Andy Weir, author of The Martian, actually worked hard to get the science right and that has become one of the talking points of this movie. But the more important word in "science fiction" is "fiction." All movies are fiction, even those that are supposedly "based on a true story." Even many documentaries are obviously biased. And even if a movie is based on real events, the screenwriters must take many liberties and invent dialogues and sometimes even characters and scenes in order to dramatize the story to make it more exciting. I guess I would assume that most moviegoers know that Mark Watney isn't a real person who was stranded on Mars (in the year 2030).DWill wrote:Now you've got me thinking about what makes a movie or book science fiction. Maybe the category is fuzzy in definition. . .
But Harlan Ellison tells a funny story in one of the articles he wrote about the impact of television in our lives (collected in his book, The Glass Teat), wherein he describes a conversation he had with Dan Blocker, who once played the character Hoss on Bonanaza.
Ellison uses this anecdote to show the dumbing down effect of the boob tube. But I like to think he was exxagerating and that most people do, in fact, know the difference between fiction and reality and aren't going to come to have "unrealistic expectations" of science after watching the movie, The Martian. I think this Slate piece could easily have been in The Onion. I think the author had to come up with an article and this was the best she could do under time constraints."He told me– and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated cases– that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, “Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some decent food for you and your family.”
“So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I’ve ever met), “Excuse me, ma’am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I’ll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting.”
“And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, “Yes, I know… but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said…”