I had the pleasure of seeing The Martian this past weekend and it actually lived up to all the hype for a change. It was visually stunning, well-acted and extremely funny and quite moving too. What else could you ask for in a movie?
I’m a big Ridley Scott fan so I am very happy that he got to make this movie and that it’s garnered so many good reviews (an amazing 93% rating on RottenTomatoes.com!). Best of all, it’s generated a ton of ticket sales at the box office as it was number one over the weekend with million!
Here’s the trailer
The Story Behind The Story
How this movie and the book ever came to be is an amazing story in of itself. The author Andy Weir was a programmer who wrote The Martian on his blog over the period of many years in a series of blog posts. He eventually created a free eBook for his readers and then published it on Amazon for the minimum .99 cents and it became a bestseller. Traditional publishers caught wind of this popularity and published the book and the rest is history. Eventually Ridley Scott (Director of classics like Bladerunner, Alien, Gladiator) became attached as the director for the film and here we are. What an incredible journey it’s been.
Here’s the author in an interview discussing his whirlwind experience with his story.
Now for something fun
The marketing team behind The Martian has been awesome. They started with a brilliant #BringHimHome hashtag on social media and even a BringHimHome.com website that allows you to add your own photo and change the words to create your own Bring Him Home poster. Well, here are a few that I created.
The first one was one I created for my description of The Martian being nothing more than Home Alone in Space.
Eric Snowden joined Twitter during this time so I decided to create Bring Snowden Home for the NSA and NASA.
This next one was for Tim Ferriss the author of my favorite book series, the 4 Hour Body, 4 Hour Work Week and the 4 Hour Chef. I said that if anyone could survive hacking Mars it would be Mr. Ferriss
This one was inspired from a conversation with a friend who said it sounds like Castaway on Mars so I added Wilson to the helmet.
This one isn’t from the Bring Him Home theme but a hybrid mashup of The Martian and another recent number one smash, Straight Outta Compton.
