“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.
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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