AI. I found it hollow and depressing.
Arrival
Selfish sack of shit sees into the future, where her and that Marvel dude have a kid, only for her (the kid) to die slowly of cancer. “BuT i HaVe ThE mEmOrIeS!¡”, and you tortured an innocent child who didn’t have to exist because YOU FUCKING KNEW SHE WAS GOING TO DIE OF CANCER, YOU BITCH!
I thought the point was the inevitability of it all. She could see it, but couldn’t change a thing. At least that’s how I perceived it at the time. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.
There was a line towards the end: D: “Why did Dad leave?” M: “He said I ‘made the wrong choice’”
My interpretation was that she could have prevented it, but chose not to.
So I’ve read the short story it’s based on several times (The Story of your Life by Ted Chiang) and it’s more explicit about how it works. It’s only possible to comprehend Heptapod writing if you can think like they can. Likewise learning their language also helps you think like them, which is also pretty true about real languages
Heptapods do not have a linear observation of time. They observe their entire life simultaneously. However that doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in free will or choice. They come to Earth because they know at some point in the future the humans will be important. Amy Adams’ character in learning Heptapod also learns to view time non-linearly. It’s not permanent and tends to come and go the more immersed she is in the language. That’s how she knows the secret phone number to call the Chinese general, that’s how she knows what will happen to her daughter, and her marriage. However since she knows it like a Heptapod does, she has no desire to change it. Like how Abbott doesn’t try to stop his own death
The movie uses the bootstrap paradox model of time travel: there is only one timeline, and events can’t be changed, because any attempt to change the timeline had already happened. She only was able to see her child’s future because the child was born. If she had made a different decision in the future, she would never have seen the visions in the past.
See also: Terminator 1 (not the sequels,) Predestination, 12 Monkeys, Tenet
Strongly suggest you read the “story of your life”, it’s freely available on the Internet (or check it out from your local library!)
It doesn’t add terribly much, but there is a little bit of clarity/another perspective on the mechanics of the aliens, it’s similar to certain characters from dirk gentlys holistic detective agency.
I think I got about 2 minutes into Forrest Gump before I had to turn it off. Cannot stand that fake accent Tom Hanks has in that movie. And yes, that’s a hill I will die on.
Forrest Gump is super racist revisionist history, where a low-IQ white male accidentally causes all sorts of large political and social historical events that were actually initiated by black people in real life. Plus there’s a ton of other messed up sexist/racist portrayals throughout the film. It’s a pretty awful film. And it stole the Oscar from Shawshank Redemption!
Citizen Kane is a horrible, boring movie.
It was his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I just saved you two, long, boobless hours.
I don’t think that’s a particularly new take. Lots of people find it boring, but recognize its importance because it’s the first place you ever see a ton of filmmaking techniques that are considered standard today. Welles basically invented modern filmmaking with Citizen Kane.
That’s the thing. Citizen Kane was a fantastic, groundbreaking film. So innovative that bits and pieces were copied and remixed over and over until they became trite and predictable. Now it just seems trite and predictable.
TV Tropes used to call this the Seinfeld is Unfunny effect, but has since renamed it to Once Original, Now Common.
The basic idea being that things that are groundbreaking at the time eventually become copied so much that people looking at the original don’t understand why it was such a big deal. My favorite examples are The Matrix (absolutely blew my mind in the theaters, but my kids think it’s just ok) and Golden Eye for the Nintendo 64 (I couldn’t believe how incredible it was to zoom in with a sniper rifle and see people moving on the other side of the map, but playing it today it looks laughably bad).
The Dark Knight
