Arrival (2016): Denis Villeneuve, Amy Adams

BAD BOYS 2

jesus

off the topic of will smith, I gotta say time paradox isn't really my favorite scifi topic - it brings up universal ideas on the nature of time, but with scifi I'm usually looking for specific ideas reflecting the point in time the movie was made/story was written

so basically I think something like Ex Machina or even Westworld (for all its shortcomings) is more interesting as 2010s scifi than Interstellar or Arrival, because what is AI and what are robots and how do we understand those questions right now is more interesting than "from olden days philosophers have pondered whether time is indeed linear or cyclical and whether all events have a causal explanation etc etc"

I went in to this only knowing "Amy Adams, linguist, makes first contact with aliens." That plus the gorgeous look of it was enough to get me excited. I kinda had hoped it was going to focus more on the difficulty of truly communicating with/understanding an alien life form. The time loop stuff actually struck me as kind of unnecessary? It bugged me the same way the ending of Donnie Darko bugs me. Either way, this was dope and I told virtually everyone I know to go see it.

There's a cool Song Exploder episode about the score:

http://songexploder.net/arrival

finally saw this; liked it a lot although renner was kind of clunky. ditto on what the hell was whittaker's accent.

when they started drawing i was all like o shit the aliens are sigur ros

i appreciated the fact that, contra chekhov, the canary didn't keel over

between this and Rogue One it's been a banner year for bizarre Forest Whitaker performances

Listening to New Songs of the Humpback Whale now and holy shit, you weren't kidding.

Totally unclear why Forest Whitaker needed an accent at all, it was just distracting.

We finally got around to this today -- enjoyed it, thought it did a reasonably good job of translating the themes of the story, Hollywooded up in predictable but not obtrusive ways. It did kind of leave the impression that she had some "choice" about whether to get married, have a baby, etc, which I think is a little off. In the story it's more like she learns how to see it all at once, but not in a way that lets her change anything -- there's nothing to change, because it's all happening at the same time.

Gorgeous film, great score.

forest whitaker no longer has a native accent and just invents accents depending on how any given sentence would sound

Saw this last night and was really moved and impressed. Yeah a couple moments were oversold and the ending in partiicular could have backed the fuck off (feels like someone pressured them to make sure test audiences 'got it' and that this cut screentime for some of the slow discovery stuff - I accepted the narrated montage in the middle but the ''it was Amy Adams who made the first key breakthrough'' line definitely felt like covering for a key scene cut for time)..... but for the rest of it I was sooooo glad to be watching a scifi movie where thoughtful academics are the heroes, grappling with not-easily-solved problems, and the film gives you credit to not have every single beat spelled back out for you. Lots of nice parallels to the idea that their language involves two parallel channels of information, there.

Also the rare big-budget movie where the ''it's intentionally ambiguous!'' defense feels justified and earned by what's in the film; I had a beautiful, snowy post-credits walk homeward, thinking about things. Yeah it takes some shortcuts but idk, I was moved to both thoughts and feelings and I keep mulling over it today, worth $10 easily.

Also thought it was cool how each time I went ''ohhh I see where they're going with this'' I was wrong and what they actually did was more interesting and true to the themes of the film than what I'd imagined. E.g. after the ''zero sum game'' bit I thought AA would have this revelation that the two aliens had two different jobs, just as the humans sent both a linguist and a scientist- tidy, but reduces the aliens' fundamental differentness. After the ''palindrome'' bit I seriously thought she was going to realize that they'd been reading everything backwards because the aliens have been drawing on a transparent eall from their POV, lol.

gleick: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/when-they-came-from-another-world

Thanks, I enjoyed that.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3HFePdUYAAg2kF.jpg:small

I p much hated everything starting from when the subtitles showed up

also, with the exception of the language and alien designs, visually v boring. I miss colorful sci-fi - this was all white, grey, and mist.

Thought this was fantastic, weirdly stressful to watch (had to take a couple of five minute breaks). I can see a lot of the criticisms about paradoxes and 'can't everyone see the future' and the addition of the military drama, but they didn't bother me. It was terribly effective at making me feel with Adams and that seems rare in contemporary movies - if I see it as emotional drama with sci-fi framework that forgives a lot of sci-fi issues.

i would have liked this more had i not read the story first, i think

Jeremy Renner was a terrible casting choice. why would you cast someone with such a stupid face as a genius physicist, and then not have him say anything intelligent the entire film??? In the story he tells her about hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics where objects act as if they calculate all possible future paths in advance, which tips her off to the language/time. so much of the script was underwritten, too. like conversations between scientists written by someone who has no idea what scientists would talk about, all those scenes with the conference video chat where they're just going. it was visually pretty but empty and the long scenes with mournful strings felt un-earned. despite the story having been written in the 90s i want to see the version of this movie made in the 70s, just dry conversations between academics

very few films did that in the 70s, and they usually presented pretty pat explanations as drawn-out academic talk

but yeah, the source story is better but, as written, is a shorter episode and not a movie. the military bit and extrapolation of tragedy (the worst parts) made it a feature-length film

I feel like there is a feature Ted Chiang pitch out there that doesn't change the plot focus or tone, but maybe only in short form as some sort of anthology

Dug this

Conversations between scientists in movies ain't written to please scientists flopson

i'm not a scientist. movies should be written to please ME

what is the midpoint bewteen flopson and a scientist

movies should be written to please barry norman iirc

What have the normans ever done for us

indelibly linked cosily middlebrow film criticism to the sound of billy taylor's 'i wish i knew how it would feel to be free'

also eliminated slavery by the mid-12th century, although that pales in comparison to achievement 1 imo

You'll forgive if I don't thank the normans for their historical achievements in the 12th c considering our little contretemps subsequent but otherwise yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z18LY6NME1s
Decent essay, which it went further

Haven't read this thread yet. This was pretty good through the communication elements but as soon as it went into the "time is not linear to them" areas it went off the rails into awful. Had similar feelings towards Interstellar. Just corny emotionally manipulative puzzle game Science Rules! masturbation that ultimately felt so empty and nearsighted. There's no meat or legit art to it. I guess this is "adult" sci-if these days. I'm probably spoiled by seeing 2001 as a kid and meeting a lot of brilliant but stunted STEM folks as an adult.

I will immediately walk away from anyone who gives props to Primer.

Will, the board will miss you.. wait, which one are you, again?

Finally saw this on the weekend & thought it was great. Beautiful & v moving

I havent read the story but will def seek it out now

finally got around to this, it was good. The ancillary action movie stuff that was added to the story for necessary cinematic/dramatic forward motion was all handled p well and didn't get in the way of the central story's focus on language, character, time + free will etc.

move to dispute utterly your 'necessary' tbh that stuff is p much always an admission of failure or at very least lack of confidence in ability to convey an adult drama

it would be a v different movie w out that stuff, but given how this movie got made - as a big studio summer sci-fi blockbuster - the attendant action-movie scaffolding was integrated as well as it could be imo.

The story/source material doesn't really have a film-able three-act structure, so afaict the director's choices were either to make something that no one would pay to see that would probably be a v frustrating viewing experience that was nonetheless v true to the source material, or to modify the source material as necessary to make it into a cohesive filmed narrative. They went with the latter route.

Bear in mind I said from the beginning that adapting this story seemed like an insane/unnecessary undertaking, so when it turns out as well as it did I consider it a minor miracle.

reject assumption of necessity of three act and presumption of audience requirements too

just cos

xp oh yeah look i liked it just fine

this is probably the best movie i've seen in ages - but i was really stoned when i saw it, and i'm also really interested in sapir-whorf hypothesis type of stuff. babel-17 by samuel delaney is great if the language stuff is of interest to you.

speaking of unfilmable writers

I wanted to like Babel 17, I really did

I'm not sure I would have liked it if I'd read out of the blue, but it was a part of a lit class I took (we did the crying of lot 49, burning chrome, snow crash, Fahrenheit 451, and we watched blade runner - it was one of the most interesting classes I had).

is there a thread for Prisoners?

i loved most other Villeneuve movies I have seen but holy christ on a bike not even beautiful cinematography or decent performances could save this. All hat and no cowboy. For me it was a Rube-Goldbergian nothing of a story.

Very good, almost great cast, put to absolute waste

Just had a thought that maybe, maybe, villeneuve’s fascination with anti-stories that only sort of resolve b-plot bullshit none of his audiences care about (while making you feel a bit like a sap for caring about plots a & c) could actually make his Dune treatment interesting

That script was like a halfassed “Who Took Johnny” fanfic that felt like maybe there might have been the kernel of a good story in there but it was so buried!! (no pun intended). I mean jeez if you are going to wade into that water don’t piss around with a bunch of handwaving. If you’re gonna go there GO there. The storytelling was so indirect and tentative and crammed with faux-complexity, and everyone just endlessly reacting. Whole movie was just v annoying for me overall.

i loved Prisoners - it was like an R-rated beautifully shot Law & Order episode

Nhex's description is the first one that makes me want to see it

I rewatched Sicario and it's about 2/3rds of a plot with amazing cinematography and sound. I wonder what kind of deal Villeneuve has to get Deakins to keep working with him

prisoners is horrible and stupid

All hat and no cowboy.

this is a wonderful phrase btw

mh review of sicario otm nb everyone should still see it