I thought it was? Their own phones where confiscated and the government knew within seconds which phone was dialing to where. It all was very strictly monitored, and the head honcho's (one of which the stolen phone was from) had to have ways to communicate with the outer world ofcourse.
In my experience there is no way that any of the non head honcho military types would have any sort of internet access, which made the scene of the army captain streaming the shouty news guy stick out to me. Hell, for security reasons we'd go to River City, the navy's term for a communications lockdown with no internet service, when we were off the cost of Lebanon for a week, or even just crossing the Suez; there's no way the soldiers manning alien camp would be allowed a luxury item like internet access. It's not a big deal really, but that's just the one situation in the movie that made me think "nah, no way that happens."
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Andy JoeWe claim the land for the highlord!The AdirondacksRegistered Userregular
There was a moment when I was sure the film was going to get bogged down in a big dumb Michael Mann gunfight; my relief when those events were skipped over was incalculable.
Just came back from seeing it earlier tonight. Contact meets Slaughterhouse five sums it up.
Was okay. I only saw Contact the movie and felt it was to preachy, while I only read slaughterhouse five and felt it was to flippant. Movie straddled both fairly well.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
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Johnny ChopsockyScootaloo! We have to cook!Grillin' HaysenburgersRegistered Userregular
There was a moment when I was sure the film was going to get bogged down in a big dumb Michael Mann gunfight; my relief when those events were skipped over was incalculable.
Hey
Hey now
Michael Mann gunfights are not "big dumb". They are explicitly the shit. You respect those gunfights.
Although I liked the movie a lot, I agree with HamHam about time travel. I'm sick of it and I wish it wasn't in so many SF films these days. It usually doesn't work for me anymore. And I also thought the movie would've been stronger with a better, more hard SF revelation at its core.
As it stands, most of the film plays out like hard SF, but then the big twist makes the ending feel more like magical realism, where the emotions are what matters and the speculative elements are only used to push a philosophical theme.
This works, but at least for me... it doesn't work 100 percent. The emotional part is good. The themes are interesting. I even kind of like the basic idea of language rewiring your brain to let you do magic, but it feels like it belongs more in fantasy, and again the time travel aspects annoy me.
It's just, I don't know. The coolest part of the movie was the rigorous work of trying to communicate with alien beings. It felt like it deserved an equally rigorous conclusion, one which fires on all cylinders rationally, not just emotionally.
I would argue that the speculative/hard-sci-fi aspect of the story concludes with Amy Adams saving the day because she is good at her job and figures out how to use the heptapod language to convince China to stand down and share their intel. The emotional stuff with the kid is really more like an epilogue. It's not like Interstellar where the power of love saves the day.
Well, when I say hard SF I'm more referring to a close examination of the process, of the science, of how everything is done; a lot of time is spent on the process of figuring out the heptapod language, but none whatsoever on the science behind the nonlinear abilities their language confers, or how that came to be, or anything like that. Probably because it's a pretty ridiculous concept from a scientific perspective! So the rigorous examination of method most of the film leads us to expect is not present in the ending, which uses the more fantasy/space opera/magical realism-ish speculative approach of "it works that way because I said so".
OremLK on
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Although I liked the movie a lot, I agree with HamHam about time travel. I'm sick of it and I wish it wasn't in so many SF films these days. It usually doesn't work for me anymore. And I also thought the movie would've been stronger with a better, more hard SF revelation at its core.
As it stands, most of the film plays out like hard SF, but then the big twist makes the ending feel more like magical realism, where the emotions are what matters and the speculative elements are only used to push a philosophical theme.
This works, but at least for me... it doesn't work 100 percent. The emotional part is good. The themes are interesting. I even kind of like the basic idea of language rewiring your brain to let you do magic, but it feels like it belongs more in fantasy, and again the time travel aspects annoy me.
It's just, I don't know. The coolest part of the movie was the rigorous work of trying to communicate with alien beings. It felt like it deserved an equally rigorous conclusion, one which fires on all cylinders rationally, not just emotionally.
I would argue that the speculative/hard-sci-fi aspect of the story concludes with Amy Adams saving the day because she is good at her job and figures out how to use the heptapod language to convince China to stand down and share their intel. The emotional stuff with the kid is really more like an epilogue. It's not like Interstellar where the power of love saves the day.
Well, when I say hard SF I'm more referring to a close examination of the process, of the science, of how everything is done; a lot of time is spent on the process of figuring out the heptapod language, but none whatsoever on the science behind the nonlinear abilities their language confers, or how that came to be, or anything like that. Probably because it's a pretty ridiculous concept from a scientific perspective! So the rigorous examination of method most of the film leads us to expect is not present in the ending, which uses the more fantasy/space opera/magical realism-ish speculative approach of "it works that way because I said so".
I haven't read the story the film is based on, but apparently the character of Ian has a larger role there, and as the physicist he goes into some detail about why and how the heptapods can perceive time non-linearly. The film probably cut that stuff out to tighten the story's focus on Louise.
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
I thought it was? Their own phones where confiscated and the government knew within seconds which phone was dialing to where. It all was very strictly monitored, and the head honcho's (one of which the stolen phone was from) had to have ways to communicate with the outer world ofcourse.
In my experience there is no way that any of the non head honcho military types would have any sort of internet access, which made the scene of the army captain streaming the shouty news guy stick out to me. Hell, for security reasons we'd go to River City, the navy's term for a communications lockdown with no internet service, when we were off the cost of Lebanon for a week, or even just crossing the Suez; there's no way the soldiers manning alien camp would be allowed a luxury item like internet access. It's not a big deal really, but that's just the one situation in the movie that made me think "nah, no way that happens."
It would've worked if he had an AM radio tuned to the same guy's show, tho.
Although I liked the movie a lot, I agree with HamHam about time travel. I'm sick of it and I wish it wasn't in so many SF films these days. It usually doesn't work for me anymore. And I also thought the movie would've been stronger with a better, more hard SF revelation at its core.
As it stands, most of the film plays out like hard SF, but then the big twist makes the ending feel more like magical realism, where the emotions are what matters and the speculative elements are only used to push a philosophical theme.
This works, but at least for me... it doesn't work 100 percent. The emotional part is good. The themes are interesting. I even kind of like the basic idea of language rewiring your brain to let you do magic, but it feels like it belongs more in fantasy, and again the time travel aspects annoy me.
It's just, I don't know. The coolest part of the movie was the rigorous work of trying to communicate with alien beings. It felt like it deserved an equally rigorous conclusion, one which fires on all cylinders rationally, not just emotionally.
I would argue that the speculative/hard-sci-fi aspect of the story concludes with Amy Adams saving the day because she is good at her job and figures out how to use the heptapod language to convince China to stand down and share their intel. The emotional stuff with the kid is really more like an epilogue. It's not like Interstellar where the power of love saves the day.
Well, when I say hard SF I'm more referring to a close examination of the process, of the science, of how everything is done; a lot of time is spent on the process of figuring out the heptapod language, but none whatsoever on the science behind the nonlinear abilities their language confers, or how that came to be, or anything like that. Probably because it's a pretty ridiculous concept from a scientific perspective! So the rigorous examination of method most of the film leads us to expect is not present in the ending, which uses the more fantasy/space opera/magical realism-ish speculative approach of "it works that way because I said so".
I haven't read the story the film is based on, but apparently the character of Ian has a larger role there, and as the physicist he goes into some detail about why and how the heptapods can perceive time non-linearly. The film probably cut that stuff out to tighten the story's focus on Louise.
Apparently the original cut was around three hours, according to the screenwriter, so I could see that being the case.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I think I'm kinda on the fence on this one? (I'll wait for the shock to settle in)
I wasn't spoiled, and truth be told I loved the hell out of this movie. I cried at least twice, and so much of the interactions and themes were so spot on for me.
Ultimately, however, I walked out of the theater a little frustrated. A little confused trying to piece together what the muddled ending was saying, what I think it was meant to be saying, and how I felt about that specific interpretation.
As a mom of a little one myself, knowing that I was bringing a doomed life into this world is an incredibly painful thing to have to think about it, and such a contingency was something that was discussed early in our pregnancy . . . and both of us had agreed it was not something we thought we could put a child through.
However, if knowing how that life ends up for that child causes me not have them, am I robbing it of a life of love and plenty, however too short? What is the value of life? What is the value of a child to a parent? Of a parent to a child? These are hard questions I don't have an answer for.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Fine, fine. Arrival is a scifi movie starring Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner.
Oh, I love Amy Adams!
That is because she is a goddess who is loved by all right-thinking people.
Still, can you give me anything else to go on? I'm dying here.
Arrival is a movie in which aliens land in giant, mysterious ships all over the Earth. Nobody knows why. Amy Adams is tasked with figuring out how to communicate with them. And that's all I'm telling you; this is one of those movies where the less you know, the better it works.
Okay, I respect that. So it's good?
It's fucking amazeballs, dude. Imagine if someone mixed Independence Day and Inception and 2001 and The Martian together. It's like that.
I... I think you're just naming a bunch of random sci-fi movies. Those things don't go together.
...and Moon and Enchanted and Breakfast Club and...
Okay, fine, I'll go see the fucking movie, chill.
...and Fifth Element and Primer and Little Shop of Horrors and a foot massage and a bowl of Junior Mints and...
Wait a minute. Do we need to tag spoilers in here?
Nope! Open season on spoilers, WOOOOOOO.
Them why are you pitching the movie, if ostensibly the only people in here have already seen it?
Your face has already--
I'm leaving now. If you follow me, I'm crying stranger-danger.
I would like to let you know that I fucking loved this OP and will be seeing the movie this weekend because of it.
I also would like you to know that I did not read this thread because of this OP so I hope this has been posted a few times already
You brought this upon yourself
Veevee on
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Zilla36021st Century. |She/Her|Trans* Woman In Aviators Firing A Bazooka. ⚛️Registered Userregular
I'm guessing it's some kind of unavoidable, massive scale astrophysical event, maybe something like a supernova or a GRB (gamma ray burst).
Humans and Heptapods working together, perhaps to evacuate another species that they have foreseen to be crucial to the time-line in some way? An uplift event?
Thematically the movie is about overcoming obstacles to necessary collaboration, so surely it's something along those lines. Team Hepta-Hu Squad assemble!
I'm guessing that in 3000 years the Heptapods begin running short of food and look to earth as a breeding ground for livestock.
It's a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!
Also, on the question of bringing a doomed child into the world: I guess you could argue that every child is doomed, be it in 8 years or 80.
But also you're not robbing a non-existent child of anything by not having it. There's literally no one to rob.
not yet
That looks like the fundamental struggle she had to resolve: do you have the child, knowing that she is doomed to die at 12 and cause you unbearable pain and cost you your husband, but giving her the 12 years she wouldn't have gotten otherwise
OR
do you spare yourself the pain, but doom the child to complete nonexistence
ugh, it's starting to sound like a pro-lifer tract
This movie was incredible. One of the best science fiction movies I've ever seen.
As for the question of "Does Louise have a choice?", My answer is no. She might think she has a choice, but she never tries to change it anyways. To attempt to change the future would invalidate her past experiences, which would be a huge plot hole. She is experiencing time non-linearly, so there is no more agency; she either goes with the outcome, or it's a huge plot hole. Because if she changes her future significantly, she won't be able to experience any of the things that were necessary to experience in order to prevent the war from happening. It would have changed.
The lack of agency is why I was unhappy with the original short story, and why I won't be seeing the movie. I do not question the quality of the story - it's that it's a really well told story that bothers me a lot.
I went in the movie mostly blind (there are aliens and we apparently have a hard time communicating with them?) but I figured out that it was based on the short story while watching it, pretty quickly. I liked the movie more than the story precisely because I hated the determinism of the story. The story goes, "She learns the language, and then starts seeing the future, and is stuck now with that future. The aliens fuck off to wherever they came from because they're inscrutable."
And I hate determinism, where free will is totally an illusion because everything is always going to happen in a certain way and Rust Cohle stares at the nihilist flat circle of time/doom. The story leaves the protagonist in a state where she's just going through the motions for the rest of her life, unable to change anything, wondering if maybe the aliens with their greater understanding know exactly where their personal cog fits into the great machine of time doing its thing but in this distant and empty, hopeless way. Because of course, if one person's fate is sealed, then everyone else's is and must be as well. In the story, the daughter dies in a skiing accident. Any number of things could have been done to change that, like telling her, or even if someone else did something differently. Maybe someone at a fast food place decided not to wash his hands and then whoever was driving the daughter to the ski resort got food poisoning, so instead of dying on the mountain she was at the emergency room waiting to see if the friend would survive three days of vomiting, and then they cancel the trip and everybody goes home and lives. But instead, agency is gone from everyone, forever.
But the movie left me feeling that there was a bit more agency in here, possibly. The first instance, where Louise heard the term "non-zero sum game" and then relayed it to the future (possibly shifting time very briefly from one where her daughter continues to fume, and one where the daughter feels better with the answer), and then of course when she was relaying information she learned in the future to the present to make the general stand down. Maybe there is a way to influence things, if someone was more perfectly fluent in the language. Louise was just barely learning baby talk and getting glimpses of the future and just having a few moments of changing time. Heck, maybe there's a point where the past can be changed (since what is the present but the past to the future) and that's what the aliens were doing, going to the past to send a rolling timeline change to the future to set up a time when humans will help them. I don't know, but there's a feeling of possibility. Maybe not much; but I felt it, and that uncertainty makes it interesting. More interesting than fate, anyway.
Wife is pregnant with our first baby. Openly weeping in public is not what I expected at 35.
Yeah, mine is as well. Luckily I knew about the loss of the child in the first few minutes and could warn her beforehand.
Was not so lucky when we saw a movie where the pregnant lead survives a buss accident but her baby does not. Those things become heartbreaking, even I had a problem with the rng of life for a little bit.
Edit: also, never watch Rosemary's Baby or Finding Nemo while the wife is pregnant. It will end her.
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Shoot m to BITS (hold Y) [hard] C109-0000-014D-4E09 P-POWER Switch Palace 3838-0000-0122-9359 Raiding the Serpents Tomb 1A04-0000-0098-C11E I like to move it, move it FCE2-0000-00D7-9048
scherbchenAsgard (it is dead)Registered Userregular
well, I kinda intuited where this movie was going after we got glimpses of the daughter way after the set-up was done. over and over and over again.
it might just be me but this weird sub-genre of interesting SF premise-realistic reactions and actions-just kidding it was all about you,special snowflake, and your personal experience and life which will bend the rules of physics and logic and time because this is your story that had until now Interstellar as its flagship title might just not be for me.
I enjoy the first half and then the eye-rolling begins.
I just don't understand why you would set up a movie like Alien where you lay out the rules and the mystery and take your time to make it accessible, coherent, interesting and logically cohesive and then flip a switch and Harry Potter the rest of the movie.
I know I am exagerating and I don't want to diminish anybody's apparent enjoyment of the movie which obviously is out there in copious amounts but I was really rather miffed and annoyed by the latter half of the movie and just needed to vent.
it is probably down to expecting something else out of the movie entirely, like I did with Interstellar, and then getting the feeling of having been conned again. if you pitch me a interesting SF premise movie then I want to watch something like that. if you pitch me The Time Traveller's Wife or About Time I will watch the shit out of those movies.
the packaging did not fit the content is my judgement and that makes me angry.
I guessed the kid and her father being a scientist to be relevant in a time travel way, when the dreams started, but for me, seeing (half of) the twist beforehand does not ruin it for me, especially when the movie has so much more to offer in terms of how will she react to the twist and can this affect the timeline.
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Shoot m to BITS (hold Y) [hard] C109-0000-014D-4E09 P-POWER Switch Palace 3838-0000-0122-9359 Raiding the Serpents Tomb 1A04-0000-0098-C11E I like to move it, move it FCE2-0000-00D7-9048
I just got back from this. I went to see it specifically because of the OP of this thread - so thanks, since I loved it. I was mostly blind, although a friend did tell me immediately before I went in that it involved "time fuckery" which... uh... detracted from the final part of the film, shall we say. Cheers, friend.
The biggest emotional gut punch, for me, was when
it finally clicked why Ian had left her. What was the wrong choice? To have a child at all, knowing that she was going to die young.
I'm pretty drunk right now but I thought that was fairly galling.
I thought it was pretty good, though we've all mentioned the timey wimey thing already.
I wish there was more to it than we help you now, you help us in 3000 years. I would have preferred something a little more... alien. Especially from a species that seems to perceive time non linearly.
I just got back from this. I went to see it specifically because of the OP of this thread - so thanks, since I loved it. I was mostly blind, although a friend did tell me immediately before I went in that it involved "time fuckery" which... uh... detracted from the final part of the film, shall we say. Cheers, friend.
The biggest emotional gut punch, for me, was when
it finally clicked why Ian had left her. What was the wrong choice? To have a child at all, knowing that she was going to die young.
I'm pretty drunk right now but I thought that was fairly galling.
Louise tells Ian about it before it's clear the child is even sick if my interpretation is correct.
Even if Ian believes Louise can see the future, 99% of people would flip out that Louise made the choice to follow this path without consulting Ian. Or that Louise apparently is not attempting to steer away from this path.
If Ian isn't fully unboard with "I can see the future" than she comes across as pretty crazy. "I'm sorry husband but I have visions our child will die in 5 years and there's nothing we can do"
I cannot decide myself if she is brave or stupid, strong or weak, or just without choice in following the path before her. And perhaps the ambiguity is the point.
My shortest review is that it's a good story, told excellently with all the tools available to a filmmaker. The soundscape, the visuals, the music. The oppressive nature of the military life she gets dragged into, the stress it causes her. The way it slowly drops clues about the non-linearity.
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silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Full disclosure: I haven't seen this yet.
But from the trailers the movie it most reminds me of is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is that in any kind of way accurate?
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21stCenturyCall me Pixel, or Pix for short![They/Them]Registered Userregular
Okay, so I think that while Louise has agency it gets complicated. Like she can change an action but then the future she sees also changes.
Like, she didn't know she called the general until he told her.
So the future can change the past and vice versa. But knowing what happens, she still loved Hannah enough to have her. Quite possibility because of she didn't she would lose all memory of her.
Ok loved this movie. The time travel stuff didn't even bother me! I liked it!
Question : how do the aliens move in their ship? It seems as if Louise is affected by gravity, though not fully, when she comes inside. They also seem to have weight when they step around. Are their squidlike flying movements a side effect of non-linear time (I.e. Gravity and time being linked)?
Ok loved this movie. The time travel stuff didn't even bother me! I liked it!
Question : how do the aliens move in their ship? It seems as if Louise is affected by gravity, though not fully, when she comes inside. They also seem to have weight when they step around. Are their squidlike flying movements a side effect of non-linear time (I.e. Gravity and time being linked)?
It's not explained at all, though it's probably not related to time. They appear to have fine control over gravity; most likely they can set it to their comfort and hers at the same time.
As I understand the presentation of time here, the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. It's Eternalism.
Humans perceive the whole of their existence as "passing through" time from one moment to the next, whereas the aliens perceive the whole all at once. The "flow of time" is just our limited human interpretation of the fourth dimension.
Which is why I found the movie to be pretty fatalistic. It was really confusing to me as to whether or not Dr. Banks' choice at the end of the movie was really a choice at all.
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In my experience there is no way that any of the non head honcho military types would have any sort of internet access, which made the scene of the army captain streaming the shouty news guy stick out to me. Hell, for security reasons we'd go to River City, the navy's term for a communications lockdown with no internet service, when we were off the cost of Lebanon for a week, or even just crossing the Suez; there's no way the soldiers manning alien camp would be allowed a luxury item like internet access. It's not a big deal really, but that's just the one situation in the movie that made me think "nah, no way that happens."
Was okay. I only saw Contact the movie and felt it was to preachy, while I only read slaughterhouse five and felt it was to flippant. Movie straddled both fairly well.
Hey
Hey now
Michael Mann gunfights are not "big dumb". They are explicitly the shit. You respect those gunfights.
You were probably thinking of Michael Bay.
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Well, when I say hard SF I'm more referring to a close examination of the process, of the science, of how everything is done; a lot of time is spent on the process of figuring out the heptapod language, but none whatsoever on the science behind the nonlinear abilities their language confers, or how that came to be, or anything like that. Probably because it's a pretty ridiculous concept from a scientific perspective! So the rigorous examination of method most of the film leads us to expect is not present in the ending, which uses the more fantasy/space opera/magical realism-ish speculative approach of "it works that way because I said so".
I haven't read the story the film is based on, but apparently the character of Ian has a larger role there, and as the physicist he goes into some detail about why and how the heptapods can perceive time non-linearly. The film probably cut that stuff out to tighten the story's focus on Louise.
It would've worked if he had an AM radio tuned to the same guy's show, tho.
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Apparently the original cut was around three hours, according to the screenwriter, so I could see that being the case.
It was 3000 years.
I'm thinking the Y5K bug.
I wasn't spoiled, and truth be told I loved the hell out of this movie. I cried at least twice, and so much of the interactions and themes were so spot on for me.
Ultimately, however, I walked out of the theater a little frustrated. A little confused trying to piece together what the muddled ending was saying, what I think it was meant to be saying, and how I felt about that specific interpretation.
As a mom of a little one myself, knowing that I was bringing a doomed life into this world is an incredibly painful thing to have to think about it, and such a contingency was something that was discussed early in our pregnancy . . . and both of us had agreed it was not something we thought we could put a child through.
However, if knowing how that life ends up for that child causes me not have them, am I robbing it of a life of love and plenty, however too short? What is the value of life? What is the value of a child to a parent? Of a parent to a child? These are hard questions I don't have an answer for.
@So It Goes I had this same exact thought while watching it
I would like to let you know that I fucking loved this OP and will be seeing the movie this weekend because of it.
I also would like you to know that I did not read this thread because of this OP so I hope this has been posted a few times already
You brought this upon yourself
Humans and Heptapods working together, perhaps to evacuate another species that they have foreseen to be crucial to the time-line in some way? An uplift event?
Thematically the movie is about overcoming obstacles to necessary collaboration, so surely it's something along those lines. Team Hepta-Hu Squad assemble!
It's a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!
Also, on the question of bringing a doomed child into the world: I guess you could argue that every child is doomed, be it in 8 years or 80.
But also you're not robbing a non-existent child of anything by not having it. There's literally no one to rob.
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not yet
That looks like the fundamental struggle she had to resolve: do you have the child, knowing that she is doomed to die at 12 and cause you unbearable pain and cost you your husband, but giving her the 12 years she wouldn't have gotten otherwise
OR
do you spare yourself the pain, but doom the child to complete nonexistence
ugh, it's starting to sound like a pro-lifer tract
FUCKING rad.
Been a while since I've seen some good, honest sci-fi in theaters .
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I have to say that my heart leapt into my chest a bit from the very beginning as I heard the opening chords of On the Nature of Daylight.
Mainly because I've heard it combined with Dinah Washington's vocals for this incredibly moving piece:
I have no way of the selection of the song was made with knowledge of this arrangement with vocals, but man, the vocals really fit the film, too.
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I went in the movie mostly blind (there are aliens and we apparently have a hard time communicating with them?) but I figured out that it was based on the short story while watching it, pretty quickly. I liked the movie more than the story precisely because I hated the determinism of the story. The story goes, "She learns the language, and then starts seeing the future, and is stuck now with that future. The aliens fuck off to wherever they came from because they're inscrutable."
And I hate determinism, where free will is totally an illusion because everything is always going to happen in a certain way and Rust Cohle stares at the nihilist flat circle of time/doom. The story leaves the protagonist in a state where she's just going through the motions for the rest of her life, unable to change anything, wondering if maybe the aliens with their greater understanding know exactly where their personal cog fits into the great machine of time doing its thing but in this distant and empty, hopeless way. Because of course, if one person's fate is sealed, then everyone else's is and must be as well. In the story, the daughter dies in a skiing accident. Any number of things could have been done to change that, like telling her, or even if someone else did something differently. Maybe someone at a fast food place decided not to wash his hands and then whoever was driving the daughter to the ski resort got food poisoning, so instead of dying on the mountain she was at the emergency room waiting to see if the friend would survive three days of vomiting, and then they cancel the trip and everybody goes home and lives. But instead, agency is gone from everyone, forever.
But the movie left me feeling that there was a bit more agency in here, possibly. The first instance, where Louise heard the term "non-zero sum game" and then relayed it to the future (possibly shifting time very briefly from one where her daughter continues to fume, and one where the daughter feels better with the answer), and then of course when she was relaying information she learned in the future to the present to make the general stand down. Maybe there is a way to influence things, if someone was more perfectly fluent in the language. Louise was just barely learning baby talk and getting glimpses of the future and just having a few moments of changing time. Heck, maybe there's a point where the past can be changed (since what is the present but the past to the future) and that's what the aliens were doing, going to the past to send a rolling timeline change to the future to set up a time when humans will help them. I don't know, but there's a feeling of possibility. Maybe not much; but I felt it, and that uncertainty makes it interesting. More interesting than fate, anyway.
Yeah, mine is as well. Luckily I knew about the loss of the child in the first few minutes and could warn her beforehand.
Was not so lucky when we saw a movie where the pregnant lead survives a buss accident but her baby does not. Those things become heartbreaking, even I had a problem with the rng of life for a little bit.
Edit: also, never watch Rosemary's Baby or Finding Nemo while the wife is pregnant. It will end her.
Shoot m to BITS (hold Y) [hard] C109-0000-014D-4E09
P-POWER Switch Palace 3838-0000-0122-9359
Raiding the Serpents Tomb 1A04-0000-0098-C11E
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it might just be me but this weird sub-genre of interesting SF premise-realistic reactions and actions-just kidding it was all about you,special snowflake, and your personal experience and life which will bend the rules of physics and logic and time because this is your story that had until now Interstellar as its flagship title might just not be for me.
I enjoy the first half and then the eye-rolling begins.
I just don't understand why you would set up a movie like Alien where you lay out the rules and the mystery and take your time to make it accessible, coherent, interesting and logically cohesive and then flip a switch and Harry Potter the rest of the movie.
I know I am exagerating and I don't want to diminish anybody's apparent enjoyment of the movie which obviously is out there in copious amounts but I was really rather miffed and annoyed by the latter half of the movie and just needed to vent.
it is probably down to expecting something else out of the movie entirely, like I did with Interstellar, and then getting the feeling of having been conned again. if you pitch me a interesting SF premise movie then I want to watch something like that. if you pitch me The Time Traveller's Wife or About Time I will watch the shit out of those movies.
the packaging did not fit the content is my judgement and that makes me angry.
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I like to move it, move it FCE2-0000-00D7-9048
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The biggest emotional gut punch, for me, was when
I'm pretty drunk right now but I thought that was fairly galling.
I wish there was more to it than we help you now, you help us in 3000 years. I would have preferred something a little more... alien. Especially from a species that seems to perceive time non linearly.
Louise tells Ian about it before it's clear the child is even sick if my interpretation is correct.
Even if Ian believes Louise can see the future, 99% of people would flip out that Louise made the choice to follow this path without consulting Ian. Or that Louise apparently is not attempting to steer away from this path.
If Ian isn't fully unboard with "I can see the future" than she comes across as pretty crazy. "I'm sorry husband but I have visions our child will die in 5 years and there's nothing we can do"
I cannot decide myself if she is brave or stupid, strong or weak, or just without choice in following the path before her. And perhaps the ambiguity is the point.
My shortest review is that it's a good story, told excellently with all the tools available to a filmmaker. The soundscape, the visuals, the music. The oppressive nature of the military life she gets dragged into, the stress it causes her. The way it slowly drops clues about the non-linearity.
But from the trailers the movie it most reminds me of is Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is that in any kind of way accurate?
Not really. Close Encounter's climax was meeting the aliens.
Arrival's climax is more about.... understanding the aliens.
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Like, she didn't know she called the general until he told her.
So the future can change the past and vice versa. But knowing what happens, she still loved Hannah enough to have her. Quite possibility because of she didn't she would lose all memory of her.
I also don't agree with the aliens needing 'more' reason. Why they need humans is kind of unimportant to the overall story.
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Question : how do the aliens move in their ship? It seems as if Louise is affected by gravity, though not fully, when she comes inside. They also seem to have weight when they step around. Are their squidlike flying movements a side effect of non-linear time (I.e. Gravity and time being linked)?
It's not explained at all, though it's probably not related to time. They appear to have fine control over gravity; most likely they can set it to their comfort and hers at the same time.
I don't even think it's a paradox, as the whole point is that Time can be viewed non-linerally so there isn't one.
Now I need to find the score somewhere where my dirty NZ money is able to purchase it.
Edit: Found it. Though, for anyone else who interested, Max Richter's On The Nature of Daylight is also in the film.
Humans perceive the whole of their existence as "passing through" time from one moment to the next, whereas the aliens perceive the whole all at once. The "flow of time" is just our limited human interpretation of the fourth dimension.
Which is why I found the movie to be pretty fatalistic. It was really confusing to me as to whether or not Dr. Banks' choice at the end of the movie was really a choice at all.