Arrival (2016): Denis Villeneuve, Amy Adams

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.

Yeah.. the short story is a romantic melodrama, that line is taken directly from the book-- the last line of the short story is so so maudlin (can't quote it directly, but it's like "and then we went upstairs, to make love, to make you.")-- but it works? weirdly? idk the short story is way more "Fried Green Tomatoes" than anything else and the "wanna make a baby" line works in that context. In the movie, I guess not

Speaking of Montreal movies, I saw Karl Lemieux' Shambles the other day, was quite good. Looked a lot like GYBE visuals, which make sense. Should I watch Denis Coté?

Cynicism is a good word to describe Villeneuve. It's not just schmaltz, it's also this forced inconclusiveness, often achieved through either cowardice or straight bullshit. So in Polytechnique he turns the camera away when he's forced into a situation that would give answers. In Sicario there's the nonsense columbian twist, which achieves the goal of making the situation seem unsolvable, but is absolutely stupid. It's politics where the filmmaker says: 'I offer hard questions, not easy answers', then raises questions that are hard to answer mostly because they're vague and/or nonsensical.

He's good at mood and world building, I just wish he would get rid of politics all together. So I have hopes for Arrival.

Or he should make documentaries. He could be a great documentarist.

the last line of the short story is so so maudlin (can't quote it directly, but it's like "and then we went upstairs, to make love, to make you.")-- but it works? weirdly?

Because - iirc - we know what she knows, that no-one else in that situation could ever possibly know.

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.

― jmm, Sunday, November 13, 2016 9:42 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the aliens never know how to communicate with humans. they never learn any human languages. it's always the humans who learn to communicate with them.

this movie was good. yeah it's almost overwhelmingly emotionally manipulative but for whatever reason it worked for me.

What is the significance of the alien ships dissolving at the end? Is it like, they've planted the seed of the new language, and that's all that's needed?

I think I still need to digest my thoughts on the movie, but the only elements I took issue with were those that were grafted to the plot of the short story to up the stakes. The military angle seems almost a given in these times, but the changing of the time and circumstances of the daughter's death... well, maybe that was a given, too.

There were small touches that by inclusion or absence broke with mainstream film convention that I appreciated. The lack of a romantic progression subplot, the lack of subtitles in the conversations with the Chinese general.

The lack of a romantic progression subplot,

"Wanna make a baby?" was enough.

I much preferred that than injecting a cut-up montage of falling in love across the movie, or throwing a sex scene into the brief time they were sequestered in the base camp near the alien ship

I really, really liked this. reading this thread has exposed a lot of obvious plot holes but i almost never pick up on that stuff. i was really taken aback and moved by the way it played with time and the viewer's perception. i don't care that the logic is weak, putting the chronological ending of the movie at the beginning and swimming back and forth in time later on just blew me away. the complete opposite of Sicario, an utterly meaningless bore.

the aliens never know how to communicate with humans. they never learn any human languages. it's always the humans who learn to communicate with them.

I didn't like how the movie implied that they did understand human language, in that scene where she goes into the ship without the screen. But I guess it still works in the logic of the movie, where they're not trying to communicate with humans, but get the humans to learn their language so that they can help them with some unspecified crisis 3000 years in the future.

None of that was in the story btw, nor was the international drama. In the story, all the different countries work peacefully to understand the heptapods, and then they leave without explanation. And there's no real benefit to humanity learning their language, it's entirely focused on the narrator's personal experience.

Also I was initially they substituted cancer for a mountain climbing accident (which seemed like the only part of the story that had potential for cinematic action), but I'll bet they did it so the audience wouldn't be asking "why wouldn't her mom just tell her not to go mountain climbing then?"

this sounds fucking stupid but if James Morrison likes it I will probably give it a try

really good imo. better than clever and didnt schmaltz the emotional impacts

hated prisoners, thought sicario had the best scenes of the year in a stupid and clumsy movie, this guy needs to keep away from plot is the takeaway

I liked it but it is pretty dang schmaltzy and I bet shakey will hate it

To protect myself, i have to say that my approval is a combination of Wow, this Hollywood Take on a Ted Chiang Story is Actually Quite Good and also Wow This Looks Nice

I liked this well enough, although my enjoyment was tempered by my current depression about everything.

I still think The Arrival with Charlie Sheen might be a better alien flick. It's a cool b-movie with a timely global warming message and no portentous weepy crap.

That said, the twist was cool and it was well-acted, shot, directed etc etc

this was the first movie i saw after the election and it made me feel better: the overwhelming and unprecedented human event of the aliens landing feels so removed when you're swept up in this dreamlike nonlinear stream of events spanning years, all while clinging so closely to amy adams' character. it's a very personal movie, and very affecting in its manipulation of time and perception. as much as the eventual riots showed the world in chaos because of this event, the vast seas of time seemed to swallow it whole. it was comforting

SPOILERS IN THIS POST

I'm the opposite of Alfred in that I've read the story but haven't yet seen the movie. So I've been trying to figure out from what I've read here and elsewhere how much and how completely the central idea of the story comes across. It sounds to me like it's thematically intact, but if that's the case I've seen a lot of reviewers missing some big parts of it -- which could be because it's not quite made clear in the movie, I don't know.

The story is a bit of a narrative experiment -- like someone wrote above, telling the story both backwards and forwards at the same time, and constructing a fictional device that allows that. The device in this case being the alien language -- which, at least in the short story, doesn't allow people to time travel or "see the future," it lets them see their entire life at the same time, even as they experience it sequentially. So, you can see the whole picture at once, but what you do is watch yourself move through it. You don't/can't change it. It basically challenges the idea of linear time and wonders what it would be like to experience time differently -- told through the story of one particular character and her life. Also interesting thoughts in there about how language structure shapes our experience of the world. Anyway, it's a good story. I'm curious to see what the movie does with it.

it's a better ted chiang adaptation than that bradley cooper movie where he takes pills and becomes wicked smaaart.
the aliens look great and so does the squid ink "writing"

not sure how a linguist can afford such a nice house though. floor-to-ceiling window views!

contracting for the military on some arm of "the war on terror" probably helps with that

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.