I was expecting a generic alien invasion movie, and I was pleasantly surprised
Yeah, genuinely one of my favourite original sci-fi movies I’ve watched in the last decade. I did a linguistics course in high school so just really loved that side of it. It also really felt like they did a great job building the tension and making it feel like there were high stakes to her work.
It’s not original, though it expands on Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”.
I suppose you are going to tell everyone that Dune was based on a book the next time someone compliments the pacing and direction of that movie?
The poster art for Arrival says it’s based on a story by Ted Chiang, it isn’t some secret nobody knows but you.
What does being original or not have anything to do with what the original commenter wrote? MOST movies are based on previously existing stories. They were focusing on the movie. If you read the book and want to show everyone how much more you know than they do, it would be more impressive if you had said “i read the story the movie was based on, and comparatively, <your opinion here>”. It might have even made for an interesting and productive comment.
Usually when the word “original” is used in the context of media, it means it’s a new idea/concept/story, in opposition to an “'adaptation” from another media (like a movie to a videogame, or a book to a movie). This movie is an adaptation.
I’m not criticizing your opinion, as I really like the movie too (including pacing and direction). Only the terminology.
genuinely one of my favourite original sci-fi movies I’ve watched in the last decade
🙄
Then I guess NO movie can be called original, because at a minimum they begin with a written screenplay, so that screenplay is the ORIGINAL work in pedanticland.
And here I thought the grammar police were bad.
A screenplay is part of (the process of making) a film. It’s not an independent work.
spoiler
I didn’t care for it at all, I felt the memory as time travel thing to be weaksacue, and I felt ripped off at the end of watching it, plus I don’t like her very much at all
Spoiler
Of course its totally fine to not like a movie, but I wanted to clarify the memory as time travel thing.
I can’t remember where I first heard this, it wasn’t this movie, but suppose humans are oddly fixated on the flow of time. To us the flow of time is immutable we exist in the present and remember the past. What if other races could “remember” things that haven’t happened yet as easily as we remember things from the past.
The movie kinda proposes that learning human languages traps us into this linear / temporal mode of thinking. As in, as children we learn to parse things start to finish and that’s it… we just never do it the other way future to now.
Turns out I’ve done a shit job at explaining this.
As I said, it’s fine to hate the movie. I just thought I’d try to explain this part because I felt like I understood it, although I’m not sure anymore.
I get into Sci Fi, time travel and obscure concepts, and I have to agree with you mainly. It ended and I kinda felt like, “yeah OK”. Another person here has said that it should be watched again. Like what, did I miss something ? Anyway, it’s entertainment and each to their own. Maybe I should watch it again one day, but it will be a while.
It depends. What were you expecting and what was your takeaway after watching? Because to me, it didn’t have anything to do with the time travel or scifi aspects at all.
The main point of the film is summed up with the line “If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?”. It was about free will and the main character’s decision to let things play out knowing her daughter will die at an early age, because if she didn’t have her, she wouldn’t have experienced the life she had with her daughter at all. It’s a philosophical story wrapped in a scifi film.
