Arrival (2016): Denis Villeneuve, Amy Adams

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

does it bother anyone else that in the movie Louise begins having visions of her daughter immediately after she first exchanges written language with the heptapods? at this point the only symbols they've shared with her are their names, but apparently this minimal contact is enough to alter her fundamental perception of time. iirc in the Chiang story her temporal leapfrogging doesn't begin until after she's had several sessions with the aliens and sufficient time to immerse herself in their language. much of the story's impact comes from the way its structure echoes her mental state, and the movie sacrifices some of this impact (and believability) by relegating the daughter narrative to a series of conventional 'flashbacks'.

I also find it odd that she couldn't remember what she said to the Chinese general, given that she experiences all moments of her post-contact life simultaneously. that scene only really makes sense if you assume she's caught in a spooky mental time travel feedback loop that isn't invoked at any other point in the film and that contradicts the way she supposedly perceives time.

That loop, if I'm not mistaken, also contradicts the way the precognition is constructed in the story. Iirc the way that Chiang describes it is that one can conceive of one's entire life, but cannot engage in activity to change or alter the outcome, because the two states of conception and action are one and the same.. but maybe I read it wrong.

I also was under the impression that Heptapod B's pictograms would increase in size and complexity as the format of the desired communication grew larger. Words, then sentences, then paragraphs, and then thinkpieces were contained within single pictograms, and Louise's capacity toward precognition was a result of having to construct increasingly complex grammatical structures in a non-linear fashion.

As for "she didn't appear any older in the future" problem, I thought it was a deliberate red herring to make the audience assume Louise was having flashbacks, not flash-forwards

^^^

Also, if they had aged her as poorly as the digital floating hair looked, you would not have liked it

i liked this movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTc3PsW5ghQ

As for "she didn't appear any older in the future" problem, I thought it was a deliberate red herring to make the audience assume Louise was having flashbacks, not flash-forwards

well, yeah, of course that's what it is - my objection is that it's a bit of a cheap, lazy trick. plus it's still kinda weird even if you do go along with the movie and assume they're flashbacks, since she appears not to have aged or changed anything about her appearance between having her baby and the present

it's the kind of twist that seems better suited to the written word than a visual medium, i think?

redhead age p well fyi

amy adams, for instance

i'm married to one, and she has at least changed her hairstyle in the 10 years i've known her

lol have you not seen predestination

That movie is completely flabbergasting. Sarah Snook is really good in it tho

(straight and bobbed > curly and shoulder-length > straight and past shoulders > curly and mid-length, fyi) xp

lol have you not seen predestination

That movie is completely flabbergasting.

Yeah, Predestination is p whack, but most of the whackness actually comes from the Heinlein short story it's based on.

The central 'first contact' section of Arrival was very gripping, but the beginning and end are boilerplate mush (in other words, Alfred OTM). Cannot for the life of me see Villeneuve as a major or 'important' filmmaker.

i get the feeling that, like innaritu, villeneuve sees himself as a major or 'important' filmmaker tho

although arrival definitely feels less weighed down by self-conscious Statement-Making than sicario does

better for it

blame nolan obv

oh yeah, absolutely better for it - i did really like arrival, i was just bothered to an unreasonable by a couple of details

i'm happy to blame nolan for lots of things but tbf i think self-important Statement Film-Makers pre-date him by a fair distance

*an unreasonable degree

yep, but i think you can trace the insistence on the statement as forced centrepiece of what otherwise wouldve been very well crafted action/scifi/whatever has really come into play with the financial success nolan brought.

lindelhof, mendes dishonourable mentions. villeneuve started off taking them their drinks and now slashes tyres for em, fingers crossed he can pull out of the spiral before he goes full "do u see" on some poor mothers son

maybe we should poll the worst Self-Important Statement filmmakers of the 21st century

would hatevote