For the rest of this space I'm going to discuss the differences between the book and the movie, so let that serve as your warning if you prefer surprises left intact.
First I'd like to address the elephant in the room: Yes, Matt Damon also played a stranded astronaut in Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, which also starred Jessica Chastain. So let's pretend The Martian is like Murph Cooper went back to rescue the unethical Dr. Mann! Oh, did I just digress into spoiling a whole other movie? Rest assured, Damon's character here is completely different from Mann and you won't be comparing this film to Interstellar while sitting in the theater.
The first difference from the book, I noticed in the very first scene. Andy Weir's book begins on Sol (solar day) 6, but Drew Goddard's screenplay has the fateful sandstorm occur on Sol 18. I couldn't think of a reason that this minor change was made
The next difference was made in the interest of keeping a PG-13. Due to the MPAA's arbitrary guidelines for strong language (that's a whole different blog post), it can vary how many uses of the F-word are allowed in a PG-13 movie. It would seem The Martian was allowed exactly two instances and used them up in the first five minutes. The rest of Mark Watney's moments of colorful language, given free reign in the book of course, were either censored in text with dashes, translated via other characters' euphemisms, and in one case silenced by the vacuum of Mars. I'm not going to say it was necessary to hear all the F-bombs, but the edits of them seemed all the more obvious and occasionally jarring, considering much of the dialogue was taken verbatim from the novel.
Some aspects of the adaptation process were absolutely necessary and welcome, such as making Watney's daily written logs into video logs, which is preferable in the visual medium of film. There were a few too many scenes of characters reading aloud while they typed or received messages, but this was justified by the other characters in the room needing to hear what the correspondence said. It was also a little awkward when NASA authorities were shown making important decisions very quickly without much deliberation, while in the book a few days were allowed to pass. There are also fewer obstacles encountered during Watney's journey from Acidalia Planitia to the Schiaparelli crater. In the book he encounters another sandstorm, a loss of communication with NASA, and a devastating tumble of his rover into the crater, which are not depicted on-screen. However it is understandable to do this for more economical storytelling so these were understandable sacrifices.
The largest changes come during the rescue sequence at the end of the story. In the book, Watney makes a joke about flying around like Iron Man by poking a hole in his spacesuit glove, while in the movie he actually carries out this plan. At the same time, the movie's Commander Lewis (Chastain) goes outside the Hermes to grab Watney herself, but in the book this is done by Dr. Beck. One aspect that gave me a laugh was that the whole crew comes to join Watney after he's pulled in; this must be a nod to the quote in the book in which Watney says: "If this were a movie, everyone would have been in the airlock, and there would have been high fives all around. But it didn't pan out that way."
The screen version also adds an epilogue after Watney is rescued, similar to something Weir says he had in the first draft of his book, and deleted when he decided it felt too artificial to introduce a time jump. However, in a movie it doesn't feel unnatural to see what each of the crew members did after they returned to Earth.
Overall, the movie stuck pretty close to the book, and those making it clearly put as much research into the scientific accuracy as Andy Weir did. The few tweaks made by the filmmakers can serve as an example of the right way to adapt a text to the screen. Both the book and the film are proof that science fiction can be intelligent and realistic, while remaining highly entertaining.
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