Trivia: The secret project created to use the Hermes to return to Mars to rescue Watney was called Project Elrond, a reference from the Lord of the Rings (also used in the original book of The Martian). Mitch Henderson, played by Sean Bean, was an attendee at the Project Elrond meeting. Sean Bean also played Boromir, who was an attendee at the Council of Elrond in the LOTR movie.
Trivia: The sound of Vigo growling is exactly the same growl that the terror dogs from the first Ghostbusters make.
Trivia: In the entire film, there are only two "homegrown", real humans - Tank and Dozer. They both have names of machines.
Trivia: The two old men near the end, talking about it being "old school" are voiced by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, two Walt Disney animators who worked on such classics as Bambi and Cinderella.
Trivia: While on the helicarrier, Tony Stark is wearing a Black Sabbath T-shirt, the band who released the song "Iron Man".
Trivia: Smith tries to explain to the woman who Bob Marley is by singing a part of the song "I Shot the Sheriff." He also sang this part of the song (with a similar voice imitation) in his role as Will in one of the episodes from the series "Fresh Prince of Bel Air".
Trivia: When the movie played in theaters, there was a scene where Dr. Catheter begins to tell Billy about the gremlins before the movie is interrupted by gremlins until they are threatened by Hulk Hogan. When the movie was released on VHS, the scene was changed to static appearing and gremlins constantly changing the channels. This caused many people who bought or rented the movie to think there was something wrong with the tape and took it back to the stores they purchased it from.
Trivia: A great deal of Flint Marko/Sandman's storyline was edited out of the film by the studio due to the long run-time. One scene early in the film showed that the scientists who accidentally created Sandman were racked with guilt when they discovered they might have activated the machine with a person inside of it. Another scene had Sandman visiting a doctor researching his daughter's rare disease whom he had been corresponding with in prison. Yet another scene showed him following his daughter in a park, and morphing into a giant sandcastle that she plays with. And finally, his daughter was going to appear in the final battle, and would appeal to her father to stop hurting people and living a life of crime to get money, as she accepted that she was going to die no matter what. Her words would be what convinced him to seek forgiveness from Peter for accidentally killing Uncle Ben.
Trivia: This is Rachel McAdams' third time travel film (she also stars in The Time Traveler's Wife and Midnight in Paris), but her character hasn't time traveled in any of the films, it's always someone else.
Trivia: The Korean woman whom Cris calls up during his magic act is actually the real-life wife of Nicolas Cage.
Trivia: The "old gangster movie" that's on the TV in Harry's apartment is the fictional movie "Angels with Filthy Souls," which was seen in the movie "Home Alone." The director wanted a detective movie for the scene, and said: "We needed something and I hadn’t figured out what I was going to put on that TV yet...Just as a laugh, we got the movie that they shot for Home Alone off of YouTube...We could never beat it!"
Trivia: When David Banner is dreaming about his trial, the jury foreperson is played by The Incredible Hulk creator, Stan Lee.
Trivia: Robert Fiveson, the producer of the 1979 B movie "Parts: The Clonus Horror" sued Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, Michael Bay and the producers of "The Island", citing over ninety similarities between the films. Despite the fact that he was a long forgotten producer of low budget films and he was up against the biggest names in Hollywood, he settled out of court for an undisclosed "seven figure sum" and 15% of the net profits of "The Island." Since it cost £126,000,000 plus advertising and netted just £81,000,000, I hope he got his seven figure sum.
Trivia: Even though Frank the pug doesn't appear, there are a couple of references to him. The first one is a big picture of him over J's bed and when J gets pulled over by the cops, there is a billboard advertising for "The Amazing Talking Pug." (00:22:35 - 00:40:25)
Trivia: This movie was originally supposed to be part of the TV series "Amazing Stories" but Steven Spielberg like the story so much that he decided to make it a full length film.