Arrival (2016): Denis Villeneuve, Amy Adams

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTrX8fRNLBc

It's this year's super serious sci-fi drama with a one-word title! Adapted from Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life"

I've kinda hated everything Villeneuve has done up to now (although I've yet to see Sicario) and I highly doubt he has the chops to produce anything other than an extremely surface level version of Chiang's intricate meditation on the nature of time and language

Anyway, it's getting good early buzz. So who knows

Love the chiang story, am super dubious about this, but the trailer raised my hopes a little

getting raves at Venice

http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-first-reviews-of-arrival-are-in-and-theyre-out-of-t-1786054617

this kind of shit is catnip for me

me too, IF IT'S DONE WELL, otherwise I am very angry

I've ignored this is guy so far--much of his earlier work has looked a bit too "dealing with issues" for my tastes--but this review has me curious:

http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2016/09/telluride-16-arrival.html

Someone I trust very much has informed me that the last third or so of this goes completely to shit.

I suspect the problem is the same with a lot of these films -- confront the unknowable and then it gets resolved because two characters flirt or something.

yeah, THE POWER OF LOVE as solution to hard physics problems is Hollywood's go-to

I've only seen one of his films, Enemy, which is batshit crazy and really excellent. So I'm looking forward to this, and his Blade Runner sequel

guys love really is the answer just fyi

Sicario is awesome.

Prisoners and Sicario both hugely flawed movies, despite looking great and having set things up nicely.

Doubt this guy is going to learn the knack of paying attention to plot at this stage.

Villeneuve is normally exactly too much 'dealing with issues', Incendies, Prisoners, Sicario, they're all blemished by being way too serious about serious issues, which the filmmaker still seems to have no grasp whatsoever about. Worst of all is Polytechnique, though, a film about an infamous massshooting of women at the Polytechnique institute in Montreal, where infamously the male students agreed to leave the women behind to let the gunman shoot them. When Villeneuve gets to this incredible moment, so loaded with questions - what were the men thinking? How did the women react? - his response is to tilt the camera away so we don't get to see it, and avoid the question all together. He does include a moment later on of a wounded woman telling her male friend 'it's not your fault', though, to really simplify it all. Both Prisoners and Sicario are shot by Roger Deakins, so they're hardly worthless, and I do like sequences from both, but anyone claiming this faux-clever pap is a better film than Deakins' visual masterpiece Skyfall needs to rethink what they want out of cinema. (winking smiley to reduce tension ;))

The flipside is that Enemy, his surreal almost genre moodpiece, is by far his best film (though I haven't seen the two early ones) so sci-fi might be exactly his thing. Who knows.

the ending of the chiang story is killer so wd be a shame if the film fucks it

loved this. knew nothing going in, hadn't even seen a trailer so maybe that helped. a woozy thing reminiscent of (MILD SPOILERS) Gravity, Contact, Inception and The Day The Earth Stood Still.. all sorts of sci-fi stuff really. felt arthouse-y.

This guy has never directed a good movie or a movie not made leaden by his DO YOU SEE interjections

been calling this 'the heptapod movie'

Sicario was good. not perfect, but good. this had better be good because I desperately need something to not disappoint me this week.

Watch Moonlight.

Enjoyed this, though the scene where her hair is required to float and it's done digitally was SO DISTRACTING, since they couldn't get it to look right

I really hope the whole movie takes place at a whiteboard doing alien linguistics

I'm tempted to make this one of my 1-2 per year adult movie outings. I have issues with basically all of Villeneuve's movies, but they are always so good looking that I can't help but like them.

man this dissolves in its last half hour into New Age hooey, doesn't it?

have you seen Polytechnique? that's DV's best of the 3 i've seen

I really hope the whole movie takes place at a whiteboard doing alien linguistics

Only about 75%, sorry. But on the plus side, all global landmarks stay intact, which may be a first in aliens-are-here! movie history.

This is his best film but it don't mean nuthin

does it have the same ending as the story? where you think it's doing slaughterhouse-5 but then it flips it?

Ugh, hated Polytechnique. Such a copout description of a complicated event. SPOILERS: Saw it waiting to see how he would depict the moment when the male students would leave their female friends behind, what would their faces look like, would they decide all at once, what did Villeneuve have to say about that moment of cowardice and/or misogyny. And he keeps it out of frame, while the camera stays on the shooter. But then later he has a wounded woman tell her guilty friend that he isn't to blame. Copout. It's as if Elephant was based on a true story where there was one big explanation everyone had been discussing, but when it gets to that Gus van Sant skips it.

My favorite is Enemy, which doesn't say much, but it gives me hope that his sci-fi film could be better than his crap drug-cop one. Though agrees, most of them have pretty pictures.

Liked this fine but also found it a bit mawkish and full of itself, a la Contact (which I liked less)or Interstellar (which I liked much more). The twist, as such, evokes all the usual sci Fi paradoxes and convenient answers.

Alien linguistics white-boarding was the best part of the movie, and should have occupied 300% more screen time

Mawkish, full of itself, whatever. In a world where the GDP of a small country is spent annually to market and merchandise fucking Star Wars, I'll take it.

I agree to a large extent. It ultimately was kind of soothing, like a Terrance Malick sequel to "The Abyss." But I couldn't get over the central selfishness of gloomy Adams and how the whole movie seemed to hinge on that.

SPOILERS I guess.

Like, what was the movie about? "If you had to live your life over again, would you do it the same way?" I wish they introduced that theme at the beginning and not at the end (unless they did?). Because in a sense the entire movie is predicated on her embarking on a relationship and having a kid knowing full well the consequence, no matter the pain and heartbreak, which is touching ... but that did not seem to jibe coherently with the rest of the movie's theme of ... selfless global reconciliation? Like, how did the language benefit the world, beyond the deus ex time loop device of giving everyone a way out of the conflict? Who else could read the language besides Adams? If she could do it, hundreds could probably do it, especially if they could use a translation device. Couldn't they see the future or travel between times, too? Lots of stuff like that, which pervade sci-fi as a genre and honestly didn't bother me that much other than how in the end I felt it was all there as gauzy sleight of hand to distract from all the holes, or lack of development, etc. I can imagine the short story being great, I could also imagine this being a great mini series. But as a 2 hour movie? As thankful as I was for the shortish running time, it was missing so much, not least a reason for her to commit romantically to her scientist partner beside some vague sense of fulfilling prophecy.

Oh, also:

all global landmarks stay intact

As far as we know, but they repeatedly show that the entire world is suspended in a state of riots and conflict and mass suicides and murders and military uprisings and looting for months on end, so there's no way things stayed intact. That was another issue I had. After this was all done, after she talked down the Chinese general, how then do you settle an entire panicked globe? By months down the line writing an academic book about alien linguistics? This is all nit-picking, no doubt, I admit it, but it kept me from fully enjoying the movie as anything more than minor, and I guess I was expecting more. Like I said, I know it bugged a lot of people, but I really liked "Interstellar," imo the contemporary peak of love conquers all sci-fi. But hey, I still only saw it once.

what kindof accent is forrest whitaker doing in this btw

Seriously. Brooklyn by way of Bahrain?

Spoiler-y post, even though I haven't seen the movie yet

For those who don't know, the short story this is based on is quickly rising on the "the best sci-fi short story of all time" scoreboard. Everybody should read it, it's totally great-- all Chiang's stories are great. The story is closest in tone to TNG "The Inner Light" or something like that, more of a family romance-drama with interesting physics thrown in.

There is no doomsday scenario in the story, no "aliens saving the human race" story. The gift that is given to Amy Adams' character feels personal and bittersweet. The entire story is told from the present-tense of the moment of her daughter's conception. Aliens are in the past, her daughter's subsequent life and death, the breakdown of her marriage and subsequent relationship are in the future. The point of the story read to me like: "with an unlocking of the mind via the linguistic exercise of learning Heptapod B, one could see the future as a result of a series of inevitabilities."

There is a side chapter about the nature of The Book Of Life, and the paradox of arriving at the point in the book where someone is reading "and then, I read the Book Of Life". Chiang's conclusion (via Amy's character) is that one could foresee the future, and one can make actions to direct their destiny, but one cannot do both at the same time. Insofar as "the future and the past are projections created in the present" I guess this makes sense?

Anyway, excited to see the film, I love Denis Villeneuve, love Incendies and Prisoners and would watch them over and over. But yah everyone should read the book, it's not at all thrilling it's very contemplative and romantic and kind of perfect

Alien linguistics white-boarding was the best part of the movie, and should have occupied 300% more screen time

Yeah, this was the most promising stuff, and unfortunately they montaged through most of it after the first couple breakthroughs. I think the movie suffers from not finding a way to give the aliens any real personality. If it had been a process of getting to know Abbott and Costello themselves, that would be interesting, and maybe a way to bring some actual humour into the movie.

My review. Getting bored with movies using motherhood as plot device of deepening female protagonists.

like Contact and Interstellar, it suffers from not trusting the "science" part of science fiction, and pasting over it with schmaltz

This whole movie is predicated on her bond with her child, which like her relationship with Renner is not really developed and relies on sentimentality for impact. Interstellar, I felt more was at stake. Contact, it's got some good ideas but goes to mush.

Per science, I wish I understood the impact of the language. If anything, I would think a language that allows people to travel through time would cause more problems, not fewer.

Sticking with my Malick directs a sequel to "The Abyss" take.

Are we past the point of needing spoiler warnings?

The twist was pretty neat, and I liked that it involved manipulating a film technique. You just assume you're seeing flashbacks. It's cool as a way of capturing the reorientation that comes from speaking the heptapod language.

I liked that a lot, actually. Just introduced a lot of the usual time travel paradoxes, though.

Bad review, Alfo, but I'm as allergic to proud pronouncements of "the short story (which I haven't read)" ignorance as your cousin is to mussels. Also, describing a connection between maternally-connected characters as "a plot device" is.. nuts?

If the aliens know the future, then why don't they already know how to communicate with humans? It seems like the time stuff makes a mess of the plot.

I'm as allergic to proud pronouncements of "the short story (which I haven't read)" ignorance as your cousin is to mussels.

usually I'm accused of paying too much attention to source material ("It's a movie, man! It's its own thing!")

I am curious tho, what's your specific beef with Villeneuve? I can't tell if I'm just sensitive to it or if you are particularly vocal about your dislike of his work, but you're definitely the loudest naysayer I've encountered.. and I feel like he's as ascendant a director as there is right now

Between him and X Dolan there's a rooting-for-the-hometown element in my enjoyment of both directors

Dolan's a world apart from Villeneuve, to my eyes.

I thought I'd made it clear; maybe I didn't. With Villeneuve I recoil from the facile conclusions a film like Sicario makes; it not only had nothing illuminating to say about drugs, U.S.-Mexico relations, or a woman in a man's world, but its cynicism felt like a con (to be clear I define cynicism as "curdled sentimentality"; it's not a synonym for "dark" or "ironic").

Arrival's first hour has his best work, though.

Do you feel as if he is exploiting serious real-life systems and conflicts for the purposes of Hollywood pathos?

I'm not sure how else to respond to the "Wanna make a baby?" scene.

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

I have bumped the sicario thread for all sicario-related musings

the first reason it’s not like a L&O episode is the cop has no partner ;_; everyone needs a Lenny

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d1/15/30/d1153042dd94e86c6efb8d60c05fb335.jpg

well, not EVERYone

Prisoners also gets points for - less than, but like Nightcrawler - actually using Jake Gyllenhaal as a straight-up weirdo, as is his natural state

he is good in it tbf

he is so ripped!
he behaves nothing like a cop really at all, ever, in this movie but he’s jake and i love him
and i love his blinky facial tic, it’s so weird

i get the impression that the script was like 2 hours longer & so they were just like, you know i think we’re good, ppl got the gist

I just watched Arrival! The sense of the mystery unfurling was a thrilling sensation.

I've read that Sapir-Whorf isn't en vogue among linguists nowadays, but I think it's a useful analogue to understand how Heptapod can change Louise's perception of time. Hand-wavey to be sure, but imo that's the acceptable fiction half of science fiction.

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.

I'm wondering if the actiony military stuff is handled in the same way that Children of Men depicts the disintegration of civil institutions -- a lot of the indications of either of these things are pushed to the periphery, either in the mise en scene itself or showing only part of its narrative.

Haven't seen it. But for linguists Sapir-Whorf isn't just out of vogue, it's completely discredited but frustratingly fascinating to non-linguists, apparently. One of the reasons it's nonsense is that it implies that speakers of other languages are so different in their thoughts as to be completely unable to understand each other, so it may work for aliens, but I don't know if I can bear to hear about it again.

My recollection is that it’s not presented as valid in the film! It’s just an idea to serve as a reference for what happens later.

My recollection is that it’s not presented as valid in the film! It’s just an idea to serve as a reference for what happens later.

https://i.imgur.com/pkpIc9Y.png

I don't get the impression Sapir Whorf is completely dead. I think there's been a swing away from Chomsky and there are some researchers interested in a kind of weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, for things like colour perception. And there's work on how people who speak sign language have quite differently wired brains etc.

Here's one researcher: https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29489

i don't think I saw prisoners but I really liked Enemy a lot.

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

― Nhex, Monday, 12 March 2018 06:39 (five years ago)

I thought it was fantastic too. Probably the best film I've seen by him (not interested enough to see all his films).

apologies for returning to the original thread topic (Arrival, 2016) but this film has kind of a pro-life subtext that I found a little heavy-handed... or am i projecting?

hmm it might be tempting to read it that way but that was not how I saw it at all.

her husband eventually leaves her for going ahead with the pregnancy despite knowing what she knows - the movie/story doesn't judge him for it, and neither does she because it's perfectly understandable to not want a child that you know is going to die. but also his reaction was all pre-determined anyway. she goes ahead with it because she *doesn't* have a choice, all she can do is decide whether to embrace the future based on the knowledge gained. i don't think this necessarily means it's pro-life though.

im sure if i watched again it would support that reading but thats in no way to say it still wouldnt be projecting tbh

wearing my schrodingers hat there

I rewatched this again and was wondering if she would continue to perceive time like the Heptapods, and is she the only one? Cause that shit would be problematic.