The Marshion

Oh great, just what we need. Another movie with 'camera watches everything' footage trope. And then the movie isn't even consistent with having surveillance cameras and sometimes it's actual cameras. Which can be steady cam 'documentary' style, or can be fixed shot. Make yer damn mind up, movie!

So we start on Mars, with a small group of people. But rather than killing them off one by one, the movie makes the dramatic step of just isolating to one guy immediately. From then, it's 'let's scare the one guy time and again!', and you'd think he'd get used to it, but no, the movie keeps up the thrills of throwing another moment at him to deal with. There's the final battle where the guy finally has to get away, but then it's all about these other people, as if the movie forgets who the main person is!


So Matt Damon is, of course, on screen most of the time, and we have the moment when we can compare how he looks topless at the beginning of the movie and then after time has past (and that's not a body double, no, not at all), so that's a nice touch. For the other cast, I recognised them but didn't put names to them until I saw the credits, at which point it was 'oh, that's who that is!'


As for the adaptation... yeah, they cut a lot of the book out, but then they had to. You couldn't go into the detail, and I doubt the 'Hollywood executives' would let the film be too scientific so they wouldn't alienate the movie going audience (known to them as 'idiots'). I'm fine with that, but that means you should go read/listen to the book to really get the full experience if you liked the movie and haven't read that.


It's a different thing to the book, and looks nice, but I doubt it's going to stick around as something amazing.


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