Spoilers for the movie, obviously.
How dare the US pretend like they would be the peaceful nation and that China would be belligerent the entire time. Don’t get me wrong, it didn’t stop me from enjoying the movie. The atmosphere, setting, plot, editing. Everything was so fantastic. The aliens, the themes about language and culture.
And I know that it was a US made movie with US main characters, but everytime they mentioned China being hostile felt so cringe. I doubt Villanueve was being intentionally anti-China, he just needed a non US ally to be belligerent so the protagonists would have a clock to race against. But even having Russia in that role would make more sense. And even weirder that China was ruled by a general from the People’s Liberation Army.
Now this isn’t me coming from a “China would never do anything bad” perspective. It’s just silly pretending that the US wouldn’t immediately send sidewinder missiles into that thing before it landed. The US would shoot first, second, and third before thinking to ask questions. The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that. Now for the sake of the movie I was willing to accept the premise, but when it became all of the non West countries acting hostile it stung with me.
I think I’m only ranting because it was such a good movie and the whole theme of language being the key to understanding culture was undermined by making China the Bad Guys. If this was a shlockier, worse movie I wouldn’t care to complain about that detail. I haven’t read the original short story, but I’m sure that it didn’t have this element.
I feel like most expensive movies with American production companies involved have the US State Department paying to have influence in them.
Especially so if there’s tanks, planes, helicopters, or other military hardware involved in the movie.Yes, always try to identify & separate state-sponsored/mandated propaganda, it’s not that hard, but you do have to look (logically) for it. And then it might affect you less.
It’s just something every-money does.
I mean looking purely logically doesn’t work either, the best propaganda isn’t about spreading good lies, they’re about strategically over representing truths in specific ways to establish connotations. Most of the time its blatant as fuck, but sometimes its very subtle and logically consistent with its context and material reality
Yes, you are right (like whatever the word “freedom” means). And don’t forget about all the normalization (of bad things that just enter pop culture) & gaslighting.
Exactly yeah
Yeah that makes perfect sense. I wouldn’t be surprised if a first draft of the script has the US president pushing to attack the ships but the State department gave notes.
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I broadly agree with you except for the spy balloon thing - the US didn’t shoot first second and third and ask questions later, the US let it fly over the entire country. Only once the totally harmless balloon had been amped up in the media as a yellow peril foreign threat did the US shoot it down.
Yeah the US reaction to the balloon says very little about their defence policy and a whole lot about their propaganda policy and how complicit the army is in it.
Fair enough. I meant more broadly how they used it as an excuse to ratchet up tensions with China. Blinken cancelling his trip to China specifically over the balloon and the subsequent shooting down weather balloons.
Potentially unpopular opinion: I hated it.
spoiler
Time travel as a premise sucks because it violates causality and thereby robs all the characters of agency. People don’t make choices and solve problems, they follow a foreordained path that was cut out for them, and it results in an incredibly contrived and ultimately uninteresting plot.
For example, the way she chooses to have the child is billed as a big character moment because she knows it’s going to lead to personal tragedy, but it’s not really a choice, it’s something that has to happen for the plot to make sense. If she chooses not to have the kid, then the heptapods’ language is nondeterministic (it doesn’t reveal the future, it reveals a future), and, given that you don’t know what choices other people are going to make, your predictions become worthless. Yet the heptapods were able to see the fact that they’ll need human assistance in the ludicrously deep future with enough confidence that they’re willing to put together the mission, which implies that the universe is essentially deterministic and we’re all God’s little finger puppets or physics objects. Which could be true for us irl but the plot tries to pretend that free will is still somehow meaningful. It’s the most frustrating sort of fiction and it feels like the mental equivalent of chewing on aluminum foil to me.
That’s a fair critique. I generally agree about time travel being too funky to make sense and there sure are a lot of implications about free will and determinism that come from it. But that didn’t take away from the fantastic direction and visual language of the film. I really enjoyed how we got to the ending even if the ending isn’t perfect.
It was visually impressive for sure! And I do dig the first-contact-figuring-out-how-the-aliens-communicate subgenre. I think my favorite is The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell - have you ever read it?
I’ve never. I need to read more sci Fi so I’ll check it out.
If you haven’t already, if you like first contact with weird aliens, try Blindsight by Peter Watts. Really cool themes concerning consciousness
I actually just read Blindsight and Echopraxia recently after seeing a recommendation on here, haha. I liked Blindsight better from a storytelling perspective but I thought they were both good reads.
This is probably the first time I’ve read a negative opinion about this movie as a whole.
negativity
As I was watching, I couldn’t fathom how that was supposed to be “amazing”, “incredible” etc. It felt so empty and it pretended to be way deeper than it actually was, i.e. presenting shallow ideas and emotions dressed in that infamous “art film” aesthetic. Other than the alien scenes, the whole movie felt the same as all other generic military propaganda movies
The Chinese weather balloon tells us all we need to know about that.
My only gripe with this is that they obviously knew that it was just a weather balloon, or at the very least that it wouldn’t shoot back so I don’t think this really supports your point even though I think you’re right. Though I personally think the Euros would shoot first.
As much as I love Villeneuve’s movies he does seem to have a … hesitance when it comes to asian characters/people. The stuff in Arrival can obviously be waved off as just ‘China bad’ but I think it goes deeper. His next movie, Blade Runner 2049, has a lot of superficial asian influence but has even fewer (none iirc) asian characters than the original. Obviously Dr. Yueh is in the book so its hard to lay blame for him on Villeneuve but there’s no other asian actors despite the Fremen being descended from Zensunni Wanderers. Presumably they weren’t all just Middle Eastern and obviously Zendaya and Javier Bardem are neither so it seems like an odd omission.
Not really sure if its an intentional bias or not but Blade Runner especially would have benefited from having at least one named asian character. Why is everything in Japanese but there’s no Japanese people?
The prevalence of Japanese stuff in Bladerunner 2049 is an artifact of cultural worries in 1983 with the first movie. It seems odd now, but in the early 80s Japan was briefly seen as the primary economic rival to the US. There was a genuine fear for a bit that the Yen would take prevalence over the dollar in some sectors, namely tech. Go look at magazine covers from the late 70s and early 80s. They couldn’t shut up about how Japan would rule the world soon.
So why is there so much Japanese stuff but no Japanese people? Because at it’s core it’s xenophobic. It edges on being outright racist, by presenting Japan as like a cultural colonizer in the futuristic LA. I don’t remember any of the Japanese stuff in the PKD story, it wasn’t until the 80s did the ambient western worries start.
They’d culminate with the Plaza accords, which was a currency manipulation measure to ensure the dollar wouldn’t have to compete as heavily with the yen. And that lead to Japan’s asset bubble era and subsequent recession.
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I haven’t read the original short story, but I’m sure that it didn’t have this element.
Yup, there was no overarching “hostile nations learn the valuable moral lesson of international cooperation” plot in the original short story - no Orientalist story beats about the ruthless Russians summarily executing their scientists to maintain state secrets or irrational Chinese general inciting for war against the super-advanced spacefaring aliens based on mahjong (you would think that the Chinese linguists would also realise that there may be a competitve bias in mahjong-based communication, but apparently Amy Adams can understand Chinese culture better than all the Chinese scientists combined🙄… I wonder why
). The heptapods in the short story sent down to Earth 112 two-way communication “looking glasses” (instead of 12 spaceships in the film) and the main character was a linguist assigned to 1 of the 9 looking glasses within US borders. If there’s any “political” commentary/conflict in the short story, it was between the American linguists/scientists who are motivated by the opportunitiy to gain alien knowledge/exchange knowledge with the heptapods, the US state apparatus (i.e., the Army colonel & State Depatment ghoul supervising the scientists) which can only view the alien encounter as a belligerent and zero sum competition (between the US and the aliens, and between the US and other nations). Instead of the geopolitics, the short story focused a little more on the main character’s relationship with her future daughter and also went much deeper into the maths/linguistic theory behind the heptapod language.I don’t really have any solid evidence to back this up, but given that the movie was released around late 2016, my theory is that the adaptation’s “China/Russia bad” elements come from Eric Heisserer (the adaptation scriptwriter) ambiently absorbing the illegal immigrant discourse lingering in the American ideological atmosphere in the lead-up to the Trump/Hillary elections and unconsciously distorting the ideas of American xenophobia/paranoia/military bloodthirst into a narrative about non-American countries being xenophobic/brutal (after all, it’s almost impossible for Americans to truly imagine themselves as actually being the evil empire; Heisserer seems to be an apolitical but generally liberal type, so I doubt that he gave too much deliberate thought to the extended implications of the international geopolitics plot additions of his script). Either that, or it was studio interference to add a “sexy” political thriller type plot conflict instead of focusing purely on egghead debates about physics and phonemes, and/or a mandate from the DoD for the filming to get access to US military resources.
Same with Gravity. Although gravity was a poo movie. But it still begins by accusing the Russians of using an anti satellite weapon which caused the Kessler syndrome that kick starts the movies events. Something that the US has literally done a few years previously.
I think that’s the wrong take. It’s been a year since I rewatched but isn’t it implied that the US nuked China because they were making better progress in decoding?
I feel like the US is constantly described portrayed as arbitrarily hostile and belligerent
They said China interpreted the aliens wrong because they used Mahjong as the basis of their communication (🙄) so they would “inherently be competitive from using a competitive game.” So when the aliens say “there is no time, use weapon” they interpreted that as a threat - but it was far more literal, there really isn’t a thing we percieve as time and weapon was a misinterpretation of their word for their language.
I think in the background lore at some point the ships were attacked but they don’t interact with the local environment at all, they don’t exhaust anything and aren’t affected by anything so presumably they were attacked at some point to find out that they weren’t able to be attacked.
The US side was more like, there’s the military wanting to press the nuclear button and then the egg head libs that are barely holding them back with a drip feed of progress.
I agree with OP, if the Arrival aliens actually came it would be the US who would interpret everything as a hostile act lol and they’d have the shorter hair trigger on launching nukes.
Nah, I think you’re totally misremembering the film: not only does the US not attack/nuke China, at no point in the film is the US state portrayed as an initial or arbitrary aggressor. The film only shows the US “rationally” reacting to the aggression and secretiveness of other nations/parties. The film makes sure to show that the US only halts their communication/information-sharing with the other nations only after China and Russia have already themselves gone off the grid.
The only time US can even remotely be interpreted as an unprovoked aggressor was when the alien spacecraft that the main characters were at was bombed by US soldiers. Even then, the bombing was orchestrated by rogue Army grunts radicalised by Alex Jones-type conspiracy theorists - there’s a scene near the 58-minute mark where a couple of soldiers in a medical tent are watching an internet video where some rando with a talk radio microphone rant about the alien contact being handled by “the same government that ruined our healthcare and bankrupted our military” and pushing for a preemptive “show of force” against the aliens, which sets up the implied motivation of the renegade soldiers - so that movie audience are reassured that American war crimes are just the unfortunate/unintended result of unwashed and uneducated individual bad apples in lower/middle echelons of the US military and that the eminently levelheaded leadership/intitutions of American military/state would never dream of recklessly provoking conflict for their material and/or strategic advantage…
I don’t remember that honestly. If it was implied it was very subtle. And overshadowed by China bad.
