What plot holes could be adequately explained away with a single shot or line of dialogue?
"We've almost got some of their telecommunications cracked; the front end even runs on a laptop!" The Mac that sunk a thousand ships could have been merely clunky product placement, not a bafflingly stupid tech-on-film moment.
"Senator Amidala is in a coma. Even if she recovers, she will never be the same and may not live long." But no.... George had to have his god-damned funeral scene, even if it demanded Simone Biles levels of mental gymnastics to save Carrie Fisher's most emotionally resonant moment from ROTJ, as well as one of the more intriguing OT lore dumps.
Bonus points if a scene was scripted or filmed and got cut.
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The Martian when the main airlock blows up.
He ends up taping a plastic sheet over the hole with what I assume is super strong space tape and plastic and then continues to live in the station for 550 more days.
We spend the first half of the movie learning how unforgiving the environment is, and how delicate his ecosystem for life is, but you can also blow half the place up and just tape some plastic over the hole.
They did a much better job of explaining it in the book, but the movie literally went "just tape that bitch up with plastic, then we'll throw a wind storm at it to prove it's good forever"
Another big plot hole in the Martian, also present in the book, is that messages are encoded in hexadecimal. But then why did he have a separate question mark card, when all punctuation can be encoded in ASCII/hex? Also
both him andNASA wrote in all caps. Again they have a full ascii set. Makes no sense.The question card is where he writes. He calls it that because that's where he writes questions.
They also don't encode spaces when they talk to him I always assume that was to save time. They only have about 8 hours a day and they can only send one message every 30 minutes or so. If they take too long to send a message they'll cut into the next message and they need to give him time to go back inside.
Ah so it’s a position where they can read his messages. They does make more sense. However all caps still doesn’t. The messages should have used caps to delineate abbreviated words. Like their first message “HOW ALIVE?” Could have been HwAliv? Which of course could be interpreted as “how are you even alive?” Or “how alive are you?”
The other thing of course is that he just wrote it in all caps because they are simple straight lines. In the book it's explained that the only way he can keep track of what they're writing is to draw it in the dirt with a metal rod. Because all the ink in the pens boils off if he takes them out into Mars's atmosphere and the laptops also break because the liquid in the LCD boils off.
That is also why they need to give him time to go back inside to write the next question. He can't use the pens outside.
Well then the movie makers screwed up when they showed the hexadecimal ASCII lookups, because it’s all upper case.
I found this post hilarious.
At least they threw the wind storm at it, LOL.
The only explanation for the wind storm and the tape is that the atmosphere had already been teraformed to be much much thicker, to the point that its at a survivable pressure for breathing, the only problem is lack of oxygen and too cold.
Isn't there something like the gravity on Mars is so low that even though there are massive dust storms with fast winds, they feel like a gentle breeze, and would never be able to topple a solid object, let alone a space ship.
Yeah, but it's air pressure, not gravity.
Yeah the author addressed that. He said he needed a way for the main character to be isolated and presumed dead for the story to work and really couldn't come up with anything so he had to kind of abandon reality for a bit.
There was actually a community back on Reddit dedicated to fixing that bit of the story.
How did the book handle it?
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So, in the book:
When he's making water out of hydrazine from the MDV, he gets the process a little wrong and accidentally causes an explosion. This slightly stresses the canvas around one of the three airlocks. He prefers to use that airlock to the other two because it's the closest to the rover chargers, so he uses that one the most. Every time he cycles the airlock, it slightly expands and contracts, repeatedly stressing the canvas until it fails.
The resulting explosion hurls the airlock over 100 meters from the HAB, cracks the airlock and in the resulting tumble he bashes in his EVA suit's helmet. So he fixes the crack with duct tape, cuts his space suit's arm off, uses the resin from a patch kit to glue the arm material over the broken helmet (in the movie the helmet is kind of cracked and he tapes over it) so he has to go into the wrecked HAB, get one of the other space suits, change in one of the rovers, then fix the HAB.
It is established that the mission was designed to survive a HAB breach, and was supplied with spare canvas and adhesive resin to make repairs, which he did. He had to reduce the height of the ceiling in that section of the HAB to make it fit, and from then on he alternated use of the other two airlocks.
The book kicked a lot more of the shit out of Watney. The movie doesn't even mention killing Pathfinder, the dust storm enroute to the MAV or rolling the rover over.
That's a great write-up response, thanks!
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Space age hyper-tough epoxy.
And the plastic cover?
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IIRC, the same canvas material the rest of the habitation was made out of.
I believe that is correct.
In the book, they also took pains to point out the steps he took to try to avoid it happening to the other airlocks after that point too - by actually balancing out their usage a bit more, instead of just always using the same one.