The Martian, page to screen
Nobody dies in the ending of The Martian, in either the novel or the film. Mark Watney is recovered alive, and all 5 of his crewmates survive the rescue, which is one of the few points on which Andy Weir's book and Ridley Scott's 2015 film agree completely. The only death in the story is the one that never happens: Watney is presumed killed in the storm on Sol 6, his crew leaves Mars believing it, and the remaining 18 months are spent correcting that belief. If you have arrived here because the last 20 minutes are tense enough to feel like someone must be about to be lost, the answer is no, and neither version of the story kills anyone to buy the ending its weight.
The Martian: the book and movie differences, in short
The book and movie differences in The Martian are differences of density rather than of event. The book is Andy Weir's novel, self-published serially from 2011 and issued by Crown in 2014, written as a sequence of mission logs in which a stranded astronaut works out how to stay alive for 18 months and shows every calculation. The film is Ridley Scott's of 2015, 144 minutes, from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, with Matt Damon as Mark Watney. The spine, the crew and the ending are the same in both. The central difference is that the novel hands the reader the arithmetic and the film hands the audience the result, which changes the texture of the story without changing a single outcome.
What the novel does across 18 months of arithmetic
The novel spends its 18 months on arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the plot. Weir wrote it as a sequence of mission logs, self-published it serially from 2011 and saw it issued by Crown in 2014, and the log form does something no summary conveys: the reader is handed the calculation before the outcome. How many calories per sol, how much water can be made from hydrazine, how many square metres of Martian soil can be made to grow potatoes, how far a rover can travel on a battery it was not designed to carry. The suspense is not whether Watney is brave. It is whether the sums come out.
The novel also spends far more time away from Mars than the film has room for. Whole stretches sit inside NASA in Houston, inside the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and aboard the Hermes with the crew who left him, and the book takes its time over the politics of telling the crew the truth. The voice throughout is flat, profane, technical and funny, a working engineer talking to a log file he does not expect anyone to read.
Watney types. The reader gets pages of reasoning in text, including the failures, the recalculations and the jokes he makes to nobody, and works out the danger a paragraph before he states it.
Watney talks to a camera. The log becomes video, the reasoning becomes performance, and the audience gets the conclusion with a face attached to it instead of the working.
What the 2015 film compressed to reach the same ending
The film compressed roughly 3 major set pieces and most of the mathematics to reach that ending in 144 minutes. Scott's film, from a screenplay by Drew Goddard, keeps the spine intact: the storm, the self-surgery, the potatoes, the recovery of Pathfinder and its accidental destruction, the Hab breach that kills the crop, the long drive to Schiaparelli crater, the Rich Purnell manoeuvre that turns the Hermes around, and the stripped-down ascent vehicle. What it drops are the disasters of the final journey. In the novel Watney detects an approaching regional dust storm by noticing his solar panels are producing less power each day, works out its shape by planting markers, and drives around it. The film has no equivalent scene. The novel also puts the rover on its side during the descent into the crater. The film leaves the drive comparatively clean.
Smaller changes accumulate. The film condenses the ground-based cast and renames the senior NASA scientist Venkat Kapoor as Vincent Kapoor, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. It thins the Hermes crew's internal debate. It removes almost all the numbers, which is the single largest cut by volume and the least visible one, because what is lost is not an event but a texture.
The change that mattered most: who reaches out at the end
The change that mattered most is the last 3 minutes of the rescue, and it is a change of hands rather than of outcome. In the novel the intercept is flown as a crew operation, the spacewalk that catches Watney is not the commander's, and Watney's own suggestion that he puncture his suit and use the escaping air as thrust is raised and rejected as too dangerous. The film reverses both. Commander Lewis, played by Jessica Chastain, goes out on the tether herself, and Watney performs the manoeuvre the book talked him out of. It is a small rewrite with a clear purpose: it closes Lewis's arc, since she is the person who gave the order to leave him, and it gives Watney one last piece of improvisation instead of one last piece of waiting.
The film then adds a coda the novel does not have, set back on Earth some time later, with Watney teaching and the surviving crew shown getting on with their lives. Weir ends within a few pages of the rescue, on Watney thinking about why people spent that much money to retrieve one man. Both endings say the same thing. The book says it as a thought and the film says it as a scene.
How faithful is the 2015 film to Weir's novel?
The 2015 film is faithful on all 4 axes and closest of all on theme, which makes it one of the few cases here where a single word nearly serves. Check each axis anyway. On plot the film drops the regional dust storm Watney detects by watching his solar output fall, and the rover roll on the descent towards Schiaparelli, and it keeps everything else in sequence. On character it thins the ground crew, renames Venkat Kapoor as Vincent, and moves the final spacewalk to Commander Lewis. On voice the written log becomes a video log, which is the longest distance on the page and still a moderate one. On theme nothing moves at all. Even here the answer resists a number, because the largest cut by volume is the mathematics, and that cut is invisible: it removes no event and takes away the one thing a particular kind of reader came for.
Where the film lands on plot, character, voice and theme
On the site's four-point scale The Martian lands closer to its source than almost any other case file here, with the longest distance on voice and the shortest on theme. It is the clean example of an adaptation that had to compress rather than reinvent, because the novel's problem was density, not incompatibility.
| Axis | The book | The film | Distance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plot | Every failure, in sequence, including 2 the film drops | The same spine, 3 set pieces lighter, same ending | |
| Character | Watney plus a wide ground crew, each given room | Watney plus a thinned ground crew, Lewis given the rescue | |
| Voice | Written logs, dense with calculation, addressed to nobody | Video logs, calculation implied, addressed to a lens | |
| Theme | Competence as survival, and the reflex to go back for people | Identical, stated aloud in the coda |
The verdict flips only for readers who came for the engineering. Anyone who read the novel for the sums will find the film has quietly removed the thing they enjoyed and left the plot those sums were holding up. Everyone else is watching a faithful adaptation, and the 7 Academy Award nominations the film received are a fair record of how little damage the crossing did.