compresses it strongly better words so many of my issues with the movie than I could have put it. (in that it seemed like a series of set pieces attached together by musical interludes; echoing your lack of character development as well)

To answer the question from your other post, my "holy trinity" is Primer, Moon, Pandorum. (the first two on a pedestal above the third, but the third manages to fit in being an "action" movie without going too far down that road such that I can't but love it.)

If we're talking books, that's an entirely different discussion, and seems to be the one most people want to have when bringing up The Martian. I've certainly felt the same about some of my favorites. (I recall the whisper of a Foundation movie that made me want to run and hide)

I need to rewatch Primer - it managed to twist my mind into a knot, so I honestly say I didn't understand much of what was happening. Moon is on my list, of Pandorum I haven't heard. Thanks for the titles, I'll definitely see them :).

RE shortening, I remember watching Ender's Game and leaving cinema angry, because the movie had compressed the book so much that I felt it won't make any sense for a person who hadn't read the novel. I now imagine that the Martian may have seemed similarly poor to you because of that. If you happen to read the book and find the text being crap, please get back to me, I'd really like to hear your perspective.

We, or rather - some of us - are talking not books, but book+movie combo. The Martian was quite a thing among space geeks even before the movie was announced, and doubly so after the story broke - so, like me, they probably implicitly assume others read the original too. I guess it's a lesson for me for the future, to bring up explicitly whether one had or had not read the book :).

One upvote for you. Fanboys are a pest. And yes, The Martian is just ridiculous, with its martian lab and spaceship that look like youth hostels, space mutinies, impossible sandstorms, and people navigating around in space thanks to a hole in a spacesuit. Not to mention the guy who tries to explain gravity assist to the head of NASA. I mean, it could be entertaining, if they just didn't try to sell it to you as actually plausible or accurate.

Besides the sandstorm, your examples are actually not ridiculous. But RE that Purnell scene, AFAIR he was trying to explain it to the PR lady - it seems totally plausible to me that she doesn't understand gravity assist. But yeah, that scene felt totally forced IMO, designed only to explain stuff to audience.

The science may have been sound, but I didn't believe that one man could invent a radically different/more powerful kind of processor and solve the power supply problem on his own.

I thought the battery technology was part of Ex Machina's "20 minutes into the future" world. It didn't seem particularly advanced, as Ava needed daily recharging. So the only unbelievable thing is that Nathan –the story's equivalent of Larry Page– managed to do a ton of AI research on his own.

I agree it's ridiculously implausible, but I'm fine with that in sci-fi as long as it's only done once per story. In fact, many of my favorite stories follow that pattern: Take a normal world and add one radical (or even impossible) piece of technology or magic. Then explore the implications. Vernor Vinge's bobble books (The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime) are an excellent example of this.

The thing that annoys me is when authors don't see an implication of their invention. Or worse, they make their characters use the invention in implausibly limited ways. JJ Abrams is often guilty of both of these.

I while watching Ex Machina, I was caught up in the story and characters. Immediately afterwards, I realized how ridiculously contrived a few parts were.

(Spoilers follow.)

The most glaring oversight was the lack of an emergency shutdown for Ava. The story should have ended with Nathan pulling out a remote, pressing a button, and Ava collapsing. The prospect of a robot going berserk was known to him. Heck, it'd already happened before. One scene shows footage of a prototype smashing itself to bits on the wall. The movie expects us to believe that after that incident, Nathan thought, "No need to add failsafes. Just let these AIs destroy my carefully-crafted robot bodies on this glass partition." I don't buy it.

(Spoilers too) The thing that stood out for me was Ava leaving the compound without any explanation for how she would inductively charge herself afterwards.

I assumed the induction panels were repurposed commodity gear. Typical use would be to charge phones, tablets, laptops, roombas, etc… and Ava could top-up at an airport or coffee shop. That conclusion makes more sense than Nathan inventing his own wireless charging standard.

However, I'm not sure Ex-Machina is trying or pretending to be scientifically accurate. Perhaps it's just a fable in modern clothes, rehearsing an archetypical myth (the Golem) as well as providing an intuitive grasp on the ethical problems posed by strong artificial intelligence and on the "Ai in the box" mental experiment. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box ).

Strange. The examples you say "made you grumpy" are exactly the three movies I think are the beacon of hope for sci-fi, and the trio of hardest sci-fi of the last, I don't know, five decades?

Gravity is the least hard of those tree, but still is orders of magnitude more accurate than anything I know that came after "2001: A Space Odyssey". There are some issues with orbits and distances and maybe with the tangled-in-parachutes scene (though I believe it was correct, critics miss the frame of reference of the camera).

Interstellar has only few implausible things - the biggest offenders were the "power of love transcending dimensions" line by one of the characters, and the... final act. But physics was done more right than probably ever before, Space Odyssey included. (INB4 yes, that planet near black hole was realistic, it's actually a pretty neat edge case of rotating black hole physics.) I actually found myself Googling what I thought was pseudoscience, only to discover it's actually true (and to learn some more about relativity too).

And the Martian... come on. There's basically two things the book gets wrong, and both are minor. Dust storm being too strong, and the author handwaving radiation shielding into existence without explaining how it works. The rest is pretty much totally legit. (Ok, the movie didn't show that gravity on Mars is weaker, but that was literally because the director said that doing it is too much of a mess, and the audience won't care anyway.)

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> Fine, but if you concede that, don't try and paint a thin veneer of half-assed realism over the whole thing. I will forgive just about anything in a more fantasy-directed sci fi, but if you start trying to be "hard", I'll hold a different standard.

Totally agree. Though if the Holy Trio above made you grumpy, I wish to know what do you consider hard. It seems we have pretty different standards.

> Second, the correctness seems to often play second fiddle to whatever set pieces or plot is desired. I understand this may be a pragmatic necessity, but it's very obvious when the two start to generate friction against each other (scientific realism and plot) and I long for this to be balanced elegantly, with the science as a more integral component

Also agree. The movies and series in this article are basically a joke in this area (even though I love Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). They're more like Star Trek in this regard, though I still think Star Trek's technobabble made more sense.

And about science being a more integral component - again, check Interstellar. There's a pretty neat story that starts with Nolan approaching Kip Thorne, telling him that he needs a planet with very strong time dilation for the plot. Thorne initially thinks it's impossible, but then he sits down, does the math, and figures out a crazy scenario in which that planet is very much plausible...

http://www.space.com/28075-science-of-interstellar-book-revi...

Haven't watched Interstellar. But Gravity is a (bad) joke of a movie, both from a scientific standpoint and as a movie in general. It's just a bad space action movie with very cool CGI. You say "there are some issues with" - no, the whole thing is a mess. They're using spacesuit rockets or a fire extinguisher to move between orbits that are extremely far apart, this is a physical impossibility that is central to the plot. But it managed to make me furious from the very first scene, with three people outside the spaceship during an EVA, and Clooney floating playfully around the spaceship, untethered. This is reducing the majesty and terribly unforgiving nature of space to a kindergarten playground.

Same feeling for "The Martian". The Martian base and the spaceships look like youth hostels, the astronauts an unruly bunch, but more than everything, there is no feeling whatsoever that we're looking at people dealing with something alien. It's the usual ingenuous american guy playfully overcoming difficulties that end up looking more or less trivial, like traversing hundreds of kms of Martian desert, growing potatoes (under artificial light!), surviving a Martian night while unconscious with no protection from the cold... Just have a look at the Martian landscape as depicted in the movie:

http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/martian-gall...

(hint: like a holiday destination in a hazy day) and at how it looks for real:

http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/jpeg/PIA18614.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/03Q5l.jpg