Also a nod to the incredible music by Johan Johannsson who creates the essence of the awesome otherworldliness and builds amazing tension, but so carefully without fear or dread.
Yes!!! I loved that aspect of the film so much, it felt like such a refreshing perspective to have on first contact in sci fi! I really wish it hadn’t had such a heavy focus on just the USA tho :/
"Arrival" ---- Great movie!!! All of it from beginning to end was well done. Amy Adams was fantastic as was Jeremy Renner.
More movies about languages would be good as they are rare.
note: this is not the movie "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen.
I consider the original Stargate movie a little bit of that.
I was really into ancient Egyptian language things when I was younger and still remember some of the discourse and that first bit of the movie feels like a love letter to the community 😊❤
I was rewatching Shutter Island and recognized "On The Nature Of Daylight" immediately, which led to dealing with a fresh wave of emotion from being thrust into the depths of Arrival again
"Arrival" ---- Great movie!!! All of it from beginning to end was well done. Amy Adams was fantastic as was Jeremy Renner.
More movies about languages would be good as they are rare.
note: this is not the movie "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen.
I agree but I hate the ending of that movie so much, the aliens seem to know everything but don't communicate to her what disease her kid is gonna have and how to cure it? Seems pretty cruel
It's kinda the whole point of the movie - if you knew the outcome, would you change anything? Knowing that she would have a kid that died, would she deny herself the love of that child to spare herself the pain at the end.
Yeah, Kirsten, The Arrival is a great science fiction movie. I really liked the ink spots, they were so hot and also the giant hippopotamuses. Early on the movie is pretty good, especially late early. The end is too mystical and sympathetic. What do you think?
Right? It’s so clever and any bi-tri-etc.-lingual person will tell you that learning a new concept or ‘thing that exists’ when you learn a new language is 💯 valid.
Thankfully Jeremy Renner didn’t get frustrated by the process of trying to bridge the language gap by shooting arrows at the aliens.
Would’ve taken me completely out of the film.
"Story of Your Life", the novella that inspired the movie, will slay you, if you've not already read it. It's by Ted Chiang. A bit different to the movie, but both are really beautiful.
I enjoyed this story, but felt that one of the changes made for the movie really made the big reveal more emotionally impactful. Also really enjoyed the way that the song that bookends the story allows you to sort of experience what the protagonist goes through on a rewatch. My favorite film by far.
Same! He doesn't publish tons, but he never misses.
In Peter Watts' review, he said (edited):
"We writers of short SF utter a prayer whenever one of our stories is about to appear: 'Please, Lord, if it be Thy will, don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year.'"
(Because he'll sweep the awards.)
That's the one where angels are kind of like the Avengers, inadvertently destroying stuff and killing and maiming a bunch of people when they visit, isn't it? It was a tad dark, if I'm remembering correctly. And no, I'm not a professional critic, hard as that may be to believe. 😸
Yes, that's the one! It is dark... I really hate the story of Job, but I found his version of a vengeful, mean and nonsensical god very interesting. Sometimes I like stuff that's a little twisted 😅
Hey, if you're into linguistics and sci-fi, check out Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin (book). The feminism is a bit dated, but it's what Handmaid's Tale would have been if it had linguistics and aliens...
This is a little tangential, but if you're into linguistics, did you play Chants of Senaar? It's a puzzle solving game all about trying to figure out what people are actually saying, it's pretty fun if you're into that sort of thing
The Cell, Frequency, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Inception, Interstellar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Gravity, Minority Report, A Quiet Place, 10 Cloverfield Lane, I Am Legend, Cloverfield
One thing I like with that film is it's v different when you watch it the second time as your perception of time has changed, neatly mirroring what happens to the main character
I was going to bring up the same point! Another similarity we share with Louise is that we also willingly chose to do it (in our case, rewatch the movie) even knowing the pain doing so brings
Arrival hit us where it hurt. Our son died a year or so before the movie came out. It is a powerful film and I would watch again except for our association with it.
I agree but mostly for the science and sci-fi parts. Watching her learn the language was really fun idk if I would have enjoyed it so much w/o the aliens
That movie made me think about the Babylon Tower story from the Bible (I know I know… trust me, I wont get preachy). God changed languages and wars started. Here (Arrival) aliens learn how we communicate from different cultures… and we almost get war. It’s Hollywood, so it needs its happy ending.
Well to be fair it’s about linguistics and physics. The linguistic breakthrough comes as a result of accepting the fringe idea that a beam of light when refracted in water has a pre-calculated destination as time isn’t linear. Not a physicist, had a mathematician explain it to me :)
Hannah is much more than an emotional driver for Louise. Her palindromic name adds a layer of explanation, and her existence compactly communicates much about the Louise/Ian relationship and their different reactions to (fore)knowledge.
Perhaps not, but I wouldn't minimize the complexity or effectiveness of the Hannah and Louise characters in this film, nor describe their relationship as merely mother-daughter.
I get that. I think of her child more as the personification of her knowledge that life is bittersweet. She knows all the joy and sorrow that will come, and she chooses that path anyway. Illustrating that with a kid (rather than, say, her career) has a lot more emotional heft for me.
A kid isn’t the only option for emotional heft when we write men, but it’s the default when we write women. Arrival and Gravity both had the opportunity to show strong, intelligent, successful women without a maternal story arc, and yet…
Honestly my only gripe with the movie is that the linguistic deciphering bit takes up so little of the runtime, I wanted to see them decode the swirlie whirlies (technical name btw) for longer
I get it, but that would have required a tremendous amount of work (the alien language doesn't exist/is not in the short story) and probably couldn't have convinced you. At the level presented, it's compelling, at least to this lay person.
Agreed, making it cinematically convincing would have been very tricky… I could see it in a limited series tho, with 2-3 episodes dedicated to deciphering the blots, but only weird people like us would watch that lol
Better would have been to say that the heptapod language(s) don't fully exist, in the way that Klingon exists. I didn't mean to slight the tremendous amount of work and thought that went into producing such a compelling movie.
That's completely fair, I included the last bit just because of that - I don't know how much of a language it is, since the Wikipedia article only mentions general characteristics and structure
They did make two languages for the movie actually, one spoken and one written. I don't know how far they developed them, so maybe it would've still been impossible, but still.
Arrival is the only movie I've ever seen multiple times in theater, by myself. Amy Adams... wow. Ted Chiang. I'm gonna make my daughter the Lit Major watch it at home with me and see if it works for her too.
This is without a doubt one of my favorite movies because of the message that communication can lead to cooperations and reciprocation. It’s an extremely important message told very well visually through the film.
Comments
Ha. I just posted this. Curious if you ever saw it?
https://bsky.app/profile/strangebrickdroog.bsky.social/post/3lccvwpltys25
But, yes to the sentiment!
More movies about languages would be good as they are rare.
note: this is not the movie "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen.
I was really into ancient Egyptian language things when I was younger and still remember some of the discourse and that first bit of the movie feels like a love letter to the community 😊❤
Oh my, it's almost Canadian radio station movie o'clock.
So very different.
Watch it again and it's a whole different movie.
One of my favorites but an absolute tear jerker.
You know what surprised me the most? It wasn't meeting them. It was meeting you."
😭😭
(It's on in the background here at the moment.)
More movies about languages would be good as they are rare.
note: this is not the movie "The Arrival" with Charlie Sheen.
Linguistics as the crux of first contact.
Broke my brain on every page.
And she knows the fate of the kid - she remembers the future where she's dead.
If she asked the aliens for help, they'd say the explosion won't happen & the kid will die. Rebelling is impossible.
I'll admit I only read the book for The Great Passage but it's about a group of people trying to write a new dictionary so I think you'd like it
Would’ve taken me completely out of the film.
Worth watching indeed?
In Peter Watts' review, he said (edited):
"We writers of short SF utter a prayer whenever one of our stories is about to appear: 'Please, Lord, if it be Thy will, don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year.'"
(Because he'll sweep the awards.)
https://sevencircumstances.com/2014/01/25/embassytown-by-china-mieville/
(It's not the Freaky Friday-esque com that trailers/blurbs seem to suggest it is)
The question is why is there a kid at all? Why can’t she just be a badass linguist?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heptapod_languages
I wish we had more media that tackled that subject too - there’s a video game I enjoyed called;
Heavens vault.
Basically has you going around the world translating symbols into a language. Pretty unique.
Sublime film
1. People wouldn't riot like that from the aliens just sitting there.
2. We all know the u.s. and Russia would be the ones trying to attack the ships.
Still love the movie tho!