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

Not sure what constitutes a spoiler here anymore. I enjoyed the movie, but also had these thoughts.

The gimmick of the movie is that it’s basically an unreliable narrator story. This can be particularly effective in a movie because the movie creates the illusion that you’re getting the objective truth rather than one character’s viewpoint. So you don’t have any reason to doubt what you’re being shown. In this way it’s similar to Memento. I’m curious about how this worked in the book, not having read it.

It is handled differently in the book; if you found the movie interesting I definitely recommend the whole collection of short stories that story is from. It’s excellent.

https://www.amazon.com/Stories-Your-Life-Others-Chiang/dp/1101972122

Watched this today and what a brilliant thing. Soooo good, particularly for fans of philosophy and linguistics (and intelligent, good drama) like myself.

Disappointing that for every quality SF movie like Arrival we get like a dozen loud and mindless CGI films these days.

I hate that comic book based films have taken over what used to be a genre filled with at least some science fiction. Because they don’t have their own genre, they have taken a large part of what was loosely fantasy and science fiction movie productions from the various studios.

Sorry to spin this into a “get off my lawn” moment, but I’m getting tired of the comic movie bombardment.

I don’t think there are any fewer SF and, particularly, fantasy films being made than there used to be. There are just also a lot of comic book movies and they’re way popular.

I agree. They seem to have replaced mostly schlock like Armageddon and Wild Wild West and other mindless summer fare.

Well, let’s put it this way. The budgets for comic book movies have to come from pockets that might have put in for a different movie type. What would those have been is my point.

I’m probably completely wrong, but as mentioned, I’m having an old man, “get off my lawn,” moment regarding way too many comic book movies.

Well, I seem to remember a lot more high profile or more expensive dramas / thrillers / courtroom type films?

Yeah, I’ve been tired of comic book movies for a long time now. Feel tired of Star Wars too.

I’m not a big comic book movie guy, but even so I’d take the MCU over the Grishamverse and its imitators any day of the week.

Yeah I’m with you there regarding reasons for not visiting the cinema (though my recent viewing of A Quiet Place was an exception - different cinema that suffered from none of the usual problems and the audience were perfectly quiet, remarkably and thankfully).

My problem with comic book movies is that I find they suck the oxygen out of the room. If I’m around family, friends or colleagues and mention movies the conversation seems to quickly turn to the latest comic book film then to all the previous entries. And people get so excited about the next instalments too! That’s the nature of pop stuff I know, but I just find it tiring. Not to mention, cinemas clear out most screens to make room for the latest comic blockbuster because they rake in the money (for example, our local cinema with around 10 screens will only be showing the new Avengers when it releases so… bye-bye everything else). I dunno. I feel like they hog a lot of mind share given how banal I think most of them are!

Yeah that sounds much better to me! :) I had a delicious pint of pale ale while watching A Quiet Place (never had beer at a cinema before) and while it was very pleasant, needing the toilet mid pic wasn’t! Where’s the pause button?

That seems crazy to me. I’ve never had a cinema devote more than maybe five screens to the biggest tentpole movie, and that’s usually a 16-20plex.

That’s what I thought too. Perhaps it’s not every screen but it was a friend of mine who informed me and she’s a manager there. I wouldn’t put it past Cineworld to be honest.

Just saw this on Amazon. Liked it a lot as thoughtful and thought - provoking SF, but I do wish it hadn’t been shot quite so… gloomy. The desired atmosphere probably could have been achieved differently, IMHO.

I kind of feel like that’s become something of a trope for sci-fi. If we look at things like the Alien franchise as an example, part of the suspense and build-up was the dark and gloomy atmosphere.

Aliens denote an unknown, and therefore keeping it gloomy and dark prevents the critique of meeting the antagonists (or plot-version thereof) too early and with more critique from viewers. Like a page from the horror movie playbook: gloomy, blurry, not fully in shot, only heard, etc are used to extend the build-up.

I could expand this by contrasting it with say, Contact. Where the aliens are a known or physical thing, but see us by way of using our own memories, fully in focus and within the beauty and scenery of the resulting travel and story. It was a different movie, made to provoke different feelings.

Yeah, I’m just not sure that the whole movie needed to be that way. IMHO it was a bit lazy, and the desired effect could have been done better and been more effective if they changed it up a bit. Maybe using the gloom in less of the sequences to accentuate it.

Anyways, it bugged me that it was a staple.

I agree completely.

It’s a character piece and extremely subjective -the whole movie it’s a memory, or something like it (past and present become blurred once she learns the language, but before learning it her experience was linear, thus she’s remembering her linear past from a non linear present)-. Nothing like Contact at all in terms of narrative. The psychological state of the POV character makes the gloomy photography a choice I really liked.