I need to rewatch Primer - it managed to twist my mind into a knot, so I honestly say I didn&#x27;t understand much of what was happening. Moon is on my list, of Pandorum I haven&#x27;t heard. Thanks for the titles, I&#x27;ll definitely see them :).<p>RE shortening, I remember watching Ender&#x27;s Game and leaving cinema angry, because the movie had compressed the book so much that I felt it won&#x27;t make any sense for a person who hadn&#x27;t read the novel. I now imagine that the Martian may have seemed similarly poor to you because of that. If you happen to read the book and find the <i>text</i> being crap, please get back to me, I&#x27;d really like to hear your perspective.<p>We, or rather - some of us - are talking not books, but book+movie combo. The Martian was quite a thing among space geeks even before the movie was announced, and doubly so after the story broke - so, like me, they probably implicitly assume others read the original too. I guess it&#x27;s a lesson for me for the future, to bring up explicitly whether one had or had not read the book :).