I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
I watched Arrival (2016), there was a lot more to it than I was expecting
I was expecting a generic alien invasion movie, and I was pleasantly surprised
Yeah, genuinely one of my favourite original sci-fi movies I've watched in the last decade. I did a linguistics course in high school so just really loved that side of it. It also really felt like they did a great job building the tension and making it feel like there were high stakes to her work.
I had no idea what I was watching when I sat down in the theater. My friend had bought the ticket and I just showed up. I didn't know ANYTHING.
One of the best experiences of my life and it turned me into a Denis Villeneuve super fan.
Same. I'm skeptical of most newer movies given all the rehashes and sequels. The presentation of the aliens had me shaking a little bit!
Could you be also recommend a few generic alien invasion movies?
If you haven't seen it, District 9 is a good non-standard 'invasion' movie
you can watch skyline if you want to watch nothing new or interesting.
Loved the movie! Such a great concept and so elegantly made. But the tagged on love story kind of took me out of it. Could almost hear the producers pushing that love story for wider audience appeal.
It happens in the short story too.
The thing I remember about this movie was that India got mad one of the fictional aliens from this movie decided to land in Pakistan instead of India.
The other thing I remember was that they for some reason decided to show the location on the map as "Punjab, Pakistan" which is even more generic because it's a province not a city.
The other thing I remember was that they for some reason decided to show the location on the map as "Punjab, Pakistan" which is even more generic because it's a province not a city.
I could see India being upset over that because it's disputed territory.
No that's Kashmir.
Punjab is technically a region that also happens to be the name of the province in both Pakistan and India since they both encompass the same region.
The best sound design team. I also love the ability of the visual design team to give a true feeling of scale and weight to things.
This was a good one. Definitely recommend
I need to give this a rewatch
Read the short story before re-watching. Definitely gives you a better perspective.
I watched it for the first time last year without knowing anything about it and, as someone who loves to nerd out about anything linguistics related (am translator, for context), I cannot describe how gleeful I was that such subjects had center focus in a big blockbuster like that. Obviously the other aspects of the movie were amazing as well and the story got me very emotional by the end, but I will never shut up about how interesting and important that translation/communication aspect of the movie was.
This movie absolutely destroyed me emotionally for like a week. I was wholly unprepared for what this movie was really about. I was expecting an alien invasion movie and got a brickload of emotions dumped on my heart.
Same. Saw it a few months before my first child was born and it opened up something in me that I didn’t know was there. I’ve never watched a movie that made me weep until this one. Full on sobbing. Watched it again a week later, wasn’t a fluke - sobbed again.
Yeah its one of my favorite movies
Definitely a top 20 in my book, one of my wife's top 5. I also love the book, it's very short story, you can probably read it in the time it'd take to watch the movie (I'm a slow reader and did it in a few hours), it doesn't add too much, but it's a bit of interesting mathematical philosophy which I found quite endearing.
It's based on a short story called "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. He's published only eighteen stories in his career (starting in 1990), nothing longer than a novella and mostly short stories. Despite that they've won him four Hugos, four Nebulas, and six Locus Awards. He's worth reading, is what I'm trying to say.
The short story was OK but this is one of the few cases where the movie did it better, added flavor to it that wasn’t in the book but carries the emotional hit farther.
The short stories in that book felt very “woah dude” to me, in the end I finished it but didn’t like it all that much. I’ve been downvoted for this opinion before, but oh well.
If you haven't read The Merchant and the Alchemists Gate by Ted Chiang I can't recommend it enough. Here's a PDF Link
It's lesser known than his big hits like Exhalation, but I think it's phenomenal.
Oh, I've read all of his stuff! It's a red letter day for me when a new story is published. None since 2019, though.
My odd choice of his would be Seventy-Two Letters. I find him most interesting when he follows through in the consequences of an old disproven scientific theory or theological explanation of the universe, and he manages to fit two of them in here.
I read the story and found it very entertaining. I'm not sure what impact it had on me, but it made me marvel at the idea of the inevitability of fate and how often our suffering and regrets of the past are the reason we're regarded so highly by others.
How did it strike you?
I put him up there with Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein, easily.
Well that's got me interested then
That's exactly what I was going to say. His prose is breathtaking.
I will say I read the short story and it made me love the movie even more. It rare for me to say the movie was better than they book and the books was great as well.
Ya know I have to say I feel nearly the same about Dune. I haven't gotten to the the later books but the first 2 have made me love the movies more. Not that I love the the books any less though. There is very little nuance lost in the movies and the changes that are made I can understand from a film making point of view. I guess what I mean to say is I appreciate the differences and it makes me like both more rather thank either any less.
I couldn’t agree more. I read them quite some time ago, and still find myself having philosophical discussions about them somewhat often today. Most are really thought provoking in a non-judgmental way.
I wonder if Ted Chiang was inspired by Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
He's written some "Notes" on the story when it was printed in his first short story collection and said that it has the same theme but that he wasn't inspired by it directly. The roots were Paul Linke's play "Time Flies When You’re Alive" and the principle of least time in optics -- if you treat light as a ray, it has to know its future destination in order to know the path with the shortest time it will take to get there (though not if it's a wave). Then there's a bunch of diagrams and discussions about the principle's implications for free will that will stretch your brain. It's pretty fun.
Thanks for the reading recommendation!
Don't remember much of this movie , but what I did see wasz very beautiful
Watched it last week for the first time. Really enjoyed it
Sapir-Whorf always fascinated me when I first read about it in philosophy class
I read this stuff casually and I was generally familiar with the theories in both Arrival and Interstellar, but I couldn't make heads or tails of either when I watched the movies. I completely missed what they were pointing at in Interstellar and thought they butchered the idea that Amy Adams was caught in her own frame of how she understood her experience of time.
I am sure that's my problem, but I truly wonder how anyone was supposed to appreciate the movies without internalizing the critical theories
Still one of my favourite movies ever
For anyone wondering, the music that just destroys you in the movie is by the amazing Max Richter. The song is On The Nature of Daylight.
PS: He recently released a piano arrangement of the song.
This song is everywhere if you look. I heard it in Shutter Island first.
“When I first started drinking warm water for my prostate..”
Fuck YouTube so much…
Either way… His short stories are the bees knees…
One of favorite movies of all time. I watch it at least once a year.
What are you talking about, it only came out last year ... Uh, right?
Well according to the movie what you're saying can make perfect sense.
Sure feels like it.
I'd like to watch this and Annihilation again. I've only seen each of them once, both around the same time, and my memories of them are pretty fuzzy at this stage.
Two of my absolute favorite movies. They are both amazing examinations of contact with life that functions completely differently than us, albeit in very different ways
FYI Annihilation novel has the same premise and setup as the movie, but is quite different plot-wise. It's more emotional, introspective, and has very vivid imagery. Much different from what I usually read, but I loved it.
Interesting, maybe I'll read that before re-watching the film. Thanks for the recommendation!
that fucking bear 💀
Was fuzzy, indeed.
The world is shocked to discover that Terry’s Chocolate Oranges are actually seed pods for intelligent extra terrestrial life.
It's not Terry's, it's Extraterrestrials.
Amy Adams wrecked me with two movies back-to-back. Nocturnal Animals and Arrivals really did a number on me.
Now you need to watch the 1996 classic "The Arrival"!
Reading this made my knees hurt.
So good. I think I listed it as my favorite movie for a while.
Now you have to watch it again. Seriously
I just did it.
Alien Linguistics. Love this movie
spoiler
I didn't care for it at all, I felt the memory as time travel thing to be weaksacue, and I felt ripped off at the end of watching it, plus I don't like her very much at all
Spoiler
Of course its totally fine to not like a movie, but I wanted to clarify the memory as time travel thing.
I can't remember where I first heard this, it wasn't this movie, but suppose humans are oddly fixated on the flow of time. To us the flow of time is immutable we exist in the present and remember the past. What if other races could "remember" things that haven't happened yet as easily as we remember things from the past.
The movie kinda proposes that learning human languages traps us into this linear / temporal mode of thinking. As in, as children we learn to parse things start to finish and that's it... we just never do it the other way future to now.
Turns out I've done a shit job at explaining this.
As I said, it's fine to hate the movie. I just thought I'd try to explain this part because I felt like I understood it, although I'm not sure anymore.
I think you explained it quite well. I just read the story and was a bit confused by the ending but this clarified it for me.
Major spoilers ahead! (struggling with the spoiler tag!)
!spoiler The story reads like she's in the present and you assume her memories of her daughter are in the past. Then looking back at the language used, she's describing memories of her daughter with language that indicates it's in the future, not the past. So it stands to reason that the encounters with the heptapods are in the present and learning their language gives her the ability to 'see' the future I assume Gary is her daughter's father. Just like she mentions of the readers of the Book of Ages, she won't do anything to change the future even if she knows what's coming, even if it means a future where her daughter dies young.
As someone with differing opinions from the zeitgeist on a variety of topics, I appreciate your sincere and well-reasoned dissention
Same, tbh. I can't say I felt ripped off, but it was definitely a disappointment.
I get into Sci Fi, time travel and obscure concepts, and I have to agree with you mainly. It ended and I kinda felt like, "yeah OK". Another person here has said that it should be watched again. Like what, did I miss something ? Anyway, it's entertainment and each to their own. Maybe I should watch it again one day, but it will be a while.
It depends. What were you expecting and what was your takeaway after watching? Because to me, it didn’t have anything to do with the time travel or scifi aspects at all.
The main point of the film is summed up with the line “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”. It was about free will and the main character’s decision to let things play out knowing her daughter will die at an early age, because if she didn’t have her, she wouldn’t have experienced the life she had with her daughter at all. It’s a philosophical story wrapped in a scifi film.
That part of the story was heavily hollywoodized. I highly recommend reading the original story.
I'm in the same boat. I enjoyed the short story more, but mostly because it didn't feel as over the top. The wacky alien mechanic works better in print IMO.
the short story/novel its derived from is also pretty good
Pretty good? It destroyed me
Yup. I couldn't shake the feeling of sorrow after watching this movie. Like it just clung to me...
Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life won a Nebula for best novella and a Theodore Sturgeon award, and was nominated for a Hugo for best novella.
Yeah, it's pretty good.
I don't remember much about the movie, but isn't it one of the movies where time gets wacky?
Almost
Spoiler
Memories are what get wacky. The main character (as well as the aliens who "arrive") can remember the future as well as the past due to learning the alien language. It's based on the possibly-not-linguistically-sound Sapir-Wharf hypothesis that says the language you speak influences the way you think. The aliens use a circular rather than linear writing system so they think of time in a non-linear way
I watched it because Lingthusiasm has a podcast episode about it and loved it too!
B E A N
space bean