[Film] Arrival

[Falcon_of_the_Sun]

Saw it today. What I feared would be 70% Independence Day and 30% Contact turned out to be some 20% ID, 50% Contact, 10% 12 Monkeys and 20% something else. So, yeah.

I'd be interested in hearing other people's comments.

To me, the one thing to be aware is that

SPOILER: Show

1) the side-effect of knowing the circular written language is a degree of foresight of the future and "ESP intuition" (i.e. it's not time travel as some seem to think)
2) this foresight is incomplete and cannot be triggered at will, it just comes at you like an emotion or an intuition (proof: main character's fragmented and step-by-step understanding of how to stop humans from attacking the ships)
3) because of #2, there is an incentive in giving the gift to as many people as possible (hence the hectapods teaching it to humans and trying to lead humans to use it together and share their initial understandings of it)

[Defectron]

So is it good? I might check it out later.

[Falcon_of_the_Sun]

I definitely did like it. My bias would be that there were many winks at my very favourite sci-fi movies, Amy Adams was in it and it does involve linguistics to a good extent.

It's not one of those technically perfect movies in which all questions are answered. It's still a quite emotional movie about a person and about some elements of human condition, which to me is a good thing because I have grown to dislike sci-fi stories which are about saving the world/universe.

Judging from IMDb many people are missing the correct understanding of the "technical aspect" of the movie, thus are seeing a lot of illogicities.

[movieartman]

Here is the short story it is based on "story of your life" which is very much recommendation worthy.
Only 32 pages.
https://libraryqtlpitkix.onion.link/lib ... 20Life.pdf
However I haven't seen the film so I don't know if it would be better not knowing how events will transpire as the implication I am getting is that the film is very faithful.

Here is a extremely glowing review for the film saying its best picture nom worthy and it doesn't sound like they knew of the story.
http://oneofus.net/2016/11/highly-suspe ... s-arrival/

[Falcon_of_the_Sun]

Thanks, I want to read the book, I'll try to buy it.

Those who have read the book claim it's a bit more complete than the movie.

[Falcon_of_the_Sun]

Thanks for the tip about the short story, I've read it.

It is somehow different from the movie. Without spoiling it, it's basically a little essay about the implications of a wildly different approach to the perception of reality due to a different approach to linguistics and consequently physics.

Although the movie has its flaws in that it does throw a few bones to the average, mediocre viewer, sticking to the book too much would have been a severe underutilisation of movie as a media, as the book, with its essayesque nature, is very uneventful (think of William Gibson's Hinterlands or Borges' Library of Babel, the latter being actualyl mentioned in the book), but still very interesting and original.