movie: Arrival

This might be cerebral enough even for Noco.

The First Reviews of Arrival Are In and They're Out of This World (Rimshot)

Looks promising -- although the aliens could apparently use a lesson in parallel parking.

Okay, I'm officially intrigued.

Friday matinee.

Check that: Sunday matinee. Seahawks game, theater will be empty.

This is a movie I will probably see, but I am concerned about the "time travel" bit. I can't think of a movie that dealt with time travel, other than H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, that I cared for at all. Time travel shifts the story from science fiction to science fantasy, a genre I have always found disappointing.

You should RUN, not walk, to see it. It was -- no shit -- one of the most interesting movies I've ever seen.

Don't let the "time travel" aspect scare you off. I can't tell you why not without spoiling a central plot point, but suffice it to say, it's a new take on time travel that I've never seen before. It is VERY original, very thought provoking, and in the final analysis very emotionally involving.

The movie's not a special effects extravaganza. A lot of the scenes are people's reactions to what they're seeing -- the director lets the audience imagine the rest. The effects there are, are really well done but aren't flashy or wow-inducing. There's a lot of cerebral content, and the director lets his audience fill in the gaps.

It's not geared at 5-year olds.

I would pay to see it again.

Watching it again on Comcast PPV.  My opinion has not diminished.

In fact, it is exponentially stronger. I have ordered the Blu-ray Disc from Amazon.

Blu-ray arrived today, and the first thing I watched was all the extras. Fascinating.

I did not realize Arrival's director Denis Villeneuve is the guy doing the new Blade Runner movie. The composer Johann Johannson is also doing the music for Blade Runner.

Villeneuve has done several movies previous, none of which I know anything about. I guess I will have to investigate the man's oeuvre. He's an artist I feel I need to know.

A quick reading of Villaneuve's previous films on Wikipedia reminds me of Iñarritu, the director who did the stunning Birdman.  I bought four or five of his previous movies only to discover they're all dark, violent, scary, unpleasant things.  Maybe they're well done, I suppose, but I did not enjoy watching them and won't ever want to play them again.  I sold most of them and the rest are still up for sale on Amazon.

Villaneuve's previous movies sound like that too.  I won't make that mistake again.

With the pending release of Blade Runner 2049 (direction by Denis Villaneuve, music by Johann Johannsson) I re-watched Arrival (direction by Denis Villanueva, music by Johann Johannsson) for the 4th time.  I swear, every time I see that movie it just gets more and more powerful.  Knowing a little bit about the plotline beforehand, the delicate prelude before the movie really starts just gains enormous emotion -- it had me standing in the living room weeping.

Gawd what a great movie.  Most movies aim to tell a story.  A very few go beyond that to teach a life lesson.

I picked out a couple of editing choices I would've made differently, but nothing major.  It's a flat-out masterpiece.

Downloaded the soundtrack album this weekend and burned a CD-R. The music isn't as incredibly great as the rest of the movie, but it is very, very good.

And sounds fabulous on my stereo. Lots of ultra-low bass.

I had a friend over yesterday, first post-pandemic social, somebody I used to work with 20 years ago and has remained a friend.

It was good to just sit a chat for three hours.

We talked about music and books and movies and work and mutual acquaintances and the deaths of our parents and the chore of settling estates.  We've gone through a lot of the same shit.

One CD i wanted to play for him, to show off my new subwoofer, was the soundtrack to "Arrival."  I was surprised to hear he hadn't seen the movie.  As I started to describe it to him, I choked up, just thinking about it.  I made him take my Blu-ray home to watch 3 or 4 times so he could understand my reaction.

It takes that many viewings to catch all the subtle clues dropped along the way.  Because the evolution of the story is non-linear, it takes that long to understand each scene in context, and why the editing placed them where they are.  It takes that long for the full emotional depth of the story to emerge.

And as it does, it gains power.  The movie makes me weep uncontrollably, and it gets more powerful every time I see it.

One of -- if not THE -- best movie ever.

NoCoPilot wrote:

 The movie makes me weep uncontrollably, and it gets more powerful every time I see it.

That's terrific, NoCo.  I was seriously considering watching.  But since there's already so much mud and blood and gore in my life, not to mention the heartache and buckets of tears...and emotion...and drama, (and that's just my clients), I'm going to think twice about this.

Maybe if I just watch it small doses.

I wouldn't be afraid of it, if I were you. There's no violence, no blood, no gore, no glorification of war.

It is, if anything, a glorification of the need to work together to solve world problems, and an appreciation for people who "think differently." The aliens are entirely beneficent, although it takes Amy Adams 3/4 of the movie to convince everyone of this.

The movie has a very positive, life-affirming message. My tears were tears of joy, tears of pride in the human race, tears of amazement at the incredible strength and munificence of Adams' character Dr. Louise Banks.

Just watched it.

And you're right.
It was wonderful.

Going out on a limb here, but I can't stop myself.

I think, (and especially if you're still dreaming in your detailed lucid way), you have every reason to be moved by this particular movie.

I will say no more.

Did you, how shall I put this, APPRECIATE the prelude, the scenes of her playing with her daughter?

You mean the daughter she'd yet to have?

Yes.

Yes. The daughter she had, knowing the future, and what the future would hold.

Plus the whole part where she calls the Defense Minister of China, not knowing what she would say, until he reminded her, from the future, of what she did say. Just astonishing editing how that whole scene was pasted together.

Hard to believe the asshole would leave her.

She knew his part (after conception), was inconsequential.
Good call.

But what about everything else?

What can you hope for?

Or do you only know the future for certain things?

And why that?

SPOILER ALERTS

Okay, Louise could see the future but Ian could not.  During the time of contact with Abbott and Costello, Louise learned that Ian would fall in love with her.

She found out that they'd have a daughter together.

And she discovered that their daughter would die as a teen of a rare incurable cancer.

Here's where the plot begins to get mind-altering.  Even though Louise knew all this, she could not tell Ian or her daughter Hannah about what was going to happen.  She knew Ian would disagree with her decision to go ahead with getting pregnant, and she knew that such knowledge would have destroyed Hannah's ability to enjoy her 16 years on earth.  But it was sixteen good years, years of joy and discovery, and on balance she knew she'd rather give sixteen good years to Hannah than none at all.  That whole prologue, when she's playing with Hannah in a carefree, loving-mother way, she knows her daughter will tragically die young.  She knows those moments will be terribly precious, precious precisely because there will be so few of them.  Yet she moves forward, marrying Ian, getting pregnant, having Hannah because those experiences are too precious to not have.

I don't think Ian, for his part, is "an asshole."  He loves his daughter (and Louise) unreservedly.  But when Louise tells him, while Hannah's just a toddler, what is to become of her, he's unable to bear the oncoming pain and leaves the family, telling Louise he would have chosen not to have her.  Avoidance of pain doesn't make him an asshole... although to deny Hannah -- who doesn't even exist yet --  her 16 good years does seem kind of selfish.  But then, men always have been more selfish than women, it's in our biology.   Louise is unbelievably strong and unselfish, giving those sixteen years to Hannah, giving motherly comfort and unconditional love and joy to her -- knowing all the while how it will end, and there's nothing she can do about it, and she can't even tell Hannah. Ian is also, somewhat justifiably, pissed that Louise didn't give him a voice in the decision whether or not to have a child who will die young. But she knew he'd say no.

There's a very short shot of Louise in the hospital corridor, breaking down in tears when her daughter passes away.  It was not pain-free for her.

Yet she chose to do it anyway.

Dr. Louise Banks had a future to attend to, a future in which she brings the nations of the world together to  decipher the alien language, writes a book about it ("Universal Language"), and prepares mankind to provide aid to Abbott and Costello's race in, what was it, 3,000 years?  Anyway, her future is important to mankind.  She has a role to play.

And Ian and Hannah are part of the journey. They make her compassionate enough, determined enough, to share Abbott and Costello's language with the world.  Hopefully eventually (within 3,000 years) other people will internalize the language, and through the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, begin to think like Abbott and Costello, where the whole future timeline is visible at once.  They will use this knowledge to shape the present, aligning it with a better future in which mankind will be able save Abbott and Costello's race.

Jesus, this took a lot of time & tears for me to write.  Incidentally, Ted Chiang's original short story on which the movie is based ("The Story of Your Life") is equally powerful, though the reader has much more to infer.

Lisa wrote:

Or do you only know the future for certain things?

And why that?

Been thinking about this, and it seems likely (logically and for the story) that once your thinking is altered by the aliens' non-linear language so you can see the future, it seems logical that you'd only be able to see your own lifetime. You wouldn't be able to see the whole future of the universe -- that'd be too much.

However, Abbott and Costello talk about something that will happen 3,000 years in the future, so either they are a very long-lived species, or they have reference materials from the future, or their own consciousness extends beyond their lifetimes.

Certainly, nothing in Dr. Louise Banks' "flashbacks" (flashforwards?) extends beyond her own career.

As to how much she knows, the revelation in seeing the future isn't that she is all-seeing. She only sees what she will see in the future. It is her personal timeline that opens up to her. She doesn't learn anything about the future that she doesn't know herself in the future.

If that makes sense.

Yes, it makes perfect sense, and that's what I'm getting at.

I'm just wondering about why certain visions/memories enter her thoughts.
If we consider the possibility that the most meaningful events will find their way in, then the whole process is suspect. I say that because what we value today is not necessarily the same tomorrow...or 3000 years from now. But maybe that isn't the criteria...something being meaningful.

See, I had a problem from the start. The notion that language is THE most important thing.
Make no mistake, it's probably second. Communication and all that.
However, there ARE other ways to communicate...as we now know, the heart has a completely separate nervous system, and it sends out far more electricity than the brain, which is a fine receptor.

But rather than delving into each and every manner in which we communicate that doesn't involve language, it all came down to this, for me:

We may not always remember every single word said to us by different people, but we'll always remember exactly how they made us feel.
I think good intentions are more important.

Or will be.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is a real thing, postulates that language is central to, and determinative of, the way we think. In Ted Chiang’s original short story, the narrator raises the example of a deaf friend who dreams in sign language. Dr. Louise Banks, in the short story, wonders what a dream is like when expressed solely by movement of the hands. Or a hypothetical language with no negative terms, the dreamer could not dream something that was not part of her worldview.  Language affects how we think.  Dr. Temple Grandin, the autistic author, claims that she "thinks in pictures" rather than thinking in words or language, which is why (she claims) she is able to understand what animals are thinking.  Animals are pre-verbal too.

When Dr. Banks, in the movie and book, becomes immersed in Heptapod B, the aliens’ written language, she begins dreaming in Heptapod B. She begins thinking in Heptapod B.

And one of the features of Heptapod B is that there is no start or end, no forward direction like an English sentence. In English word order matters. “Lion eats hyena” does not mean the same thing as “Hyena eats lion.”

In Heptapod B there is no word order because the semagrams they write, the circles with all the squiggles, are a complete thought all in one graphic. They cannot be misinterpreted due to something as vague as word order.

Because of this, Louise found herself dreaming in complete sentences, thinking complex thoughts where all permutations of the thought were worked out and fitted together before they ever formed. There was no “development” of a thought, but rather they arrived in her mind fully formed.  As she progressed, she found that her thinking became clearer, she became able to see all of the arguments and counter-arguments of a debate at the same time, and write semagrams that incorporated not only present debate but also future arguments.  Her thinking became less linear, less time-dependent, and more something that is universal.  In short, she could anticipate all sides of an argument and address them all in a single statement that covered all the bases.  No vagaries.

Her thinking in Heptapod B became anticipatory, instead of simply reactive.  Her thoughts anticipated where a discussion was headed.  She began seeing a whole argument, or discussion, or story as one unified gestalt, not an unfolding piece-by-piece construction as in a linear language like English, but as a complete, self-contained thought that contained not only itself but also its context and ramifications and corollaries.  

About this time, she begins having flashbacks where she sees events in her life -- but they haven't happened yet.  Eventually she realizes she is seeing the future.  Her immersion in the non-linear time basis of Heptapod B is allowing her to "see" her future memories, so her whole life, her whole timeline becomes something she has access to.  Here's a relevant quote from the book:

Quote :

Freedom [of choice] isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness.  Similarly, knowledge of the future [is] incompatible with free will.  What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future.  Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future.

Before I learned how to think in Heptapod B, my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesmal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.  After I learned Heptapod B, new memories fell into place like gigantic blocks, each one measuring years in duration, and though they didn't arrive in order or land contiguously, they soon composed a period of five decades, [from] when I know Heptapod B well enough to think in it and ending with my death.  Usually, Heptapod B affects just my memory; my consciousness crawls along just as it did before, a glowing sliver crawling forward in time, the difference being that the ash of memory lies ahead as well as behind; there is no real combustion.  

But occasionally I have glimpses when Heptapod B truly reigns, and I experience the past and the future all at once; my consciousness becomes a half-century long ember burning outside time.

So to return to your question: Louise is able to occasionally glimpse her whole life, as if it were a piece of film she was holding.  The important parts -- where she deciphers Heptapod B, where she uses Heptapod B to change the course of human history, the parts of life where she is sharing joy with her as-yet unborn daughter, these are the highlights she keeps returning to.  These are the memories that are important, these are the events she "remembers" so she can align her present to make sure the future unfolds as she has foreseen it.  As it says in another part of the book, now that Louise has seen the future she could no more act in a way contrary to creating that future than she could act in a way that would change her past.