Arrival (Spoilers!)

I'm surprised there's no thread for this movie. It's amazing. Critically acclaimed and fully deserves it IMO.

Spoiler free: It's a sci-fi movie involving aliens, but it's not an action movie or an alien invasion movie. It's very brainy. It's all about a scientist working to decipher the (very) alien language. It's good, pretty realistic in how they handle the military response, priorities, news and public response, stuff like that. Some scenes are kind of slow and drag on, one or two scenes have some cheap and unnecessary CGI, but overall it's still a great film.

With that said, this movie has a twist, and it hinges on that twist. My personal recommendation: DO NOT watch any trailers, DO NOT read anything more if you want to get the proper experience. Almost any discussion about this film and its themes WILL require spoiling it so I think we should consider this entire thread spoiler-filled.

First movie in a long time to legitimately have my heart pounding. Loved it! Looking forward to Passengers as well.

An interesting comparison between myself and the friend I went to see Arrival with - I really enjoyed it, felt very tense, loved finally having an intellectual film about aliens. My friend, however, couldn't accept the twist, and it kind of spoiled the film for him. My feeling is that if you can accept the aliens as a part of a story the twist should be easy, but we're so used to seeing aliens in films by now that it's much easier to accept them than something based on a massive leap of faith regarding what the human body is capable of, even in the right conditions. He admitted that he was quite tired while watching it and might not have completely absorbed it, but think it is a film that you either accept the ending or don't, and if you can't it will likely affect your experience of the whole film.

When the twist was first revealed I thought it was a bit screwy but everything really fit together by the end.

Personally I found the twist to be not one, really. It was foreshadowed pretty early on, and in a number of places. There are many many hints-Ian gives one of the first major ones when he uses his 'two pencil' comparison.

Not that I considered that a problem. The movie works really well without needing to shock or surprise the audience.

edited 15th Nov '16 11:33:42 AM by ArthurEld

Can I get a reminder of what the two pencil example was? For some reason I don't remember that part.

He points out that the way Hepatod writing works is equivalent to someone writing a sentence with two pencils, 'starting' at end and beginning, knowing exactly what the whole sentence would be and how much space it would take.

Just watched this today and really enjoyed it. I love quiet portraits of end-of-the-world narratives or sci-films that don't get bogged with its science fiction narratives.

I agree with your assessment of the twist. It didn't feel like one to me either. Its more like having the narrative unfold in a linear fashion even if it's non-linear—if that somehow makes sense.

For a bit I thought the twist was going to be the Hannah scenes were in the past, but Hannah was some sort of Chosen One of the aliens and her death was a Too Good for This Sinful Earth thing engineered by them somehow.

Really liked the film. It's one of the rare films that is able to keep tension without firing a single shot or showing a dramatic death. That to me is a triumph of filming.

There shots fired offscreen and a dramatic death offscreen though.

True, but that's the humans. The aliens don't do anything and they create intense tension. That is a triumph.

See, I read the original novella, "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang, so I already knew what the twist would be. But I still greatly enjoyed the movie — it had some outstanding acting (even though I kept on thinking "Hey, Lois Lane and Hawkeye have some good chemistry together") and the design of the heptopods was outstanding. Just the general camerawork and the music made it so tense and dramatic.

This was a really good movie, and I appreciate it for being everything I hoped Contact would be that it then wimped out on. Starfish Aliens, actual scientific principles and fact-checking, aversion of Evil Bureaucrat villains, and real change to society and humanity coming from the plot's conclusion.

I just saw this movie and I'm....overwhelmed by it. This blew my mind.

Just.....palindromes, man. that's all I can say.

Now that I think about it, the film also feels like a better adaptation of Dr. Manhattan's condition than the Watchmen film. Specifically, what it feels like to experience all moments of your life at the same time. The Snyder film, I felt, was too straight forward in its depiction of Manhattan's backstory, making it feel like just Jon reminiscing his history in a simple forward-to-now direction. The style Arrival takes, of brief snippets of memory at random and Louise's behavior mirroring itself in each time period better reflects what that sort of personal omniscience would be.

Just saw the film. All I can say is that this film is incredible.

I know right? I was having the exact same thoughts at the end.

It's interesting how we've had movies coming out in the fall that are basically love letters to science three years in a row – Interstellar in 2014, The Martian in 2015, and now Arrival in 2016. Makes me wonder what movie it'll be next year.

Well, in fairness, this movie treats this "power" basically the opposite of Watchmen. Manhattan's condition is played for deconstructive horror, since it's made him so alien he's essentially ceased to care about anything, while in this film it's a good thing and it's implied the Heptapods' knowledge will lead to great strides in space travel and international relations.

Saw the film with family, I really enjoyed it as it's one of the few movies I went into knowing just about nothing about the movie except the premise, actors and brief glimpses of footage. I normally don't care about spoilers for the big blockbusters because it's impossible to talk about those movies without going down spoiler roads, but for a movie this small as soon as I saw talk of a big spoiler ending it was easier to just step away and wait. My brother did not like the end movie, he felt a number of choices in cinematography and sound design took away from the experience (if you're in a crowded theater, it's difficult to evoke Silence Is Golden when you can hear popcorn snacking).

Anyway, the thread title reads SPOILERS so I'm not going to both with them. The reveal of Anachronic Order as Louise can perceive the future was a little hard to comprehend, but narratively is quite powerful. The way it is set up throughout the film was excellent, allowing the Wham Line of "Who is this child I keep seeing?" help us understand what is happening rather than a surprise after the rules have been revealed.

As for Watchmen film vs. comic, fully realizing Dr. Manhattan's perception of time is difficult because an important element of that story is that his perception of the future is obscured by external forces. So in his spotlight chapter showing exactly how he sees time, it comes across as remembering THE PAST out of order, rather than seeing past and future simultaneously. Arrival is not constrained by a greater comic book premise and is able to explore that concept more fully.

So do you think Louise was right to still decide to have Hannah, even knowing what was going to happen to her? I get what they were going for - better to take the good with the bad than never have the good at all and be haunted by what might've been - but this was the one aspect of this otherwise A+ movie that felt iffy to me.

I know I wouldn't have.

When discussing pets, I always say the same thing: I like dogs, but I don't want a dog. Dogs are too short-lived, and I don't think I could handle it; it would be like having a child that I knew wouldn't live past their teens.

But using the same line of reasoning, I can definitely see others making that decision; after all, people do choose to have dogs (and yes, I know a dog and a child is not the same thing).

And I've seen what the death of a child does to parents. It's awful. But then life goes on.

Consider the alternative, she sees a daughter doomed to die of cancer as a teenager and decides that's too much for her and takes steps to avoid it. That is the burden she has now, knowing all potential joys and sorrows she'll experience, and it's hard to imagine another scenario that would encapsulate that kind of burden.

.. The local cinema has a thing called "Baby Cinema" where they encourage new parents to show up with infants in tow for a couple of showings of various movies a week. - I think they run sound low for it, but the main point is that those particular showings are there to let people still go to the movies without having to arrange babysitting / a social event for that crowd. Guess which movie they chose this month?

'love letter to science'

Linguistics is one of the humanities damn it!