Now before anyone says if you want entertainment go watch "Transformers"
As a person who never ventured beyond the first four minutes of the first 'Transformer' movie (I just searched for "Youtube Transformers Megan Fox"), I would never ask you to watch it
.
'Arrival' is the opposite of a 'thinking man's sci-fi' because when I think about it, I tend to agree with the 1-star reviews and when watching it, I do not feel the 'science' at all. But, none the less, I still like it.
Also I don't see what head scratching moments you referring to
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
Because (as usual
), we are talking about different kind of things. You are thinking "Things that make me think" / plot points. I am thinking "Things that are corny / makes absolutely no sense". This is a movie after all. But, if this movie was something like 'Event Horizon' or 'Sunshine' or 'Pandorum', I would not have bothered with this. However, if 'Contact' could do very well with Science, why didn't a supposedly 'Intelligent' movie didn't do the same?
I wished they did not bring the military into this. It was after all not in the original story.
The 'Sanskrit' word test does not have any meaning because the translation of word depends on the context in any language. Forget whether it is even the translation. Just a little later, Louise goes on to explain how aliens would have to understand 'what is a question' and what different forms of 'you' mean. Where is the consistency within the internal logic of the movie?
Minor aside: Pakistan gets to teach the world how the aliens write, Chinese are the aggressors, US uncharacteristically is the 'passive' observer (except for some rogue elements), but we only get a "desire for more cows" reference. Why? In the story, 119 crafts landed. Why didn't they land one of the twelve in India?
The theoretical physicist says "Science is the cornerstone of civilization" and a linguist writing "Language is the cornerstone of civilization". But, umm... where did it ever take us? 'Contact' did not shy away from the religion vs science conflict. Why didn't they explore this a little further, especially when it is an international collaboration of experts who scratch their collective heads over how to communicate with aliens?
The end is so cheesy as well. The way the brain works, we remember traumatic and important moments in greater detail (time slows down just before an accident). If she was involved in such a life altering, planet changing event, why didn't she get a 'flash' of the event (like her book or child)? For a movie that stretches the interpretation of Sapir-Whorf a little far, couldn't they have thought of some other way?
And learning a language does rewire the brain in a way, but far, far from what is shown in the movie. See
A linguist on Arrival's alien language.. The process of learning a language does come in handy. If you have a lot of time, skim through
How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math - Issue 40: Learning - Nautilus.
*** SPOILERS OVER? *******
Anyway my point is, this is cinema, movie, entertainment, so even if a movie is highly precise and very accurately deals with core science and math (even on a fictional level (Primer is perfect example)) it still should give thrill and excitement, and keep your mind occupied and entertained.
As established over the years (TV series and movies), we have different preferences. Though we agree on some things, we could like it for different reasons (Say for 'Justified', I could say "Boyd" and you could say "Raylan"
). I agree with you that 'Contact' is a better movie overall than 'Arrival', but our ratings may be very different.
I prefer 'Martian' to the boring 'Interstellar'. On the other hand, I liked reading about the science (and the liberties taken by Nolan brothers) behind Interstellar than Martian. So, there is no 1:1 correlation between how I enjoy the science behind the movie and the actual movie. I prefer both very much over 'Gravity', which opens with one of my favourite opening shots and then George Clooney opens his mouth and its pretty much downhill from there.
Contact is the perfect example, also the way Jodie Foster was shown to decode the language was much more in detail and exciting than in arrival.
Yes! There is exactly one brief voiceover about how they 'figured' it out, but it would have been much more exciting had they shown the process itself (I had mentioned it in my
earlier post as well).
'Contact' was written by Carl Sagan, who actually worked on Voyager missions. Sagan obviously thought a lot about how to communicate with real aliens and hence the detail. But even here, the scientist who actually makes an important contribution to the decoding in the story is completely sidelined. If they can drop in 'Sapir-Whorf', they could have dropped in 'Lagrangian' in a simpler, dummified way as well. At least that way, Jeremy Renner would have looked like doing a little more than saying "atmosphere" (his only contribution?) and staring at the screen.
2001 again for me falls in the ARRIVAL category .... its an highly overrated movie IMHO.
The term over-rated is highly over-rated
. What is it but a deep disagreement between our view and the supposedly 'popular' view?
Even though I like entertaining and engaging movies, I rate 'experience' movies like '2001', 'Stalker' or Bergman's movies much much more. The perception of a movie is always the sum of what happens on the screen and what runs inside our head while watching it. With our personalities being very different, we will always have these little disagreements from time to time.
Isn't everything on the internet always, IMHO? If we all had the same opinion, the world would be so very uninteresting. If you can't call '2001' garbage and me a 'Classic', we could as well program a bot to write our thoughts
