I hated Arrival. There must be something wrong with me. Help!

I have an explanation for the popularity of X Men Days of Future Past:


*ahem*


Michael Fassbender.

I don't like that guy at all.

A minute's silence for our brother here....he's going to be tortured for years by Fassbender-loving fiends like me.

LOL. Fassbender seems to have strong fanbase. I really liked him in Eden Lake. He was very annoying.

Oh I LOVE him! Can't help it, Hunger did it!

I think he's a good actor but some people seem to get hung up on...you know...his best friend. I had no idea about that until I consulted Dr Google. Ehhh, I want to see someone act, not fly free.

I never saw a Fassbender film that I enjoyed!
Shame was the worst film of 2011, The Counselor and Prometheus are the worst Ridley films in years (just my opinion) etc. I never saw Eden Lake but all the others I hated.

Well. I had no idea...thanks for telling me, but tbh I don't like actors for member size. It's quite literally the last thing I care about.

I havent seen Shame but Prometheus was terrible IMO. I dont even remember him in it. Eden Lake is worth a look if you like that genre. I found his acting very natural but the character is a tool. He did a really good job.

I found it merely Ok...nothing special.
However, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd see this movie before.
It reminded me of a movie I saw years ago...maybe a TV show.
I think it was set in England or Scotland.
Almost identical plot without the time-whimey thing.

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The older I get, the more I understand Michael Douglas' character in "Falling Down"

I was extremely disappointed in the film as I loved both Sicario and Blade Runner 2049. Arrival is on Amazon now, and some of my thoughts about the film:

1. I love the premise and idea of focusing on the language aspect of alien arrivals. Maybe it's the best thing since "klaatu barada nikto."
2. Unfortunately like that referenced classic we still have the cliche' of the overly aggressive military with a timed countdown to talk and then we'll shoot thing was lazy writing. The whole, well China and Russia are doing it, so we'll join in felt silly.
3. I thought exactly what the original poster wrote about the Chinese general phone conversation being a deus ex machina. It was, and to expand on that, the reason it was done in Chinese and obscured conversation is likely so that most of the audience will be left guessing what was said. Hey, lets just make a conversation that saves the world indecipherable, so we don't actually have to write anything.
4. The music was far too leading and pretentious chiming in at the exact moment, TELLING and GUIDING the audience, how to feel, instead of complimenting and reinforcing what we felt from the storyline and writing.
5. I disagree with the premise about having a fate, seeing into the future, etc. Yeah I get it, time is nonlinear, but this whole speak to yourself in the past from the future thing isn't as blind blowingly "pat on the back" brilliant as what the people who wrote this film imply through reading between the lines. Bill and Ted did this two decades ago. I also disagree with the premise that the future is written. "Nothing is written."
6. The film was beautiful and well shot and for the most part well paced and directed, but Denis Villeneuve seemed to be channeling Chris Nolan pretentiousness with some of the closeup shots and "future memory" scenes.
7. Instead of going for sentimentality in this film, they should have gone for a tone of more cold and matter of fact pure sci-fi. Sorry, there's only one Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderberg did channel him well.


This is too bad. I thought I was going to love this film, but was very disappointed; the tone just didn't jive with me and the writing and audience manipulation wore itself on its sleeve just like a Nolan film. Anyways...

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I love Fassbender, but then again, I've only seen Slow West, Fish Tank, Inglorious Basterds, and Macbeth. The newish Macbeth film is amazing and rivals Polanski's version, which is something I'd never thought I'd live to write. Fassbender and Marion Cotillard are perfect as the couple.

Both of these statements are true.

You like Rainer Werner Fassbinder too? This place keeps getting better and better!

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Still kicking and it hurts.

I liked Arrival, it was no Solaris ('72) but it took a great unexpected plot unveiling that I actually didn't see coming (the chronology thing). The commentary on language and communication in the film was great (which reminds me of Terence Mckenna's words on the subject) and not an angle you really see in many mainstream movies. I also liked that there wasn't actually an alien invasion for once!

I too felt that the movie was overhyped at least on a first viewing.

SPOILERS

For one thing, it was really far fetched to believe that this woman, or anybody for that matter, could decipher this completely foreign language. And the movie skips ahead over several steps as to how she would go about it, probably because not even the writers could explain how she did it, since they wrote themselves into a corner with it, it feels like, and had to skip over a lot of it.

Also I didn't like how in the end, the only explanation we got as to why the aliens were on Earth is that in the future, they are needed to help mankind. That is such a lazy explanation. It feels like such an in the nutshell explanation to an extremely out of the nutshell scenario, and you can't always just try to wrap things up as quick and cleanly like that.

But maybe I would see better qualities in it, on a second viewing down the road.

That's conservation of detail for you - they quite simply don't need to show the whole thing because it doesn't matter that much to the story at large. They just give you an idea of how the process will generally work, show it in enough detail so the audience grasps how it works in practice, and then trust the audience to accept that it ultimately works so it can move on to other concerns such as the various human-based conflicts and the introduction of the time elements that make up a bigger conflict. Explaining and depicting the whole process step-by-step would take too long and also wouldn't add much of worth to the film in the process.

Also, I thought it was the other way around and that the aliens showed up because they knew that they would need the humans' help at some point in the future, hence it was in their own interest to teach humans their language and future-reading abilities.

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Hahaha, we weren't talking about him, but I do like his movies too.

@iluv2viddyfilms
@ironpony

Totally agree with both of your post. Every point you made is something I had though of as well.

This is what I wrote about it.

Yes, I loved the premise of an alien race that views time differently, I just hated what they did with that in connecting it to a character whose future is pre-written and all the sentimentality stuff about the daughter, husband leaving, etc.