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Gormongous

Arrival

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I saw The Arrival and liked it a lot. I don't really have much to discuss, except to say that Denis Villeneuve continues to move from strength to strength and, if anyone has the juice to do a Blade Runner sequel/reboot that's not unmitigated dreck, it's him.

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I saw Arrival yesterday. Similar strong atmosphere as Sicario, but the story was much less offputting for me. The alien design was a bit boring, and the ending got a bit hollywood-y, but overall, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

 

I liked that it combined elements from some of my favorite sci-fi authors. Arrival and sci-fi author spoilers below:

Stanisław Lem and Kurt Vonnegut.

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On 19/12/2016 at 9:51 AM, Nappi said:

I saw Arrival yesterday. Similar strong atmosphere as Sicario, but the story was much less offputting for me. The alien design was a bit boring, and the ending got a bit hollywood-y, but overall, I enjoyed it quite a bit.

 

I liked that it combined elements from some of my favorite sci-fi authors. Arrival and sci-fi author spoilers below:

 

  Hide contents

Stanisław Lem and Kurt Vonnegut.

 

I saw it yesterday. I disagree about the alien design! It was a bold choice to just have some make up on the back of some dude's hands. But I actually did like it. I've read a ton of linguistics so it was tough to get into the movie and stop having opinions about everything. But apart from the deus ex machina at the end I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Really strong atmosphere and more personal than a lot of brainy sci-fi. 

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On 27.12.2016 at 11:01 AM, brkl said:

I saw it yesterday. I disagree about the alien design! It was a bold choice to just have some make up on the back of some dude's hands.

 

Haha.. I was so disappointed, because for a movie about the difficulty of encountering, dealing, and communicating with something truly alien, the actual alien design was so easy to compartmentalize

 

"Oh, it's an octopus a septopus (?) type of monster!"

Maybe it would not have bothered me, if Stanislaw Lem had not been so good at that kind of stuff.

 

Regarding Patrick R's list, I watched Jaws for the first time a couple of years ago (I might have seen it when I was very young, but didn't remember much of it), and damn that movie is wonderful. 

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Saw this movie recently. Enjoyed it, but I wasn't head over heels for it. Spoilers:

 

By far the most interesting part of the movie was the theme of "if you knew everything that was going to happen in your life, including some tragic stuff, would you change anything," and also the subtext of 

could you change anything. The movie spent almost no time on it but honestly that was the only thematically interesting thing to me. The Sapir-Whorf stuff is just dumb pseudo-science, the aliens themselves had pretty opaque motivations and not much else going for them, and the movie took its sweet time doing everything (not that I minded - the languid pace actually makes me really excited for Blade Runner 2, because there's a chance that movie will also take it niiiiiice and slow, like the original).

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I watched it this weekend and it's probably my favourite Hollywood movie in the last, I don't know, 10 years. It's visually stunning and very well paced. Sure, it's Hollywood and it does a lot of Hollywood things, especially towards the end, but I can live with that. Also,

it has the slowest unfolding twist I've ever seen and it happens towards the middle of the movie.

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I skipped this in theaters because I heard enough to think it wouldn't be for me. And sure enough...

 

 

I was really disappointed that the angle I was actually interested in ("How does one communicate with an alien race?") is mostly relegated to a montage, while the film instead focuses on very cliche plot points like "The Military Guy Who Is Always Wrong About Everything" and "The Scary Foreign Guy Who Is War-Hungry and Scary". Maybe I'm a bore, but I think a procedural film about the logistics of First Contact would be plenty fascinating on it's own, without any need for those theatrics.
 

The first thirty minutes were great, though I think I would have liked a more detailed and nuanced look at how people across the world are reacting to the event.


I did find the Slaughterhouse Five angle fairly moving (I am a sucker for the "time-travel-as-metaphor-for-painful-memory-and-ptsd" premise, and even get moved by it in films that don't really deserve it) but it felt more like a clever subversion of assumptions about film grammar than meaningfully connecting to the film as a whole. After it was over I was simultaneously impressed and annoyed that the dead kid story was entirely incidental. Impressed because if this had descended into a Contact sort of thing where an event of global significance got reduced to one person's issues, it would have put me off. But also annoyed because it's the entire emotional fulcrum of the movie and it feels very separate from the actual story.

 

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57 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

I skipped this in theaters because I heard enough to think it wouldn't be for me. And sure enough...

 

  Reveal hidden contents

I was really disappointed that the angle I was actually interested in ("How does one communicate with an alien race?") is mostly relegated to a montage, while the film instead focuses on very cliche plot points like "The Military Guy Who Is Always Wrong About Everything" and "The Scary Foreign Guy Who Is War-Hungry and Scary". Maybe I'm a bore, but I think a procedural film about the logistics of First Contact would be plenty fascinating on it's own, without any need for those theatrics.
 

The first thirty minutes were great, though I think I would have liked a more detailed and nuanced look at how people across the world are reacting to the event.


I did find the Slaughterhouse Five angle fairly moving (I am a sucker for the "time-travel-as-metaphor-for-painful-memory-and-ptsd" premise, and even get moved by it in films that don't really deserve it) but it felt more like a clever subversion of assumptions about film grammar than meaningfully connecting to the film as a whole. After it was over I was simultaneously impressed and annoyed that the dead kid story was entirely incidental. Impressed because if this had descended into a Contact sort of thing where an event of global significance got reduced to one person's issues, it would have put me off. But also annoyed because it's the entire emotional fulcrum of the movie and it feels very separate from the actual story.

 

 

I don't disagree, although I liked the film a lot more than you. I think it's a natural consequence of adapting a novella that uses the intimacy and identification with the narrator that happens in literature, but I don't know what I'd improve in my own version of it.

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14 minutes ago, Patrick R said:

It definitely made me curious to read the source material.

 

It's a cool novella, especially in terms of using the shifting of tenses in a first-person narrative to make time feel more fluid, but I think the movie's going to end up stealing its thunder somewhat, invariably, just because the gradual revelation is so important to the novella's climax.

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I liked the movie, but I kind of agree with Patrick that they glossed over the potentially most interesting aspect of the story in favor of the almost mundane/cliche.

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