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1. Who plays Mark Watney?
Matt Damon
Damon's casting came a year after he played a very different stranded astronaut, the treacherous Dr. Mann in Interstellar. He was nominated for the best actor Oscar, one of the film's seven nominations, none of which it won.
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2. Who directed The Martian?
Ridley Scott
Scott, the director of Alien and Blade Runner, took over after screenwriter Drew Goddard, who had meant to direct it himself, left for another project. Cuarón and Nolan made Gravity and Interstellar, the space survival films that arrived just before this one.
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3. Who wrote the novel?
Andy Weir
Weir, a software engineer, serialized the story free on his website, then sold it on Kindle for 99 cents when readers asked for an e-book. It climbed the charts fast enough that a publisher and a studio came calling almost simultaneously.
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4. What is Watney's main scientific specialty?
Botany
Watney is the crew's botanist and mechanical engineer, which between them cover most of what the planet throws at him. The food in the habitat will not stretch anywhere near the four years until the next mission lands, so the botany is what keeps him alive.
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5. What crop does he grow in the habitat?
Potatoes
The potatoes were packed for a Thanksgiving dinner the crew never got to eat, and Watney grows them in Martian soil fertilized with the crew's vacuum-packed waste. The crop dies when the habitat's airlock blows out and the cold kills the bacteria in the soil.
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6. Which mission leaves him behind?
Ares III
Ares III is the third crewed Mars mission, and its crew is forced out early when a dust storm threatens to tip over their ascent vehicle. Watney is hit by a flying antenna and his suit stops reporting his vital signs, so the commander has to assume he is dead.
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7. Who commands Watney's crew?
Melissa Lewis
Lewis is a Navy commander and geologist who makes the call to leave Watney behind and then leads the crew's vote to turn the ship around and go back for him. The film also hands her the final spacewalk to grab Watney, which in the book belongs to Chris Beck.
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8. Who plays Commander Lewis?
Jessica Chastain
Chastain and Damon had both been in Interstellar the year before without sharing a single scene, and Chastain prepared by spending time with the astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson. Sandra Bullock had already had her own space ordeal in Gravity.
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9. What is the crew's main spacecraft called?
Hermes
Hermes is the crew's ion-drive ship, and they defy NASA by flying the Rich Purnell maneuver, a slingshot around Earth that sends them back for Watney. Discovery, Endurance and Icarus belong to 2001, Interstellar and Sunshine.
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10. What old NASA probe does Watney recover to communicate?
Pathfinder
Pathfinder landed in 1997 with the little Sojourner rover, and Watney digs it out of the sand and hauls it home. He talks to JPL by pointing its camera at cards set in a circle, one per hexadecimal digit, while the engineers dig a duplicate out of storage.
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11. What music does Watney complain about hearing?
Disco
Commander Lewis left behind nothing but seventies disco, which Watney grumbles about in his video logs while playing it anyway. The soundtrack leans into the joke and ends with Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive over the credits.
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12. What does a Martian day get called?
A sol
A sol is a Martian day, roughly forty minutes longer than one on Earth, and Watney's video logs are dated by sol rather than by calendar. He is on the planet for more than five hundred of them before the rescue, around a year and a half of Earth time.
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13. Which country offers a booster that can help the rescue?
China
The Chinese space agency offers its Taiyang Shen booster, a classified project, after NASA's hastily built Iris resupply probe explodes seconds after launch. The Chinese scientists point out that handing it over means giving up their own probe's mission.
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14. Where were the Martian surface scenes filmed?
Wadi Rum in Jordan
Wadi Rum is a protected desert valley in southern Jordan whose red sandstone has stood in for Mars more than once, and Lawrence of Arabia was shot there too. The interiors, from the habitat to the Hermes, were built at Korda Studios outside Budapest.
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15. What does Watney puncture to propel himself near the end?
His suit glove
Watney punctures the glove so the escaping air works as a thruster, a stunt he pitches with a comparison to Iron Man and which Lewis vetoes before he does it anyway. The ascent vehicle had already been stripped of its nose cone and windows to save weight.
