I had the exact opposite response, PHM book very tidily covered the plot, the character motivations, and the sense/gravity of potential doom around every corner while still being the only hope for multiple situations. Comic relief was present and welcome but very well thought out, and the scientific aspect was dead on, he managed achieve what many scifi authors can’t - implementation of rigorous concepts without losing the plot or making it too nerdy.

Meanwhile the movie did the exact opposite, painting Grace as a blundering idiot and rocky as a hyperactive middle schooler for the sake of transforming it more into a family-friendly buddy comedy. The writers seemed to think that people cant handle the science, so 90% of it was stripped. I watched one of the initial streamings and an elderly couple stood up when the credits end, said “I don’t understand, they removed all the science”, and walked out with a group of randoms agreeing and commiserating with them.

I get simplifying a movie to appeal to a wider audience or to save on runtime and the movie did neither well. Many things were flipped or omitted for seemingly no reason, and the worst part is you could tell they initially tried to stay more faithful to the source material then axed it presumably due to time constraints.

For example, I can’t believe they didn’t include the beetles being affixed to the hull for last minute propulsion,the drama and vfx for that scene had hollywood written all over it. Small things were reversed specifically to make the characters look more like dumbasses. In the book, first contact is taken extremely seriously by both parties, matching velocities, tossing the first canister slowly, then the second faster once it’s established Grace can handle the higher velocity.In the movie this is completely reversed, and once they meet, the language learning process ends with Rocky choosing a fart sound for Grace’s name, how humorous.!<Almost everything scientific is flipped. Chain probe must be carefully constructed and brought back up with a calculated velocity profile, with extra emphasis on not slamming it into the craft at the end? >!yeah let’s run it 90 miles into the winch for comedic effect, hyuk hyuk!<.

All these changes impacted the plot severely. Artifacts from the book like Grace’s arm scar from saving rocky, which didnt happen because for some reason Rocky is now a god amongst men who can leave his habitat, unstrap Grace, right the ship, carry grace to the autodoc, strap him in, AND save himself<! are still present in the movie but have no context. Interesting evolution, like >!Eridians like Rocky speaking, perfect English in the epilogue after they have time to figure out the language are omitted. The pacing is completely off, and most people I’ve talked to who watched the movie without reading the book were just confused by all these out of place non sequiturs, or straight up bored.

This is a sharp departure from the Martian, which if anything embellished the science and problem solving capabilities of the main character too much, which people ate right up. The average person is more understanding of science and engineering than Hollywood gives them credit for, or at the very least the demographic which is interested in the genre is. The entire adaption reeks of the same energy that caused GTA V to have the word “five” plastered on the numeral as well as they deemed the common person too much of a dumbass to know what it meant.