This Wednesday, The Martian follows its huge box office and home release success with an updated release on DVD and Blu-Ray. The Martian – Extended Edition comes with two cuts of the film, the theatrical release, and a new extended version that runs an extra ten minutes. You can read a full review of the two disc Blu-Ray edition HERE, but here we’ll give you a bit more insight into what you’ll find in this new version of the film. Warning though – some major spoilers are ahead.
The extra scenes in the film total 9 minutes and 44 seconds and are spread over ten chapters of the disc. Many of the additions are quite minor – an extra scene of a still wounded Watney getting out of bed one morning, Watney briefly falling to sleep while he’s driving around Mars, a throw away line that showed off a technician’s wit. But we learn a bit more about Watney’s world too. We see him using smoke and superglue to find weaknesses in his plastic and duct tape engineered sealing, and repair them. We are introduced to an inflatable, portable habitat he was able to take with him on his lengthy expedition at the end of the film. And we even get to see a naked Matt Damon in the process. Well, sort of.
We also learn that the crew told Watney they were coming to get him earlier than the original cut made it out to be, sending him a message saying they were coming to get him, with Damon’s brilliantly delivered line “Well now how are you going to do that?”. Fans of the original book will be pleased to hear we get the “bureaucratic felcher” line that was cut from the film back in there, delivered brilliantly by Jeff Daniels. Kristen Wiig gets an extra scene – and an excellent one – where she talks about her two deadbeat ex-husbands, as does Donald Glover, who really needs a supercomputer. Also pay attention to the commentary a little bit before this addition – it’s entertaining to learn that the actor didn’t slip and fall on purpose in his first scene.
The longest scene cut from the film, however, is one that shows what Watney did for those months that we starts wasting away. He finishes the mission. Look out for that in chapter 22, and we’ll let you enjoy it – including some unnecessarily extended camera stroking. It’s arguably the release’s most important addition.
Both cuts have identical commentaries – with a lack of commentary a good way to tell what’s a new scene and what’s not, should your memory be failing you. So while there’s not much insight into why certain scenes were cut, the writers do mention at various points things like “we’re getting into the section where the cuts are more and more painful” – and indeed you’ll find some extra scenes aren’t far away.
Beyond the extra ten minutes of feature film content, there’s also two hours of amount of features on a bonus disc that weren’t available on the original release (which, as we reviewed last year, was pretty bare bones). These two hours of content are spread over sections – a comprehensive six part making of documentary called “The Long Way Home: Making The Martian” and “Investigating Mars”, something of a five part journey that looks at the real-life science behind the film – as well as some of NASA’s real-life plans to journey to Mars.
In addition to these, the disc contains a production and art gallery, the theatrical trailers as well as the Ares Mission Videos and the Gag Reel that you found on the original DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Plus, just in case you didn’t get enough extra footage, there are three deleted scenes on there. The first shows Watney calculating the distances he needs to travel on his rover mission (which is actually just an extended take of what has been added into the extended edition already). The second sits us in with the Hermes crew as they discuss problems with their spacecraft as well as on board sleeping arrangements, and the final scene is something of an alternate, extended ending, with Watney looking pensively at the Earth with a familiar voice over as he travelled home aboard the Hermes.
The Martian – Extended Edition is landing on Blu-Ray and DVD on August 24th.
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