Arrival (2016)

Homsar said:

Its a nod to one of the worst episodes of Rick and Morty. Its almost up there with Sand Snakes in GoT.

With that said Rick and morty is up there with the greats and the best cartoon on TV currently running

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While that's true -- even a horrible episode of rick and morty is pretty fucking good.

The whole Ice-T part of it was trite to the point of, "You didn't think that was funny did you guys?" But the rest of the episode was great. Just relentless mockery of popular culture.

McCheese said:

I'm a stupid who likes Michael Bay movies. Please explain to me.

Where did the aliens and ships go at the end? Why did they dissolve?

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They have methods of travel that we don't even begin to comprehend. They're far advanced of us in obvious ways. But apparently not every way, because they see a looming crisis that they have to ask for our help.

It's a merge of self interested and benevolent. Good Guy Abbot.

And the structure of the movie is backwards. Meeting the aliens is where she meets her husband, but it's left at the end of the story. Her daughter (the part that comes after meeting her husband, having a child with a disease that will kill her in adolescence, deciding to do it anyway, then the husband leaving her) story is told first.

Time is a flat circle. It's the structure of the movie. Westworld did that too. Same technique, both executed to great effect. In WW it was a plot device, in Arrival it was thematic.

Sylas said:

um no.

Memento is a movie that is shown backwards. (in so much that a movie can be truly shown backwards and not just be rewinding).

This is just like idk half a million other films with a setup and a payoff?

It's more like, Sixth Sense. "here we'll start this film with a seemingly unrelated scene, pay attention though this matters later. ok enjoy the film"

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That's the entire point of the hectopod language. It isn't rooted in time.

The acts aren't sequential. The structure of the movie is 1/2/3, but in the timeline of what happens in the plot the structure is 2/3/1.

That's the whole point!

Masakari said:

If the aliens look at the past/present/future as happening at the same time, I'm curious about how/why they referenced "3000 years into the future". Wouldn't it be difficult for them to convey that to humans?

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It probably would have been more consistent for the narrator to say something like, "They came now because they needed our help before". But you could have turned this movie into Primer pretty easily, trying to play with tense, given the abstract treatment of time.

So "3,000 years in the future" is basically just a gimme to the movie going audience. "Ooooh, ok, that makes sense." It does, in movie-speak.

Like us, hectopods like their numbers BIIIIIG and ROOOOOOUND.

Sylas said:

i'm not even sure why you are trying to argue this? This was a pseudo-scifi chick flick. it was the notebook for nerdy girls. like I don't know why you are going out of your way to pretend it was some amazing thing or some unprecedented accomplishment in film making. It was a single scene at the beginning of the movie, seemingly out of place and unrelated, that you figure out about 20 minutes into the film that it occurs in the future. It wasn't some twist and it wasn't some 2/3/1 (you mean 3/1/2) omg time is a "flat circle" bullshit.

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Sit down and watch that again if you doubt it. Look at the structure. Elements are intentionally non linear.

If you didn't like it, that's fine. It's not a unique concept, it's just entertaining and harder sci-fi than most movies released I a given year.

But what you're trying to do is argue fact as if it were an opinion. The acts are disordered, they are done so intentionally to create an effect. That effect is central to the theme. That effect is pith of the story.

Yes, they did dumb it down and they did add unnecessary dramatic elements. The soldiers bomb wasn't dumb as much as it was underdeveloped. Given the medium of visual storytelling, I think they did about as well as you can. One primer is enough. It's not too much, primer is a masterpiece of recursive confusion. But one is enough.

Our measures of years is conveniently tied to a consistent cosmic event (orbit of Earth around the sun) so it would be pretty easy for them to note how we measure that and say "about 3,000 of those thingies." Also even if time is flat/cyclical to them, they still would find it useful to have some way to distinguish how far apart things happen, even if they don't care whether they are particularly before/after.

The soldiers I just took as unstable and poorly influenced outliers akin to the terrorists in Contact, except with way less explanation. Also, I would expect some kind of mental vetting for the guard and research detail of the fucking first alien ship but maybe it was the Trump administration in power.

Not even close to the same.

I would assume the Hazmat suits were more to guard against random atmospheric / elemental concerns than anything, I thought it's already been shown scientifically that it's essentially impossible for an actual random alien pathogen to be dangerous to humans and vice versa.

Sylas said:

i'm not even sure why you are trying to argue this? This was a pseudo-scifi chick flick. it was the notebook for nerdy girls.

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This is nonsensical gibbering.

You either get this movie or you don't. Not understanding it or not enjoying it doesn't mean you are not smart. Anyone that claims that is an elitist, and has their own prejudices.

But it's note the Notebook for nerdy girls. The whole romantic plot was a thematic choice; would you make a decision that you knew would hurt you in the end if you could enjoy it in a life-changing way until then?

That's not for nerdy girls. That's for any human being that's ever been a relationship that they enjoyed, and was hurt by that relationship ending.

Intrinsic said:

It is more consistent to say they added bullshit to the movie that the short story didn't attempt to tackle b/c it wasn't actually relevant to the story being told. Same with the military trying to blow up the aliens bullshit.

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The tension in the film was the Chinese threatening to attack their ship. Having the American soldiers internalize the fears that the Chinese were having was a way to make that threat immediate to the characters of the film without having to introduce a bunch of Chinese characters

iannis said:

Sit down and watch that again if you doubt it. Look at the structure. Elements are intentionally non linear.

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The way the story is told is somewhat non-linear, but you have to remember that it's being told as a story from a narrator. And it's being told as if it's being told by Amy Adams to her daughter. So having the scenes with her daughter at the start of the movie make perfect sense from an in-movie story telling perspective. It's just that the audience isn't let in on that until the end. But had they not done that, there would be no structural elements to the movie to give it a sense of time being non-linear, so it's not throwaway as some of the other posters are implying. It was a way for the audience to experience time in a wishy washy sense the same way Adams' character does. It also gives us at least some emotional attachment to the future events, just as Adams would at present. Otherwise we'd just be left with her saying "holy shit, I'm going to have a daughter some day that's going to die" and our reaction would just be "oh, that sucks"

pharmakos said:

I wanted to know more about the aliens.

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I liked that we didn't get to know a lot about the aliens. There's always the danger in science fiction movies of showing too much and ruining any sense of imagination (Stranger Things suffered from this in the later episodes). I was even worried about seeing the aliens themselves, but I thought they did a good job of making them something somewhat other worldly, but still grounded in biology. They managed to make them not look silly