Arrival (2016): Denis Villeneuve, Amy Adams

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

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

I liked this but unfortunately I kept on thinking 'this is not what the american response would look like if the alien landing happened while donald j trump is president'

Don't blame me, I voted for Costello

as we were leaving the theater on the down escalator i turn to my gf and go "so i guess she made the choice to still have the kid even though she knows the kid is going to die of incurable cancer"

i forgot that this might have been a 1981 "wow i can't believe darth vader is luke's father" level gaffe to make as one leaves the theater

as you and your girlfriend were leaving the theater, you turned to her with a smile and asked, "Wanna make a baby?"

as me and my wife were leaving on the down elevator we prepped for decontamination and debriefing

yeah, idk, I thought the original story and the movie both indicated that free will exists, but all of the events of the past and future can be seen through the heptapod language. so, despite seeing things in your future you may do differently given prior knowledge, it's still static. so the real gift of the language is an understanding of self that transcends free will, living your life as a whole, not moment-to-moment. your sense of self is no longer rooted at the moment level but at the entire life level.

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

Dolan is 90% awful, Villeneuve is only about 65/70% awful.

just back from seeing this and i liked it quite a lot - like someone else said unthread tho i'd have been happier if it was just 100% procedural sci-fi. the whiteboard scenes were by far the most interesting

couple of observations::

- the reveal relies on the audience paying no attention to the fact that amy adams apparently doesn't age a goddamn day in the 15 years or so between 'let's make a baby' and her losing her daughter
- between this, interstellar and ant-man we've now had three movies in three years where the denouement involves extradimensional shenanigans anchored by a parent's love for their daughter

lol have you not seen predestination

because lemme tell ya

I liked this but unfortunately I kept on thinking 'this is not what the american response would look like if the alien landing happened while donald j trump is president'

― 龜, Sunday, 20 November 2016 13:49 (four hours ago) Permalink

^Yeah this definitely affected my experience watching the movie. I felt sad and queasy during the whole thing.

lol have you not seen predestination

not only have i not seen it i'd never heard of it until now tbh

The denouement of Contact was similar to that too.

i noticed the age discrepancy with amy adams but chalked it up to the filmmakers' laziness- this kind of shit is so common now. i saw 'Loving' yesterday, which takes places over the course of nearly 15 years, and the characters don't age one bit.

Maybe the alien ships' atmosphere is good for the skin

Chinese General's "I'll never forget the words you said" made me think of this
https://frinkiac.com/meme/S06E17/221170.jpg?b64lines=IFdoeSB3b3VsZCB5b3UgbmVlZCB0byBzZWUKIGl0PyBZb3UncmUgdGhlIGdlbml1cyB3aG8KIGludmVudGVkIHRoZS4uLiBwcm9kdWN0IGluCiBxdWVzdGlvbi4=

the setting seemed ambiguous enough that i feel it could've taken place in 2040-70 but i may have forgotten some obvious signs. either way, i thought the same thing about her gorgeous house, maybe being a teacher is lit in the future

enjoying movies is a state of mind isnt it

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.