[smadsen]

Coincidentally, I'm watching The Martian right now after reading the book last week. I have to agree, the movie just does not capture the same sense of surprise and careful attention to detail as described in the book. The sets are nice though, and it's pretty cool to see how the production team visualized the scenes and hardware compared to how I had imagined them. Seems like there could be some scientific inaccuracies too (e.g. hab repairs with only hardware store plastic film and duct tape).

Overall, I'd say Interstellar works much better in movie form, although perhaps that is partly due to the scale of the concepts it employs compared to The Martian, which is smaller and more technical.