Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)

[Spinal]

I don't think the message of the film is just "we all need to communicate with each other". It's that language has an enormous impact on the way we think and process the world. The film suggests that interacting with different cultures can initially be tense, jarring and raise the possibility of mistrust. But fully understanding a culture and the way it uses language can ultimately open up our brains to new possibilities. That's what is memorable about the film for me, much more so than the philosophical question about her daughter. Not to say one is right and one is wrong. Just saying that this layer of the film worked well for me.

[number8]

[

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Not sure where you're getting the virus thing from. I don't recall that being in the movie at all.

]

Yeah, I don't remember anything about that at all.

[number8]

The film suggests that interacting with different cultures can initially be tense, jarring and raise the possibility of mistrust.

This aspect was what struck the most with me, too. The scene where Louise explains that they don't just need to translate glyphs, they also need to ask basic questions to learn the syntax of their form of communications so they know how certain interactions would come across, and when she intuits that they need to figure out if weapon and gift mean the same thing to their culture. That seems like the film's chief allegory. I kept forgetting her character's name after the movie and was just calling her Space Margaret Mead.

[amberlita]

Well that would make a lot more sense. Wow, though. I have no doubt you guys are correct; I'm just amazed that I could confabulate all that. I'm questioning my ability to mentally process data.

[Morris Schæffer]

Well that would make a lot more sense. Wow, though. I have no doubt you guys are correct; I'm just amazed that I could confabulate all that. I'm questioning my ability to mentally process data.

Don't worry, you're not alone. I pestered these guys for clarifications so long that it's amazing I haven't been banned for dumbness.

[dreamdead]

That said, I still thought the movie was fantastic. Reminded me of a few of my favourite sci-fi novels.

Winston, you mind offering up a few of those sci-fi titles? I read Chiang's story collection before seeing this and dug it a lot, and would be interested in anything that's self-contained...

[Skitch]

For those that have seen Arrival, has your anticipation for Blade Runner 2049 altered pro or con after seeing this film?

[Winston*]

Winston, you mind offering up a few of those sci-fi titles? I read Chiang's story collection before seeing this and dug it a lot, and would be interested in anything that's self-contained...

Embassytown and Babel-17 were the ones that came to mind.

[TGM]

For those that have seen Arrival, has your anticipation for Blade Runner 2049 altered pro or con after seeing this film?

I've been a fan of the director's work for a while now, and so this movie didn't really alter my perception of his or any upcoming projects of his one way or the other. If it's got his name attached, I'm interested.

[Skitch]

I haven't watched Arrival yet, but I'm right there with you TGM.

[DavidSeven]

I wish deeply that he wasn't going into franchises, but I'll see whatever he does next with great anticipation.

[Peng]

SPOILER for the whole paragraph:

In desperate need of a second watch, as, rare for 'go-with-the-flow' me, I was able to guess too early (in the first half) what trick it has up its sleeve. What clicked for me is that I was wondering why Amy Adams' superb-in-retrospect performance doesn't have a layer that indicates the loss of a child, when a keyword was uttered and then everything fell into place. Thus, I am not sure if the emotional aspect falls flat for me because I was too distracted by my own thoughts during the film (I had that realization super-early in the film), or because the film really doesn't earn it. Otherwise though, apart from that and a few plot clumsiness (mostly the climatic phone call), very superb. Rarely have I been so engrossed and stimulated based purely on ideas, thoughts, and process minutiae this year. A second watch will clarify if it is able to reach my emotions as well, now that I will have no hesitating, distracted thoughts during it now.

[Dead & Messed Up]

I think I loved the first two-thirds of this movie and couldn't get over my own dislike of [

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bootstrap paradox

]* to appreciate the final third, although reading through this thread helped me better recognize and appreciate the flashback dynamic (there was a solid ten-minute chunk where I thought the daughter was psychic - d'oh!). The sequence with them unknowingly racing against a red digital readout was maybe the high point, and goddamn me for falling for that old classic. Why would the soldiers, after all, need a red digital readout for a bomb they had no intention of defusing or even watching? But even then, it works.

The cinematography seemed too washed out for my taste. That could be the result of me watching on a DVD screener (my roommate is in a guild), but a lot of the color bled together and felt unnecessarily faded. Which is a shame, because Villeneuve's shot selection is mostly excellent (and I liked how we never travel to other countries beyond the occasional wide shot during montages).

* [

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This runs into the same plot problem Interstellar does, in that a being that can consciously exist beyond "arrow of time" linearity had to develop to that state, and if it could only have developed to that state on assumption that it would essentially evolve beyond linearity and double back and save itself, how did it do so the first time around? Imagine crossing a river on a boat you found, then recognizing that you have to travel back and put the boat there. Why is that necessary? You've already crossed the river. This is a weird sort of jump a lot of time-travel movies do, and while I used to appreciate how it hints at our own brains' inability to really process fourth-dimensional thinking (since the more you think about a bootstrap, the more you realize how dependent your brain is on linear consequential thinking), more and more I find it to be self-impressed plot convolution. The film would've been better without that element.

]

All that said, easily one of the better films of the year, largely because it assumes its viewers are intelligent and curious about alien life and the human response, and also because, as others have said, the film is equally (if not more) about our own struggle to communicate with and understand other humans.

This is one that may play better and more consistent on a rewatch.

[Melville]

I see I never did post my thoughts about this. I appreciate a movie taking on the idea of language changing our experience of the world, but I kept thinking Borges did it better. And I liked all the emotional beats in principle, but their execution didn't really land for me, maybe because Renner's character felt undeveloped. But negatives aside, Villeneuve rocks the cool grey atmosphere, as always; he's really good at modulating that coolness, making it either soft or icy hard.

So...mixed, but I liked it quite a bit overall.

* [

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This runs into the same plot problem Interstellar does, in that a being that can consciously exist beyond "arrow of time" linearity had to develop to that state, and if it could only have developed to that state on assumption that it would essentially evolve beyond linearity and double back and save itself, how did it do so the first time around?

]

But there is no "first" or "second" time around: there's only the one time. I have the opposite opinion about the bootstrap paradox. It makes perfect sense according to classical physics, and if you were to make a story about time travel or precognition and skip over complications like it, you'd be skipping what makes these things interesting in the first place. I think that's especially true if the story's about humanity transcending its everyday conceptions.

[Rico]

None of that shit about soldiers setting a bomb, a global military crisis with China and "learning to work together" was in the original either. That was pure Hollywood crap. They turned a singular story into another overbearing message movie.

Thank you. [

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The hysteria with the soldiers and China actually ruined the whole movie for me. The soldiers are in the room when the scientists are communicating with the aliens, shouldn't they realize that the aliens don't pose a danger? Even if they believed the gift was a weapon, wouldn't blowing it up mean you're the only world superpower without said weapon? But mostly how dumb do you have to be to preemptive strike the far technology advanced aliens?

]

[Irish]

Thank you. [

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The hysteria with the soldiers and China actually ruined the whole movie for me. The soldiers are in the room when the scientists are communicating with the aliens, shouldn't they realize that the aliens don't pose a danger? Even if they believed the gift was a weapon, wouldn't blowing it up mean you're the only world superpower without said weapon? But mostly how dumb do you have to be to preemptive strike the far technology advanced aliens?

]

Agreed! All those elements were boilerplate thriller material and crudely bolted onto the main story.

[

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I mean, the screenwriter interpreted Hitchcock's old bit about creating suspense literally---hey, let's just put a ticking time-bomb under a table! The entire sequence wasn't plausible. There are no soldiers around the monolith, no checkpoints, no cameras. So any faceless, nameless group of renegades can walk up with a bomb? It was telling that the entire plot point was never referenced again once it happened.

The China stuff at least made some sense, given the current state of the world. I can buy into a degree of paranoid saber rattling. I don't buy into the idea that anyone would play a grade-school game of 'telephone' with an alien species when we barely understand each other's language.

All of this junk split the film's meaning into two or three distinct parts, and none of them had anything to do with the other.

]

[Dukefrukem]

Haven't read anything in this thread yet, but this film annoyed the shit out of me. The flash-forwards at the beginning of the movie are intentionally there to confuse the audience in thinking they are flashbacks. For 3/4 of the movie I'm trying to figure out why Amy keeps thinking about her boring dead kid. This is the laziest way to structure a film with some kind of "see what we're doing now?" kind of reveal half way through the movie. Let's be clear though- This means that Amy Adams always has the ability to see the future correct? Otherwise there would be zero point in putting flash-forwards at the beginning of the movie. That ability wasn't given to her by the aliens. The only thing the aliens did was allow her to understand the language.

I also really wish there was some sense of time passing. We hear days/months being said but it doesn't really feel like anyone was there longer than a week.

Overall, I'm annoyed. I though the drama with the bomb was the best part of the film, except it was short lived and nothing came of it.

[Dukefrukem]

I mean, LOST was famous for doing it.

Yeh and fuck lost.

[Dukefrukem]

Jeremy Renner's character was only there to impregnate Amy Adams. Why bother with that casting?

[Dukefrukem]

The movie tries to approach some of those ideas, but does it such a ham handed, unimaginative fashion that I was flabbergasted. It practically screams [

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DO YOU GET IT YET, AUDIENCE? LOUISE CAN SEE THE FUTURE.

]

So this.

[number8]

I don't know if you can say the movie's exposition is obvious and ham handed when a couple of posts back you seem to misunderstood the movie by saying the ability wasn't given to her by the aliens...

[Dukefrukem]

I don't know if you can say the movie's exposition is obvious and ham handed when a couple of posts back you seem to misunderstood the movie by saying the ability wasn't given to her by the aliens...

It's ambiguous isn't it? You can't say I'm wrong when it's not clear. The first 3 minutes of the movie is evidence of this.

[Lazlo]

It's ambiguous isn't it? You can't say I'm wrong when it's not clear. The first 3 minutes of the movie is evidence of this.

[

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It is not ambiguous. Learning the language gives you that ability. The movie is from her perspective as someone who is learning and has learned the language. So the movie now has the ability to jump around to different parts of her life.

It is definitely playing with cinematic form and editing, positioning visions of the future as flashbacks. But that doesn't mean she always had the ability to see through time. The movie presents her visions as flashbacks at first, but what we take to be distress from remembering trauma, is actually confusion at beginning seeing a future for reasons she doesn't understand.

]

[Irish]

[

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It is not ambiguous. Learning the language gives you that ability.

]

Not sure about that. The script muddles this point.

[

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The movie needs Louise to be special in a Hollywood way -- another 'chosen' type -- and the script mentions that not everybody who studies the language gains the ability. Somewhere in the second act climax, Louise also asks the heptopods what's up, why this happened to her, etc, and they give her some shit about how humanity helps them out in 3,000 years. (How that's a sufficient answer, I have no clue.)

]

Anyway, from a certain point of view, Duke is right.

[

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If Louise's consciousness steps outside linear time, if there's no past and no future and only 'now' -- then she has always had the ability.

The script intentionally plays fast and loose of when the movie's 'now' actually is from the audience's viewpoint, which makes in difficult to interpret.

]

[Lazlo]

Not sure about that. The script muddles this point.

[

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The movie needs Louise to be special in a Hollywood way -- another 'chosen' type -- and the script mentions that not everybody who studies the language gains the ability. Somewhere in the second act climax, Louise also asks the heptopods what's up, why this happened to her, etc, and they give her some shit about how humanity helps them out in 3,000 years. (How that's a sufficient answer, I have no clue.)

]

Anyway, from a certain point of view, Duke is right.

[

Show Spoiler

If Louise's consciousness steps outside linear time, if there's no past and no future and only 'now' -- then she has always had the ability.

The script intentionally plays fast and loose of when the movie's 'now' actually is from the audience's viewpoint, which makes in difficult to interpret.

]

I don't buy her as being special beyond her skills as a linguist allowing her to start to unlock the heptapods' gift. I don't think that's in there. She's then able to pass that knowledge and ability along through teaching and writing her book. The heptapods don't expect her to be alive in thousands of years to help them. They expect future humans to learn and grow in their language and ability. If she's special it's because they know she gives them the best chance of teaching humans, but that doesn't mean that she has some innate ability to visualize time before she learns the language.