Do they really? At the risk of letting my inner hipster movie snob out in force, I've found modern sci fi movies to be bottom of the barrel as far as any sort of plausibility/immersion goes. (As an example, 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)
Moon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.
I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper.
A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; 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. 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 (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
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 ).
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'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.
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.
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.)
--
> 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...
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:
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.
This is actually a decent route for a kind of supplementary education: it would be pretty valuable to expose a broad audience to the way scientists/engineers really think about problems—and the opportunity is generally wasted, preferring to convey that scientists/engineers just have some magical ability that the audience does not.
It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info.
I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.
I'd like movies to go more for a kind of "social proof". Part of the reason Star Trek, especially TNG, raised a generation of scientists and engineers is because science and engineering there is normal. Not mundane, but normal. Every protagonist and background character in this world is highly educated; no one is surprised by it, nobody boasts about it - it's just how everyone are. Even that dirty Klinon thug knows more science and engineering than your average university graduate. It's just normal, and I think it reflects on the audience.
Besides thinking, there's a huge value in portraying accurate science and technology. Even if it's background, not core of the plot. Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema, whether they like it or not. Especially if one doesn't know about something beforehand, the movie will set baseline expectations about that thing. Think how most people seem to believe that people will explode when exposed to vacuum - thanks to decades of movies that told them exactly that. If people are going to learn from TV, they may as well learn the correct stuff.
"Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema"
I think that's universal of all stories in all cultures. I remember a speaker at Gen-Con in the 90's claimed that the original reason for campfire stories of heroes was to inspire the young men to defend the group in times of danger (overcome the flight with a heroic fight). Cinema is just a very effective way in the line of delivery methods. VR is going to be really interesting to watch.
I agree it's probably a human universal. But the TV and cinema are special here - as you said, they're a very effective delivery vector, but moreover, movies usually cover vast range of things, and we watch shit ton of them. For instance, have you ever seen a real assault rifle? Maybe you have, but I haven't - so all I feel about them, i.e. my intuitive knowledge (as opposed to stuff I read on Wikipedia) comes from movies and videogames. I haven't seen a live round fired from a gun in my life, but I "know" how it sounds, how the bullets behave, etc. Half of it is probably wrong, but barring a real-life experience, that's all I've got. And while campfire stories could cover things in the abstract, movies let you cache images of just about anything - from how to bake pancakes, to how to deal with angry people, to how planes work. I think we're underestimating just how much "life experience" of an ordinary person comes from TV - and thus how much of it is wrong.
True, but I think TV and cinema are the last generation's special with the internet now this generations like a couple of generations ago radio was the thing. The vector is a little more amped now with the imagination level down on the audience. I guess frequency is up mainly because of external factors (e.g. fear of strangers for parents).
I have seen an AR-15 (which is not really an assault rifle, but the media is not very accurate) and handled a gun (my mom's) and shot one when I was 7 (I sucked) and hunted (we apparently ended up tracking Sun-Tzu the deer). I'm very worried by our "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express" level of knowledge.
I think about this too sometimes.. TNG in particular had scientifically literate characters and that sort of depth was considered normal, there was no fuss about the big ideas and the knowledge, they just applied it. It is easy to get used to a mature baseline of thought like that as a viewer. Most of the newer apocalyptic themed sci-fi just seems silly in comparison.
As a side note, I really like some of the comic books written by Jonathan Hickman, for example his S.H.I.E.L.D. or FF runs. He seems to be a fan of science.
TNG is a thing that comes back as a topic almost whenever I have a longer discussion with my mother and brother. It's those discussions that made me realize that there are two things that Star Trek world had, that I miss in the real one:
1) High level of baseline literacy we were talking about. Contrast to our world, when many people shy from learning new things, and those who do learn are often labeled as nerds and warned about dangers of having too high self-esteem. I really long for the world where this sort of anti-intellectualism is not something to be proud of, and where the social pressure is encouraging self-development, rather than discouraging it.
2) Expectation of competency. It's visible on all levels - from civilian vs. Starfleet interactions, through teamwork of starship crews, to the inner workings of big bureaucracies like the United Federation of Planets. Everyone is assumed competent until proven otherwise. Characters in Star Trek know they're working with others who are as smart as they are, and so they trust each other and trust the system. Contrast with the real world, where we often assume our coworkers are incompetent, and the predominant narrative in society is that bureaucracies are stupid and evil.
I only now realize how much my expectations of humans are different thank to Star Trek, and that a big part of my life is trying to form an area around myself, where 1) and 2) would hold.
There's also point 3), but that may be a particular quirk of my personality - I prefer stories where not individuals, but organizations are heroes. That's another reason why I love Star Trek, and that's also why S.H.I.E.L.D. was always my favourite part of the Marvel Multiverse. A magical mutated flying superhero is boring. A Helicarrier - now that's interesting. :).
Fully agree with 1) in a sense that the sciences and the humanities are all around us, in front of us, and it's not 'geek' impulse to try exploring both, it's part of being a rational, fulfilled human being.
As for 2), that's an interesting point. Perhaps it speaks to a level of maturity and mutual trust that we have not achieved yet. Maybe it manifests naturally as a result of progress with 1). It'd be interesting to read some lengthier discourse on this.. I feel it relates to government, market forces, social perception, culture and more..
Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
Sometimes this seems to make it worse. I've observed I tend to get most frustrated when the movie is plausible throughout until an implausible climax. I understand that this is where the friction between plot and science will be strongest, but it feels like they're changing the rules where it most matters!
They need to stop hiring scientists just to make technobabble plausible - the creative writers need to start treating them seriously instead, and consulting them on the story flow. Like in Interstellar, when Nolan would tell Kip Thorne that he needs something for his plot, Thorne would outline the necessary physical conditions and developments, and then the two would argue over it until they could figure out a path for the story that reaches the creative goal while staying within the constraints of science.
45 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadMoon stands out to me as one of the few beacons of recent "hard sci fi", whereas many of the movies that got a lot of acclaim for having staff-scientists (gravity, the martian, interstellar to a lesser degree) just made me grumpy.
I've found modern movies play the same tricks as they always did, pick up on buzzwords and massage them enough such that the average joe can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's what the article means by "plausible-ISH", and I felt like they touched on this thrust in the "ten years ago everything was ElectroMagnetic Pulses" (not verbatim), nowadays we just have different tropes; I don't believe things have gotten any more sophisticated aside from that the internet forces the tropes to be "more correct" one or two levels deeper.
A lot of my bitterness is rooted in a combination of two things. One, the final sentence of the article hits the nail on the head. "You can only make so realistic a film where someone jumps over buildings"; 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. 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 (truly "leading the story" as the article likes to suggest they are attempting) rather than the stucco you paint on after the fact, disguising up a weak skeleton against only the most peripheral examination.
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_)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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)
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 :).
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.
(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.
Can you elaborate on this? I'm not sure what you mean. Were they too excitable in the movie to be believable?
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.
https://www.engr.wisc.edu/alumni/perspective/22.2/spuds.html
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.)
--
> 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...
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
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.
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.
It's a little difficult to say exactly what it is that could be communicated, but I guess I'd call it 'intuition'; and the value of trying to convey it in a movie is that if you tell the average person, "I'm now going to give you some examples of how scientists think about things"—they're going to become nervous and less efficient at absorbing the info.
I was recently impressed by "Ex Machina" for being 'plausable-ish' and showing realistic, intelligent thought processes, as an example. The t.v. show "House" is also sometimes good about it.
Besides thinking, there's a huge value in portraying accurate science and technology. Even if it's background, not core of the plot. Pretty much everyone in the West learns stuff from TV and cinema, whether they like it or not. Especially if one doesn't know about something beforehand, the movie will set baseline expectations about that thing. Think how most people seem to believe that people will explode when exposed to vacuum - thanks to decades of movies that told them exactly that. If people are going to learn from TV, they may as well learn the correct stuff.
I think that's universal of all stories in all cultures. I remember a speaker at Gen-Con in the 90's claimed that the original reason for campfire stories of heroes was to inspire the young men to defend the group in times of danger (overcome the flight with a heroic fight). Cinema is just a very effective way in the line of delivery methods. VR is going to be really interesting to watch.
I have seen an AR-15 (which is not really an assault rifle, but the media is not very accurate) and handled a gun (my mom's) and shot one when I was 7 (I sucked) and hunted (we apparently ended up tracking Sun-Tzu the deer). I'm very worried by our "I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express" level of knowledge.
As a side note, I really like some of the comic books written by Jonathan Hickman, for example his S.H.I.E.L.D. or FF runs. He seems to be a fan of science.
1) High level of baseline literacy we were talking about. Contrast to our world, when many people shy from learning new things, and those who do learn are often labeled as nerds and warned about dangers of having too high self-esteem. I really long for the world where this sort of anti-intellectualism is not something to be proud of, and where the social pressure is encouraging self-development, rather than discouraging it.
2) Expectation of competency. It's visible on all levels - from civilian vs. Starfleet interactions, through teamwork of starship crews, to the inner workings of big bureaucracies like the United Federation of Planets. Everyone is assumed competent until proven otherwise. Characters in Star Trek know they're working with others who are as smart as they are, and so they trust each other and trust the system. Contrast with the real world, where we often assume our coworkers are incompetent, and the predominant narrative in society is that bureaucracies are stupid and evil.
I only now realize how much my expectations of humans are different thank to Star Trek, and that a big part of my life is trying to form an area around myself, where 1) and 2) would hold.
There's also point 3), but that may be a particular quirk of my personality - I prefer stories where not individuals, but organizations are heroes. That's another reason why I love Star Trek, and that's also why S.H.I.E.L.D. was always my favourite part of the Marvel Multiverse. A magical mutated flying superhero is boring. A Helicarrier - now that's interesting. :).
As for 2), that's an interesting point. Perhaps it speaks to a level of maturity and mutual trust that we have not achieved yet. Maybe it manifests naturally as a result of progress with 1). It'd be interesting to read some lengthier discourse on this.. I feel it relates to government, market forces, social perception, culture and more..
Alien & Primer are excellent counterexamples.
Oddly, Prometheus was an excellent example. It's like Ridley Scott documented all the different ways you can make a character totally uninteresting and loathsome, and made sure to include at least one example of each in that movie. What a turd.
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.mb.txt