Arrival - Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, Forest Whitaker, Destiny prologue

Sometimes a twist is just a twist, but I think here the twist was pretty good. It confused the viewer in a similar way as Amy Adams got confused. Is it the past the future the past? Everything is happening at once or parallel… I liked the movie.

Reminded me about Memento, in that the viewer got almost into the same state of mind as Guy Pierce (the viewer cannot remember just what happened right before, because he has not watched it, but the effect is samey)…

and I love the music by Max Richter since Waltz with Bashir… also the other music by Johan Johansonn, the modern stuff was great… Villeneuve is really a great director

I went and saw Arrival with a friend earlier this week. I thought it would have been a pretty good hour, maybe 90 minute story. At almost 2 hours it just dragged. I liked the story, and thought the acting was pretty good, but I kept wanting them to just get it over with. Probably didn’t help that I thought the “twist” was obvious from about the time they mentioned the thing about the aliens writing a sentence from both ends at the same time. There’s a lot of time left from that point on, and not a lot actually happening if you are fairly sure what’s going on.

Saw the movie today. Its a strangely paced and presented film. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I credit the audio for elevating the experience. Not just the music (I’m a fan of both Richter and Johansonn), but sound effects, filtering, and mixing. I can’t think of a movie I’ve enjoyed just the listening experience of as much as this one.

I watched this tonight and I did not like it. Or, rather, I did not like the ending. I enjoyed the movie for most of it, but I hated the ending. At some point past half-way I realized, or thought I realized, that the scenes with her daughter were from the future. But then towards the end she had a comment while hugging Hurt Locker guy along the lines of she had forgotten how good it felt to hug him or some shit like that? That confused me. Anyway. Alien language learned that allows humans to access information from the future but we still can’t cure cancer? Come on.

I saw this tonight. I really enjoyed it. I like that the premise that the movie is exploring is laid out early on: that language affects how a society perceives their world. That’s what Louise is coming in thinking, and it’s what she has to figure out. There’s so many possibilities on how that could apply in this case. And the way it ends up applying is very nicely done. Good story. I’ll have to add the novella to my wish list.

I’ve read the source story and watched the movie, and now spent a day writing in detail an analysis of both, taken together, specifically about the metaphysics. I’ve written almost 7000 words and I’m not done. And reading the thread here added more stuff I have to cover. Maybe I’ll post a link when I’m done but I doubt anyone world read that kind of obsessive analysis. I take those metaphysics very seriously.

Should I clarify that IT DOESN’T MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE?

(you can skip this following part and jump lower after the separation)

I’m not going to add spoiler tags, everything I say is a spoiler, so be warned. The movie has been out for some time, so I guess it can be discussed openly.

The problem of trying to analyze both the short story and the movie is that the result is a kind of interpolation of ideas. Stuff that has its own origin in the short story, carries over to the movie BUT without being introduced there. So it’s like elements that are coherent in one story appear in the other and create contradictions.

The short story is of course autonomous. It wasn’t written to be expanded later on. So all its intention begins and closes there, and it works to frame the problem. And one expects that the movie adds stuff and so messes what was originally an elegant construction. But not quite, because the original story has at least two significant “holes”. One on the science side, the other on the metaphysical side.

The movie, because it’s far less explicitly technical and throws more deliberate, worldly plot into it, actually sidesteps the problems of the original story. It doesn’t completely avoid them, because they are ingrained in the concept, but they are only implicit and not directly referenced. So, in a certain way the movie works BETTER, as the problem of the short story was directly in your face (if you are rigorous).

I was able to actually build a kind of speculative explanation that works for the movie. But only by introducing completely new elements to it. So it’s the very opposite of “canon”. I’m just saying the story can be massaged into something that makes sense, but only by adding lots of ungrounded speculation to it. The problem isn’t this though. The problem is that this overall hypothetical explanation, directly CONTRADICTS the original premise of the short story. So it essentially negates its most important core: the original idea that inspired the story in the first place.

That’s the overall problem: that the permutation of ideas going back and forth between short story and movie has created a fundamentally incoherent whole where individual parts make sense on their own, but CONSTANTLY CONTRADICT EACH OTHER. Some idea that makes perfect sense given a specific context, is brought together with other ideas that require different premises. Parts of the movie that have sense only if you examine the context of the original story, but that miss in that original story, and parts of the original story that do not make sense in that original story but that might work in the context of the movie.

You can’t imagine how deep I went into this mess.


Here’s a specific description of one of the problem:

The problem of the movie is that it introduces a concepts entirely absent in the original story: time travel (or at least information traveling through time). Of course when you postulate “time-as-a-solid” (determinism) it’s an obvious contradiction when you then introduce time travel: because as “Back to the Future” teaches time travel relies on the postulation that time can be changed.

Either it can be changed, or it can’t. Either time is a solid, or it’s a variable. What the movie does is presenting a paradox as if it’s meaningful. Revelatory. But it’s instead the very opposite. The problem is framed incorrectly to INDUCE error. They make a mistake and then pretend the mistake is transcendental. Nope, what you see in the movie is a dishonest “intuition pump”. A problem framed in such a way you’re induced to believe a LIE.

To prove this point we have to rely on the short story, where the “mechanics” of the alien are more explicitly detailed. The overall concept that the writer used for the story is that the universe is deterministic, time is symmetric. Time-as-a-solid. Unchanging. A bit like Rust Chole in True Detective. But the core “scientific” idea is that the aliens are “holistic” beings who experience time non-linearly. All at once. It’s not anymore a sequence. It’s a fixed whole, set in stone.

Now here the true core: in the short story human beings and aliens have radically different physics, but this is described explicitly as having two different points of view ON THE SAME SUBSTANCE. Both human beings and aliens exist is the same shared universe. The rules of this universe are IDENTICAL for both human and aliens, because the universe is one and the same. What creates the dramatic difference is that human and aliens experience it differently. But again, the substance is one, seen from different perspectives.

Okay?

The hypothesis that time is a solid is an hypothesis that EXISTS. It might be that our universe indeed operates on that premise. Our own real universe. That means the possibility that time is fixed already. We experience it sequentially, but it is fixed. The substance is fixed but we have a different way to experience it. Experience is a way to “interpret” a fixed, unchanging substance.

If time is fixed it means that what happens is fixed. Experience of it can change, but the object of that experience is always one. That’s why we are offered those kinds of aliens. Those aliens CAN’T time travel. That’s why those aliens are presented as passive entities that are bound to their patterns. They are chained to their time. They experience it as a whole, but have no power to “act”. Again because we postulated the thing we observe is the SAME thing, but seen from a different perspective.

That applies to us. Your life can theoretically be experienced in a sequential way, or “holistically” as a whole, the way it would appear to an alien. Okay? But it’s the SAME life. You can’t time travel as a human being. And you can’t time travel and change things as an alien either. Because what you observed never changed. The thesis here is that you are watching (from different perspectives), not acting. You are experiencing differently, but you cannot interact. That’s why the whole premise is that the aliens, TOO, cannot interact. They are bound to their actions.

Can you see that the fact the woman USES information from the future, altering the past opens a contradiction in the premise of the whole thing?

If we accept time travel then we accept that the rules of time as we see them can be broken. But didn’t we postulate that we are only dealing with experience of the same substance? If time travel exists then human perspective is invalidated: something impossible happened. Something that cannot be explained. We established that both alien and human perspectives HAVE to be valid, at the same time. Because, again, they are perspectives on the same unchanging thing. And if we invalidate human perspective to allow time travel then we didn’t modify perspective, we did modify substance.

This contradiction in the movie CAN actually be fixed. But only in a very fanfiction way. The idea is: the moment you embed alien consciousness (perception) with human, you obtain neither one or the other. You obtain a THIRD. So the idea wants that the woman, once she gets in touch with aliens, acquires some brand new power that is the result from the synthesis of both alien and human. A power that neither humans nor aliens had. She can time travel because she becomes a new “being”. Because human and alien perspectives exclude each other, if you put them together time “explodes out”. You breach the very fabric.

This actually happens logically, and it’s directly embedded in the short story, even if the short story had no trace whatsoever of time travel. It happens because the short story makes a glaring mistake. The mistake is then embedded in the movie, because the movie carries over the overall concept, and then SOLVED hypothetically by movie because the movie on one side breaks the premise of the book, but because the premise of the book was broken it actually FIXES IT.

I mean: the movie is broken. But since the movie took a story that was broken in the first place, the result is that the movie’s own incoherence can be used to fix the original flaw in the short story.

IT’S INSANE.

Fascinating. But you already know the answer don’t you? Here have a cookie.

The script writer looked into the future & saw that everyone liked the movie, and didn’t have problems like they had with the book, so he wrote down what he saw in the future and that’s the movie you watched.

I am not done (and what I wrote there is not even included in the 7000 words I already wrote elsewhere).

This is a typical way of thinking that baffles me. How can you accept that as a logic explanation?

This is like 1800 romanticism where you believe you have a soul mate and won’t have any other life outside of that.

The movie, and the short story states it even more strongly, works on the premise that her choice is a choice everyone would feel compelled to make too. But where’s the evidence of that? Why you blithely accepts that this choice is a plausible, acceptable one?

You would automatically assume that she cannot have children outside that option she’s given. That if that love story goes wrong she won’t have any other chance to be happy, or dating someone else ever again. That it’s either that, or nothing at all.

It’s so obviously laid in a way that induces deceit. It’s another information pump. You’re induced to believe her choice makes sense because it is embellished with endearing music and romanticism. But nope, it doesn’t make any sense.

If she refuses to change her set future then she refuses to take chances. But of course her life COULD go much better as it potentially could go worse. She can’t be sure.

Under that premise we assume no one will ever get out of bed in the morning because no one will ever take any chance. What if leaving the warmth of your bed will lead to a much more miserable day? You know what you’re leaving behind but you don’t know where you’ll end up to. So better take no chance and stay in bed.

This actually can be solved too. She sees the future and knows what she will have. If she changes that and decides to take a different path then it means she might have a different husband, different children, but she would know that the daughter she lived with will be no more. That means she might go for a new life, but only by actively killing what she intimately knows. Kill a daughter to try if fate gives you a better one. So it’s as if a sense of nostalgia applies to the future, and you’ll decide to not change anything because you’re attached to what you have and cannot simply toss it away like garbage.

This explanation works, but then it doesn’t. The premise, once again, is that time is symmetric, and that she starts to experience it that way. But that also means we have a convenient tool to think about it intuitively: she “remembers” the future the same as all of us remember the past.

So you’d just have to ask yourself: if you had the chance would you travel back in time and fix some stupid shit you made? Of course this too is a gamble. You cannot determine if by fixing that issue you actually end up in a better place. But, hey, you can try. And if time travel is a thing, then it doesn’t run on fuel. If you fuck it up you can always try again until fate offers you a good hand… (UNLIMITED POWER!!1!!)

You see? It doesn’t work. And it doesn’t work even more strongly because even if you can imagine cases where, okay, she makes the choice to not change anything, this specific case certainly can’t be used UNIVERSALLY. If she doesn’t take chances then someone else certainly WILL. The story wants that everyone feels compelled to fulfill future, that’s the premise that holds it up.

Just imagine, what if instead the chance was give to some very pool fella with a VERY miserable life full of pain. What if this poor fella didn’t have jack shit to look forward to. No beautiful, if short-lived, daughter. Nothing at all.

Do you believe he wouldn’t take chances?

This movie makes me wish they did a better job with the Dr. Manhattan storyline in Watchmen (or did a better job with Watchmen, period.)

Sounds like you need to read some Boethius hrose! Your take on this movie is similar to the concern many had about the problem of the omniscience of God; if God is all knowing than it looks like we can’t have free will, because God’s knowledge of the past and future are “fixed”. Boethius’s solution is not that God is atemporal but that past and the future are “present” to God in a special way that still allows for free will.

The tragedy of the daughter is in some ways the tragedy of life in general. Why should you have any children at all if all of them are guaranteed to die?

[quote=“Enidigm, post:112, topic:120764, full:true”]
Sounds like you need to read some Boethius hrose! Your take on this movie is similar to the concern many had about the problem of the omniscience of God; if God is all knowing than it looks like we can’t have free will, because God’s knowledge of the past and future are “fixed”. Boethius’s solution is not that God is atemporal but that past and the future are “present” to God in a special way that still allows for free will. [/quote]

Yes, I watched this movie BECAUSE I’ve studied these themes for the past few years. So it’s all a path I already explored and I get personally upset when one sets on a similar path and messes it up so much. (same as Westworld, but Westworld did it fine in the end)

But even here, “past and the future are “present” to God in a special way that still allows for free will” is still a free pass out of jail. How the hell does it look logical to you? What “special” way? You are just waving the problem away.

But because I’ve looked into this stuff I also have my own hypothesis, and it’s actually a compatibilist hypothesis. The universe is deterministic AND we have free will. (but I come from an agnostic perspective)

We do not consider every potential life the same. That’s why you make actual choices, and decide to have children with a particular person instead of a random stranger. Time travel allows for endless options. These options are not equivalent. The story in the movie assumes that all stories are equivalent and that choice is not the point. You should treasure your life story the way it is.

It’s all fake romanticism to reassure you that your life is worth living no matter what. But it’s a fraud because the process they use to show this to you is completely flawed. It’s a lie to make you feel good. The “worst” type of religion (consolatory).

Arrival, and much of sci-fi has a problem. It’s technical, it sets up a whole system that you need to buy into to “get” the movie. It’s an appeal to nerdiness.

Compare to Spielber’s movies (AI being the best of the bunch) where scifi is mostly surface dressing and the stories works at an emotional level.

Yes, keep away from philosophy and science, you nerd.

Here some convenient sentimentality to keep you Believing. Keep your head down in the mud, breathe it all in.

Emotion VS reason, here it comes:
The “emotional level” is just a logical level that you don’t understand. It’s a celebration of being in the dark.

What “feels” is a thought that doesn’t think of thinking.

I hope that’s an ironic “best”, or at least it’s being used in a “most exemplary” sense. AI’s emotional storytelling was abysmal. Especially that stupid coda. And for latterday Spielberg more generally, we could do with a little more nerdiness and a little less “fixing a broken family through crisis”. We get it, Steven.

For how neat is what I wrote, further inspection proves it wrong. Not even that hypothesis holds to explain what we see.

The aliens indeed time travel even in the original story. Their writing can only be explained through time travel and it makes sense that the movie director arrived to that conclusion and used it. He didn’t add anything.

The idea of alien writing, as is explained already in the short story and carried over without changes in the movie, comes from the gimmick that the writing, too, is non-sequential. And it is explained that they write that way because they already know how the sentence ends before they start to write it.

This is already a form of time travel equivalent to that used by the woman. The woman accesses in the past information she will only receive in the future. The aliens start writing a sign while knowing “how it ends”, how it will turn out when complete. It’s still information that “goes across”. It’s still about accessing at a different time information that sequentially isn’t there.

But because of that, I don’t have any possible explanation for alien beings that work like that. It’s just not possible not because it’s “fictional”, but because it breaks logic and there’s no way to make that idea work.

:(

Maybe it’s explained more clearly in the story, but I don’t really see how this equates to time travel, unless somehow the writing encodes information that wouldn’t be available to the writer at the time of writing. After all, most of the time even we simple humans don’t construct our sentences “sequentially”, one word at a time. We (more or less) formulate a complete thought and express it. We, at least subconsciously, know how it’s going to end before we start to write it/say it. And in many languages, syntax rules embody that. Are Germans time travelling when they write subordinate clauses with verbs at the end? Or English speakers who use recursion in a sentence?

Yeah, it’s just a metaphor.

But yes to this too: “the writing encodes information that wouldn’t be available to the writer at the time of writing”. That’s quite clear in the original story, no way I see around it.

It also seems that the story views aliens as “optimizers”. Being able to access simultaneously their whole life the outcome is directly maximum performance. It makes kind of odd the woman uses this “skill” only once. But I guess that goes with the suspension of disbelief.

…The aliens’ own timeline must be a complete mess. What the hell happens when two time travelers simultaneously face each other?

What a fucken convoluted mess.

I just found out that in the original story she travels FORWARD in time.

In the movie they simplified the scene: she cannot remember the “zero-sum game” word, then has a flashforward and she pilfers the word from it. It’s the way the movie uses to teach the public she can take back in the past information stolen from the future.

In the sort story instead she explains that she doesn’t get knowledge of the future all at once, but that it drops like blocks at random (like the visions in the movie). The “zero-sum game” scene is inverted.

She hears in the past (present time) someone saying the word. The scene is interrupted by a scene in the future. She finds herself, right that moment, simultaneously in the past and in the future. Two places and two times at once. And because there’s this momentary connection she hears in the future the word she just heard in the past.

So: information travels forward. It’s meant to deceive, since it appears as if she merely remembers a thing that she’d be able to remember normally without superpowers. But because it’s described that way, if you look deeper the scene tells you it’s not just the usual human memory. It’s a moment of actual simultaneity that transfers information across.

Sometimes things are narrative devices you know.

I finally got the see this last night.

I love that “Revenant” natural lighting. The movie was shot beautifully. The audio was excellent. Sometimes you just have to admire the craft, right?

I was satisfied with the time-travel aspects, because even though travel-travel just introduces a ton of paradoxes my inner nerd refuses to accept, the movie just quietly told me to “deal with it” and continued on its way. The flash-forward was a neat twist that, yes, was irregularly telegraphed, but I was still pleased with it.

I went in expecting a low-key, thoughtful look at first contact, and that’s what I got. Two thumbs up, would see again.