Her: you know, I got superpowers. I can see the FUTURE!
You: No shit? Okay then, let’s make an experiment, since it sounds like bullshit. You’ll tell me the next word I’ll say.
Her: Okay, let me see… The next word you’ll say is “salad”.
You: SPINACH! FUCKING SPINACH! SPIIINAAAAAAAACH!
The Liar’s Paradox is a time paradox. Evaluation of the line contradicts itself when the beginning conflicts with the end. They are two moments in time.
Visually, the meaning cycles back, a recursion. The recursion creates a circle, the alien language.
I finally saw this the other night and quite enjoyed it. Thankfully I stopped reading this thread in time to preserve the twist, which I also quite liked.
Just saw this tonight and am again reminded of how differently I perceive things as a dad compared to myself before kids. Seems like we’ve moved past spoiler tags here so…the opening bit was rough as hell and tough to watch. Can’t even imagine the pain of knowing your daughter’s going to die like that. Movies or games that explore the father-daughter dynamic in a tragic manner just really speak to me these days.
As far as the actual movie overall, my wife & I both really liked it. I’ll keep an eye on his future movies for sure.
His older movies are fantastic, too! I personally would rate Enemy and Sicario over Arrival, but mostly because I think the script for Arrival didn’t do a great job with the original story (it was competent, but stuff like the C4 mentioned above…meh).
But the Wife Acceptance Factor on both of those is likely to be pretty low, compared to Arrival.
I had no idea this movie even existed until I recently did a casual search for good movies from 2016. Top s-f movie, good high concept stuff.
The feeling as the full scope of events unfolded (starting when you first see her book and lectures, climaxing in the whispering by you know who of whatever it was into you know what’s ear) elicited a proper s-f “sense of wonder” (as one reviewer said, you can almost feel your seat tilting back as your mind reels :) ). The romance side of it was a bit unconvincing, but I think that’s just down to a lack of sexual chemistry between the leads, which can’t be helped. They did the best they could.
Good to see the movie made a healthy profit too, I think there’s always going to be commercial room for well-made high concept s-f on a modest budget with judicious use of CGI. So much better than the cliched pap that we get so often from the bigger budget s-f movies.
I’ve always thought that as the price of good CGI gradually comes down, we’re going to enter a golden age of really good s-f movies that don’t always have to cater to the lowest common denominator, but at the same time can afford to be a bit more whizz-bang than the old Wednesday Play type of thing (which treated high concept s-f properly but on painfully low budgets). As The Expanse shows, this can even be done with tv now.
Excited to see what Dennis Villeneuve is going to do with Dune (and ofc Blade Runner).
I tend to think that this was intentional. You weren’t supposed to think that Adams’ character was interested in any type of relationship because she had just lost her daughter. And Renner’s character was introduced as a little abrasive and dismissive of her specialty; for a small portion of the film I actually thought he might end up being the villain.
The romance was supposed to be a slow-growing, mutual-respect type of thing rather than the typical Hollywood hot-blooded passion affair. At least that’s how I took it.
Yeah, I get that we were supposed to be seeing a relationship in its first stages. I wasn’t expecting any bodices to be ripped, but I felt there was just like no spark there between the actors at all, no convincing emotional feeling/reason for them to get together, not even a nascent feeling.
If you’re talking about when she first meets Renner and the aliens, that’s not correct - her daughter dies in the future, and her knowledge of that doesn’t occur for a while. I think her disinterest at the start was just because she was a workaholic and because … aliens!
My dentist is a moron and spoiled a certain reveal about the origin of whatever alien presence there is in this film. Is this still worth seeing if that aspect of the movie is known going in?
I prefer going into mysteries etc blind, but that option is diminished here.
I’ve avoided reading this thread, so assume I’d be going in otherwise blind.
So he mentioned where the aliens come from? Don’t even remember that bit of info. Is that the only thing he mentioned to you? Or do you just mean he spoiled the ending of the movie?
I didn’t go in expecting a twist, so that quite caught me off guard and I enjoyed that part. Also loved the cinematography, etc. Would have liked more procedural elements - for a movie that’s supposedly about learning an alien language there’s very little of that on screen. (Granted, that would be a challenge to do in a way that’s mass-audience compelling, but I was hoping they’d try.) Still probably liked Interstellar better overall. As long as we’re comparing not super-related SF movies…
Try the short story it was based on for the procedural. I read it last week, after seeing the movie, and thought it added a lot. Although I actually think they made a good decision and changed an important detail in the movie, which in my opinion made one of Amy Adams’ decisions much more powerful (wow that’s hard to skirt around without giving anything away!).
Late to the party as usual, but what a party it is. Arrival got a lot of heart, if nothing else. Knowing her daughter will die of cancer early, would Amy Adam’s character still have her? Even though the answer seems predestined, you kind of think she would choice yes again. A thousand yes.
I think they did a reasonably good job of capturing the nuance of the short story this is based on, but the original short story is maybe one of the best short pieces of sci-fi I’ve ever read in my entire life, so … perhaps the bar is a little high.
Needless to say, I highly, HIGHLY recommend reading the original short story the movie is based on. The whole Chiang short story collection (it’s linked here in the topic from Amazon because I see it in the top links under the first post) is quite good, but this is clearly the standout.
I just watched this again, and it’s a bit like Shutter Island, in that once you know the “trick”, it’s almost a different movie, so you get two movies for the price of one.
It’s really well done actually, because the way Adams acts, the second time you see it, it’s clear that she’s having disturbing visions of a daughter she doesn’t have. But of course, because of the intro voice-over, the first time you saw it you thought they were flashbacks, and even though intellectually you understood they weren’t once you’d had the revelation, it’s only when you see the movie a second time that it becomes viscerally clear that she isn’t acting as if they’re flashbacks at all, she’s acting, really well, as if they’re disturbing visions that she doesn’t understand at all (until near the end, when she does). This subtly changes the way the film hits you, it lets you think about the philosophical implications more and it becomes more of a sense-of-wonder thing when you’re not distracted by the vertigo-inducing twist.
