These two plot contrivances in the Martian drove me crazy. What are your favorite convenient plot-moving, cliche-driving coincidences and problems?

In The Martian he's stuck on Mars, right, everyone thinks he's dead, and he can't communicate with Earth. Well, why not? It makes no sense - NASA can build a spaceship that can get to Mars, but somehow forget about redundancy in communication. And correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Mars have direct line of sight with Earth pretty darn often? I'll bet there are hand-held collapsible dish-style transmitters being used by the military right now that could perform a simple text transmission over that distance. Isn't NASA famous for being prepared? It never occurred to anyone that a windstorm might knock out the satellite dish?

This "pretend" technical problem continues as Whatney has only the one lady's disco music to listen to, and he keeps complaining about it into his selfie stick. This is of course ridiculous, because every single record that sold more than 50k copies in the last 70 years would fit in the size and weight of a car battery. THAT would be a pretty good thing to pack in your personal effects. A terabyte of memory is about the size of a pack of smokes, that's 250,000 songs. Plus, Whatney is watching Happy Days in one scene - each episode in 720p is about a gigabyte, right? Since they are in space for almost two years round trip, you'd think they might have packed some entertainment.

Think about it - you know what might come in handy on Mars? The collected complete knowledge of the human race. I'll bet all of wikipedia, 1000 textbooks, 50 games for Xbox 360, and 100,000 hours of 480p video could be carried by a single person in a large briefcase. This disco thing was just a stupid rip-off of Guardians of the Galaxy anyway, you guys seriously couldn't get 'Zepplin?

You know what would have been a great use of about 100k of that memory? Instructions on how to use Morse Code. If Whatney had Morse Code, he wouldn't have had to "science the shit" out of making a silly angle-based substitute alphabet. The camera on the Pathfinder (which Wats is only forced to travel to and use because NASA is so stupid they didn't send any secondary ability to communicate on two trips to Mars that transported half a million tons of equipment) could have turned left for dot, right for dash - OH BOY that would have been convenient.

Now I can't stop seeing theses story driving coincidences in every movie. Do you guys notice these too? Have any of them ever "stuck in your craw" like these did in mine?

Submitted by FULLBOREKORG Xbox 720 Release Date 2015