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.

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

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

nolan would win in a landslide tbf

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..

Interesting to think about. I can't comprehend what it would be like to be a Heptapod except as a kind of split consciousness. One part of you is acting in time, while the other part of you is seeing the whole succession of actions from sideways-on. It's hard to imagine combining the two perspectives, since action in time seems like it requires a sense of the world as containing opportunities, affordances, routes along which to project possible actions. The sideways-on view seems to disillusion those things. Not that it's a problem for the movie to keep it mysterious. It's more about provoking the idea.

Yeah, I am chronically giving away my copies of the Chiang so I never have it on hand. But iirc, in the story, Louise describes the heptapod's behaviour as almost like a kind of performance. They know what will happen already, and the actions they take are more like cursory rituals toward the inevitable.

It certainly was thought-provoking in more than a 'what-if' sort of way, I found myself thinking about my own life and the inevitable conclusion of this activity or that, and how "learned wisdom" would inform, for example, where I'd go after work and when I'd leave to go home, or whatever.

maybe we should poll the worst Self-Important Statement filmmakers of the 21st century
― not all those who chunder are sloshed (bizarro gazzara), Monday, 21 November 2016 12:32 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

von trier or noé surely

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.

― memories of a cruller (unregistered), Sunday, November 20, 2016 9:01 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Otm, these were the only things that actually bothered me in the movie, especially the former. Going in having read the story, it felt like they were way too eager to get to the 'twist'. It could have been done by just inserting those scenes without any explanation, but instead they made it clear (or at least very strongly implied) she was experiencing them in the 'present' (holding her head, people asking her what's wrong, etc).

yeah those were obv mistakes imo, in the imdb goof plot hole sense but more importantly the bad storytelling choices sense

This was decent, I guess I need to read the story cause from what people are saying it sounds like all the not-so-good stuff is stuff the filmmakers added?

dude's random midfilm exposition voiceover was shameless

http://i.imgur.com/cXLzaEV.jpg

I couldn't stop thinking about Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure when the General Shang gave the future Louise the answers for the past Louise.

What was the Sanskrit word for war and needing another cow? I didn't make that bit out.

If Louise's book was a best seller, then wouldn't everybody who read it and learned to translate Heptapod acquire the 'weapon' of their language? Or was it just her 'cause she went on the ship and directly interacted with Costello?

This shat all over Interstellar, damn that was some annoying garbage.

This shat all over Interstellar, damn that was some annoying garbage.

Life is way too short to ever watch another Christopher Nolan movie.

I could watch the new Nolan film, or I could rewatch Memento or The Prestige. Seems Jonathan is the Nolan to watch.

If Louise's book was a best seller, then wouldn't everybody who read it and learned to translate Heptapod acquire the 'weapon' of their language?

I guess, but presumably it's still wicked hard to learn

You only have to learn just enough to let the precog kick in and take you the rest of the way.

really enjoyed this. pretty sentimental at the end, but also really needed something this optimistic at around this point; with so many questions about the morality of even continuing to reproduce knowing what might be coming soon (though of course this film also posits a humanity that will be around in 3000 years to help once we all learn Heptapod). mainly I've always been violently allergic to the entire post-Heinlein school of time travel paradox / split timeline science fiction, favoring simultaneity / fixity like Primer or Slaughterhouse 5 so this was refreshing

my favorite album last year was 'New Songs of the Humpback Whale'; noise removal software has enabled a quantum leap forward in the clarity of underwater recordings, allowing you to subtract out any splashes or rumbling artifacts -- that CD doesn't sound like you're in scuba gear 100 feet from a whale, it sounds like you are somehow in an auditorium 10 feet away from a whale. I kind of knew it was money in the bank for immanent hollywood alien sound design but I'm glad it was this film that did it, and I was also really impressed with the way it was used in the actual score during the first approach. it is actually quite a trick, getting away with using whale song in music (I do own those Paul Winter records but mainly to make fun of them, and even the Hovhaness piece lets the orchestra lay out for the solos)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsaRJ4j4xIo

actually looks like what I assumed was whale song was actually spontaneous vocalizations by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, recorded on an iPhone while he was listening to a rough mix of Johansson's score! totally thought it was whale song.

Well, in fairness, they may mean "We will be by in 3000 years to retrieve the calcium from your bones, turns out bones will be useful for what we'll be up to then, and when you want bones in 5016, Earth's the place to go!"

At a certain point, I did lean over to say "half of this film is excellent and the other half reminds me of my least favourite parts of Interstellar and Gravity".

My companion (later, because she's more polite) also pointed out that there's no effing way you'd send a particle physicist there, that's what anthropologists are for.

Reminded me a lot of China Mieville's Embassytown thematically, though obvioulsy not as complex or richly realised. A bit more depth and ambiguity than your typical blockbuster Hollywood SF though. Loved the musical cues for the Heptapods.

What about it reminded you of Embassytown?

i thought this was very good. certainly better and more affecting than Interstellar

What about it reminded you of Embassytown?

― mh

A plot revolving around weird alien semantics.

ah, I was thinking of the city & the city and had forgotten I have yet to finish embassytown

I missed the twist!

Kind of a weird experience.

Thought it was a decent film, but when it ended I was like "I wonder if those aliens were supposed to be a metaphor for cancer or smth

lol

just came back from seeing this. as far as the recent spate of spacesuit movies go, I think this could be the best of the bunch. didn't quite beat Gravity in 3D on a decent screen in terms of outerbody thrills but it was really well done and I liked how they managed to avoid gratuitous conflict or peril.
A smarter Independence Day and a simpler Slaughterhouse 5.

That whalesong album mentioned upthread is really something!

I found this interview with the movie's cinematographer interesting.

Amy Adams wins National Board of Review for best actress.

http://lithub.com/ted-chiang-on-arrival-the-boredom-of-moviemaking-and-the-princess-bride/

sorry, posted that before reading it. hadnt realised it was such a short interview.

This really was a beautiful looking movie, the first of Villeneuve's I've seen, and the third shot by Young after Selma and A Most Violent Year. The scene when they're first entering the ship, and Renner is running his hand along the surface of it, has so much texture you can almost reach out and touch it yourself.

Before the movie we saw a trailer for Will Smith's upcoming pile of nonsense that made me laugh out loud in the theater.

(Is this the first awards contender toplined by two people who appeared on Joss Whedon TV shows?)

ha i know doesn't that Will Smith movie look fucking terrible? i can't wait to see it!

Someone needs to fan-edit the trailer as a wacky comedy, because it basically looks like "What if Inside Out was a prestige drama?"

"What if Will Smith was the prophet of a revived polytheism?"

ha i know doesn't that Will Smith movie look fucking terrible? i can't wait to see it!

The first time I saw the trailer I thought it was a parody, but then I realized there was no way Will Smith would do something that funny, and I just got depressed.

OMG it turns out that this Will Smith movie is EVEN STUPIDER than the trailers made it appear.

http://www.avclub.com/review/will-smith-goes-glum-twisty-treacle-collateral-bea-247387

With the company in dire financial straits, Howard’s minority partners Whit (Edward Norton), Claire (Kate Winslet), and Simon (Michael Peña) conspire to wrest control by hiring three struggling actors (Helen Mirren, Keira Knightley, and Jacob Latimore) to randomly sneak up on him on the subway or while he’s eating and pretend to be personifications of death, love, and time while an unscrupulous private eye secretly records their interactions and doctors the footage so that it looks like Howard is talking to himself. (Yes, this is really the premise.) A reader might presume that this high-concept ensemble gaslighting would result in farce and disaster and not, say, valuable life lessons and a triple twist ending in the Sea Of Trees vein. But what this reader doesn’t realize is that it is really the minority partners who need to have sophomorically written conversations with abstract concepts while standing in the public way.

Over-sharing divorcé Whit has lost the respect of his daughter because he cheated on his ex-wife; high-strung Claire wants to have a baby because she is a woman; shy Simon is actually, seriously terminally ill. And perhaps at this point, this reader—this theoretical reader—might guess that the life-changing actor spirit guides were in fact hired by Howard, and it is the partners who are being gaslit into a better understanding of themselves. Collateral Beauty isn’t that clever. The script, by Allan Loeb (The Switch, Here Comes The Boom), seems like satire at first, with its offhand references to previous failed interventions in Howard’s life, like an ayahuasca shaman who was flown from Peru at great expense. But it is lethally sincere when it comes to bathos and psychobabble.

So it's a reverse Christmas Carol?

Christmas Carol as Big Con?

smith has a weakness for these massively dud "gift of the magi" style high concept movies

i mean who among us can forget SEVEN POUNDS

Will Smith has literally never been in a good movie

Six Degrees of Separation

Men in Black, Too (not Men in Black 2)

my favorite album last year was 'New Songs of the Humpback Whale'; noise removal software has enabled a quantum leap forward in the clarity of underwater recordings, allowing you to subtract out any splashes or rumbling artifacts -- that CD doesn't sound like you're in scuba gear 100 feet from a whale, it sounds like you are somehow in an auditorium 10 feet away from a whale. I kind of knew it was money in the bank for immanent hollywood alien sound design but I'm glad it was this film that did it, and I was also really impressed with the way it was used in the actual score during the first approach. it is actually quite a trick, getting away with using whale song in music (I do own those Paul Winter records but mainly to make fun of them, and even the Hovhaness piece lets the orchestra lay out for the solos)

I don't know when I will get around to seeing Arrival (I'm terrible at actually going to/watching movies yet at the same time I listen to the film scores of everything new that catches my fancy) -- but I have a copy of the film score for this and it absolutely floored me, gave me chills, my film score of the year I think.

men in black 3 was ok but not cos of smith or anything

ali is a good movie

rong

BAD BOYS 2

jesus

off the topic of will smith, I gotta say time paradox isn't really my favorite scifi topic - it brings up universal ideas on the nature of time, but with scifi I'm usually looking for specific ideas reflecting the point in time the movie was made/story was written

so basically I think something like Ex Machina or even Westworld (for all its shortcomings) is more interesting as 2010s scifi than Interstellar or Arrival, because what is AI and what are robots and how do we understand those questions right now is more interesting than "from olden days philosophers have pondered whether time is indeed linear or cyclical and whether all events have a causal explanation etc etc"

I went in to this only knowing "Amy Adams, linguist, makes first contact with aliens." That plus the gorgeous look of it was enough to get me excited. I kinda had hoped it was going to focus more on the difficulty of truly communicating with/understanding an alien life form. The time loop stuff actually struck me as kind of unnecessary? It bugged me the same way the ending of Donnie Darko bugs me. Either way, this was dope and I told virtually everyone I know to go see it.

There's a cool Song Exploder episode about the score:

http://songexploder.net/arrival

finally saw this; liked it a lot although renner was kind of clunky. ditto on what the hell was whittaker's accent.

when they started drawing i was all like o shit the aliens are sigur ros

i appreciated the fact that, contra chekhov, the canary didn't keel over

between this and Rogue One it's been a banner year for bizarre Forest Whitaker performances

Listening to New Songs of the Humpback Whale now and holy shit, you weren't kidding.

Totally unclear why Forest Whitaker needed an accent at all, it was just distracting.

We finally got around to this today -- enjoyed it, thought it did a reasonably good job of translating the themes of the story, Hollywooded up in predictable but not obtrusive ways. It did kind of leave the impression that she had some "choice" about whether to get married, have a baby, etc, which I think is a little off. In the story it's more like she learns how to see it all at once, but not in a way that lets her change anything -- there's nothing to change, because it's all happening at the same time.

Gorgeous film, great score.

forest whitaker no longer has a native accent and just invents accents depending on how any given sentence would sound

Saw this last night and was really moved and impressed. Yeah a couple moments were oversold and the ending in partiicular could have backed the fuck off (feels like someone pressured them to make sure test audiences 'got it' and that this cut screentime for some of the slow discovery stuff - I accepted the narrated montage in the middle but the ''it was Amy Adams who made the first key breakthrough'' line definitely felt like covering for a key scene cut for time)..... but for the rest of it I was sooooo glad to be watching a scifi movie where thoughtful academics are the heroes, grappling with not-easily-solved problems, and the film gives you credit to not have every single beat spelled back out for you. Lots of nice parallels to the idea that their language involves two parallel channels of information, there.

Also the rare big-budget movie where the ''it's intentionally ambiguous!'' defense feels justified and earned by what's in the film; I had a beautiful, snowy post-credits walk homeward, thinking about things. Yeah it takes some shortcuts but idk, I was moved to both thoughts and feelings and I keep mulling over it today, worth $10 easily.

Also thought it was cool how each time I went ''ohhh I see where they're going with this'' I was wrong and what they actually did was more interesting and true to the themes of the film than what I'd imagined. E.g. after the ''zero sum game'' bit I thought AA would have this revelation that the two aliens had two different jobs, just as the humans sent both a linguist and a scientist- tidy, but reduces the aliens' fundamental differentness. After the ''palindrome'' bit I seriously thought she was going to realize that they'd been reading everything backwards because the aliens have been drawing on a transparent eall from their POV, lol.

gleick: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/01/19/when-they-came-from-another-world

Thanks, I enjoyed that.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3HFePdUYAAg2kF.jpg:small

I p much hated everything starting from when the subtitles showed up

also, with the exception of the language and alien designs, visually v boring. I miss colorful sci-fi - this was all white, grey, and mist.

Thought this was fantastic, weirdly stressful to watch (had to take a couple of five minute breaks). I can see a lot of the criticisms about paradoxes and 'can't everyone see the future' and the addition of the military drama, but they didn't bother me. It was terribly effective at making me feel with Adams and that seems rare in contemporary movies - if I see it as emotional drama with sci-fi framework that forgives a lot of sci-fi issues.

i would have liked this more had i not read the story first, i think

Jeremy Renner was a terrible casting choice. why would you cast someone with such a stupid face as a genius physicist, and then not have him say anything intelligent the entire film??? In the story he tells her about hamiltonian formulation of classical mechanics where objects act as if they calculate all possible future paths in advance, which tips her off to the language/time. so much of the script was underwritten, too. like conversations between scientists written by someone who has no idea what scientists would talk about, all those scenes with the conference video chat where they're just going. it was visually pretty but empty and the long scenes with mournful strings felt un-earned. despite the story having been written in the 90s i want to see the version of this movie made in the 70s, just dry conversations between academics

very few films did that in the 70s, and they usually presented pretty pat explanations as drawn-out academic talk

but yeah, the source story is better but, as written, is a shorter episode and not a movie. the military bit and extrapolation of tragedy (the worst parts) made it a feature-length film

I feel like there is a feature Ted Chiang pitch out there that doesn't change the plot focus or tone, but maybe only in short form as some sort of anthology

Dug this

Conversations between scientists in movies ain't written to please scientists flopson

i'm not a scientist. movies should be written to please ME

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.

I was on this wonderful streak of loving films till I ran into this pedagogic experiment! Poor form when the film literally places the audience as the 7 year old kid getting obvious concepts explained to them by mum. The story really asks you to suspend your disbelief re:governmental competency all throughout. Woulda won me over if they shot Ian in the end

Okay, hating, over!