To get there requires rigorously somewhat more space than I want to take today but which I can describe using basic function concepts: there is a set of functions that generate negative and positive outcomes relative to what is considered neutral and ‘neutral’ is a multi-dimensional space that renders as a series of planes tied together by rotating them so a perfectly straight line disappearing into the z-axis is actually a series of infinitely stacked planes which essentially open up or ‘unfold’ to you as you count along z. To skip ahead, this implies that the purely logical answer would be for another dust storm to come up as he’s getting ready to leave Mars and for that to either tip him over or off course, etc., meaning any negative outcome desired, or escape by the very milimeters of his suit, meaning any positive outcome. I mean the guy is stranded because a rocket that’s been sitting there for some long period – greater than a year, it appears – which must have been through the gamut of Martian weather suddenly decides to tip over AND the guy is able to leave Mars because there’s yet another rocket which has been standing through the Martian weather. As to an end, one way to approach that problem is by looking at problems with the beginning: that a dust storm in negligible atmosphere not only has the same impact as a similar storm in a denser atmosphere, that we’re really bad at designing structures which survive and, the hidden flaw, that if storms could do this then how has any rocket dropped in beforehand remaining standing? There’s some interesting ‘space’ in that, by which I mean cognitive space that illuminates – since this is a statistical blog – statistical thinking. Problem with your ending is unreal economics are in the premise: they have set up rockets dropped in advance so I conclude they have the resources to divert. This entry was posted in Decision Theory, Literature by Andrew. The astronaut then for the rest of his life has to live with the fact that all his and his colleagues’ ingenuity did manage to save him, but at the cost of ending future manned exploration of space. Have the spaceman get rescued-by the way, it’s a sign of the weak characterization that, even though I read the book and saw the movie, I still can’t remember the main character’s name-but have that rescue require resources that would otherwise have been necessary for the space program, so that, as a result, future missions are canceled. As I said, the challenge is to avoid the two easy outs of a pure win, in one direction, or a failure, on the other. And I conjecture that had Weir framed it to himself as a problem to be solved with ingenuity, maybe he could’ve done it.Īnd, hey! I finally figured out how Weir could’ve done it. All I do know is that, for me, the ending that Weir chose didn’t do the job.
#The martian movie plot how to
So how to do it? How to make an ending that works, on dramatic terms? I don’t know. And, given the structure of the book, an indeterminate ending would just be a cheat. A pure “win” for the hero would just feel too easy, but just leaving him on Mars or having him float off into space on his own, that’s just cheap pathos. So what I think is that Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, should’ve considered the ending of the book to be a challenge, not for his astronaut hero, but for himself: how to end the book in a satisfying way? It’s a challenge. It’s an excellent metaphor for life (although not stated that way in the book one of the strengths of The Martian is that the whole thing is played straight, so that the reader can draw the larger conclusions for him or herself).
A lot of the fun comes when the solution of problem A leads to problem B later on. The Martian is structured as a series of challenges: one at a time, there is a difficult or seemingly insurmountable problem that the character or characters solve, or try to solve, in some way. The ending is not terrible-at a technical level it’s somewhat satisfying (I’m not enough of a physicist to say more than that), but at the level of construction of a story arc, it didn’t really work for me. In this post from a couple years ago I discussed the unsatisfying end of The Martian.
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