I don’t want to spoil things here but let’s just say the book balanced tensions a lot more deftly (both tension from danger and tension from emotion). In this movie the journey felt much too effortless to me. I’m hoping a longer version would do better building tension properly.

By comparison, I think The Martian was able to capture more of a sense of urgency even though it had the same Problem?… Solution! format.

I haven't seen the movie, I've read the book and seen interviews with Weir.

A couple details in the book that aren't in the movie: To farm astrophage, they pave over the Sahara desert with solar powered breeders. This, among other things, starts throwing the climate out of whack even faster. Stratt, Grace and a climatologist character who isn't in the movie muse about how manmade global warming was erased in a month. No, check that, global warming bought them an extra month. Well, if we were able to get that accidentally, imagine what kind of global warming we could do if we really set our minds to it. So they nuke Antarctica to break off a giant ice sheet, to release huge quantities of methane trapped in the ice.

Weir often mentions regret that he didn't get to add that scene. It was written in the screenplay, and would have been relatively cheap to make because there's no compositing. Just a dialog scene with no special effects, cut to a pure special effects shot. No editing puppeteers out of the set or layering a live action astronaut in front of a CG planet.

It got cut for time, and I don't think the scene even got filmed, so I don't know if a future special Weir Edition blu-ray will include it.