Great, call the AI "Mother", give the ship a skeleton crew, and hope it doesn't invoke special order 937

http://alienanthology.wikia.co...

This is a good way to get rid of your lifer employees who've settled down into family life and are just coasting, relying on labor laws and the hefty cost of severance to keep their jobs. Call in to a meeting after dropping off the kids here, respond to some emails after picking up the kids there, everything off at 5. Meanwhile you have the productive employees at the office that come to kind of ignore and not expect anything from the wfh crowd. I've been a contractor at several large companies (cisco, yahoo, oracle) and I've seen it. Yes yes you have your rock star wfh employee here and there. But for the most part, the wfh folks might as well not even be on the team you wouldn't notice and everybody resents them because they make more money than them and don't have to come in and they don't do anything. So this sort of policy shift is a good way of getting rid of dead weight without having to pay severance because there's no way a remote coaster can convert to productive office monkey and they know it.

Or maybe people who have feelings of inadequacy and anxiety choose to use social media in an attempt to mitigate those feelings (futile.)

There's rules against that :-)

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

It's a good rule.

So the emergency lithobraking maneuver didn't do the trick then. This sucks. Really.

Spain, 1492 - members of the public argued against organizing and achieving the treacherous and expensive journey filled with monumental and unknown dangers it would take to cross the ocean for unknown payoff. Instead they argued to send pigeons and donkeys because that made much more sense.

That's exactly what that comment will sound like in 500 years. Congrats!

How bout a toy he might enjoy like a Star Wars action figure.

It's "intents and purposes", not "intensive purposes"

Hell I'd let them win too, no way I'm running afoul of dudes in maximum security prison!

So how do I get a raise in such an environment? How do I differentiate myself from my coworkers? This has Lord of The Flies written all over it. Or that Simpsons episode where Martin ends up in a bird cage.

Wow pretty harsh! :-) You remind me of the guy in the Simpsons who says "Worst... Episode... Ever!" and the three dorks who show up to the itchy & scratchy panel to complain that the sound that the rib cage harp makes is wrong or something lol.

If we went by your standards we'd never get any kind of fun fiction, it'd be movies about spacewalks to fix broken heat exchange pumps on the ISS. We'd never have got "2001" or any other classic.

Remember: this is for as wide an audience as possible while keeping it as "hard" science fiction as possible and I think they pulled it off pretty well. The vast majority of the population doesn't know what hexadecimal is. It's not for you, it's for your brother in law and millions of other people who won't know the difference because it looks real enough. It's better than having zombies show up! (check out "Last Days On Mars" if you want that)

Remember too that this is in the near future, like 20 years, so they may have developed new materials that make having large windows on board a space ship ok. Andy Weir, the author of the book, said that he pretty much ignored the whole radiation problem in order to be able to tell the story but the new material or coating or whatever is what explains that. It's nice of NASA to make the ship as comfy as possible for this long-ass mission.

The MAV launching in the storm, well it's better than letting it tip over. It was a risk but one they had no choice but to make. It's either launch in the leaning MAV or watch it tip and they all die.

Watney explains in his vlog that the antenna fragment and his coagulated blood seal the suit (come on give the story a break, it's fiction!) and his suit is designed to keep him warm and provide oxygen for a long time. So making it till morning is no big stretch, he's woken up by the low oxygen alert.

Yes the gravity on Mars is weaker. Too difficult to simulate, too disruptive to the plot. No big deal. Also note that he's wearing a very heavy suit.

And the computers, well again this is 20 years into the future. In 1995 if you watched a movie thaty showed somebody with a pocket computer that could make phone calls and give you directions and answer questions and have the kind of animations n stuff that your common smartphone today has you'd have laughed and said it was stupid and unrealistic. Maybe the data center in which the supercomputer that he uses is air gapped or he went in for unauthorized access. Plugging a cable in to a computer will save you the trouble of hacking it over a network! And the message that says "Calculations Correct", well I have apps on my smartphone that give notifications that are as lame as that. It's for effect.

The last 15 minutes of the film can be safely ignored and chalked up to the need to give the ending a big bang for the audience. It's fine. Could have been much worse.

Worst... Complaints.. Ever!! :-)

That point is conceded by Weir but he needed something to happen like that, for Mars to throw the first punch. Something to create chaos with a loss of visibility where the crew did have a real need to evacuate (the MAV tipping over if it stayed in the storm much longer.) And the storm provides the projectile that leads to the crew thinking Watney is dead.

I'll raise you, though: Radiation. Weir also said that he pretty much ignored it, letting the audience assume maybe they had developed some kind of material that covers the HAB and his suit and the vehicle that blocks it out. It's true, kind of needed to sacrifice that. Also the Hermes would have been greatly affected as well.

I read the book twice and was kind of apprehensive of how Sir Ridley would take this on. Would he neuter the science to make it more accessible? Introduce stuff that wasn't in the book at all to make it more blockbuster-y? Would there be some love interest stuff that isn't in the book? Would he remove the gory details of the potato farming to not gross out the audience?

Nope, it stayed very very true to the book. And the scenes at NASA were very very good, I did not get impatient and think "come on get back to Mars". They really captured Watney's personality while giving the audience a real appreciation of the situation he was in. I went to see it twice, it was that good.

Matt Damon nails it. I know it's hip to hate on him but he's a damn fine actor and also the Bourne movies were great, he can pull off the action hero very well.

The supporting cast does a great job. Commander Lewis (Jessica Chastain) is true to the character in the book as are all the NASA people. Jeff Daniels is phenomenal. The only tiny teeny complaint I have is they changed the Venkat Kapoor character to be named Vincent Kapoor, but very capably played by academy award winner Chiwetel Ejiofor. They should still have kept his character as Indian but I guess they didn't want to give him an accent, that would have been much worse. Annoying debate has raged on this point on the IMDB boards ever since the casting choice was made but final consensus (by non-SJW reasonable people) is that it was simply a matter of availability of actors who could pull off the role. Chiwetel Ejiofor was a great choice.

I hope this movie gets all the Oscars coming to it. Best picture, best director, best actor. 10/10. Fantastic.

And now it's followed us into the workplace, fucking AGILE.

Why not just go to any maximum security prison and pull any of the number of guys they have locked up in "the hole" and check it out? They're in there far longer than 5 days. Heck at gitmo not only are they in pitch black for 24/7 for weeks but they get deafening rock music blared at them the whole time too.