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posted by janrinok on Monday December 05 2016, @10:36PM   Printer-friendly
from the will-the-sequel-be-called-departure dept.

The new movie Arrival is drawing sufficient praise as a smart and stylish science fiction film [AdBlock unfriendly] that Kate and I actually went to the trouble of getting a sitter so we could see it in the theater Friday night. It is, indeed, a very good movie, and probably the best adaptation one could hope for of the Ted Chiang story "Story of Your Life" (which is one of the best science fiction stories in any medium over the last mumble years). I was, however, disappointed that they left out nearly all of the physics that's in the original.

First, a brief, non-spoiler summary, before diving into the details: In the film, Amy Adams plays Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist who is recruited by the military to help them communicate with the aliens in one of twelve "shells" that have appeared at random locations on the surface of the Earth. She's paired with theoretical physicist Dr. Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner), and the two of them spend a lot of time writing messages back and forth to the alien "heptapods," who appear only on the far side of a transparent partition. As Louise figures out the heptapod language, it leads to a transformation in the way she sees the world, one with significant emotional costs to her, but that might be the key to saving the whole communicate-with-aliens enterprise.

What's your take on 'The Arrival,' Soylent?


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:24AM

    by JNCF (4317) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:24AM (#437476) Journal

    Long exposition and dialog kills a comic as dead as it does a movie.

    Technically, I agree with this statement. And yet... I'm guessing you didn't enjoy 12 Angry Men or Maus?

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  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:43AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:43AM (#437485)

    12 Angry Men was a play converted into a film. They did that for a while as the transition happened from stage to soundstage, from live to edited. Not so much now; Now even Broadway is flash. If it doesn't have lots of stuff going FOOM! it generally doesn't get into wide release in the [current year]. Now we have a few art house films in limited release just in time for the Academy Awards.

    It ain't about what I like, it is the reality of a marketplace driven by what teens want to see enough to pay for. Everybody else watches Netflix or BluRay on their home theater system so they don't have to suffer the aforementioned teens with their phones and horrid manners. Any forms of storytelling not geared around kids with the attention span of a ferret on meth is "made for TV" or direct to video now.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:12AM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:12AM (#437568) Homepage
    There was a ton of dialog in last year's /Ex Machina/, it's just that it was interesting, engaging, and not out of place, so you happily listened to the interactions where the characters discovered their roles. There was a fair bit of dialog in /Room/ too, at least compared to the number of gunfights, explosions, fist fights, chases, car chases, and other action sequences.

    Boring or shit dialog kills movies. Every time someone opened their mouth in /Jason Bourne/, I cringed. I so wanted to use SQL to corrupt their databases after seeing that.
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves