Arrival trailer

I'm kinda cautiously hopeful about this one. I like the idea of an alien arrival where no one, maybe not even the aliens, knows what's going on, and everyone has to figure each other out.

The language barrier thing could be very intriguing. I remember in "Contact" that the premise was the aliens could communicate with us through math, but that assumes an alien race views math the same way we do. "Contact" made a big deal about prime numbers, for example, but it never really asked if or why an alien race would care about prime numbers.

The thing that might make me steer clear of this movie is if it gets into some kind of political agenda.

I love the tone. But yeah, if it ends up being another lecture from aliens about how us humans need to get along I'll be really let down. It's not that we don't need the lecture, but we also need something more. Films like The Abyss and The Day The Earth Stood Still do little more than say "You humans need to be kinder to each other. You're too violent." And what the next film that tries that needs to offer for me is some revelation about human nature that points toward a solution.

The problem is, Hollywood has no solutions to the problem of human conflict. We need Jesus for that. And I highly doubt movie aliens will ever point to him as the answer.

So hopefully instead they'll focus on the lead female character and her discovery of what makes this alien race tick. This is a time I'd definitely take a concept driven story over a thematically driven one. (I also really like monster movies and the "discovery" process involved in them.)

This one totally slipped by me in my planning. Although Friday my boys were off from school so it would have been hard to see it anyway. But I saw it yesterday and really enjoyed it! Here are my thoughts:

It didn't open at any of the theaters near me, so I haven't seen it yet. Maybe in a couple of weeks, when I have some time off for Thanksgiving, I'll be able to see it.

Finally got a chance to see this movie, and came away fairly satisfied with it.

SPOILERS FOLLOW!!!!!!

It was plain a lot of thought had gone into the elements of this movie--the ways the aliens communicated, the complex nature of their "sentences", the difficulties each side would have in communicating with each other and how those they could be overcome, and I really wished it had shown more how the Chinese were able to communicate with Mahjong tiles, or some of the ways the other nations had found. But maybe that would have made the movie far too long, because that would have gotten into some real complexities. Btw, I noticed in the opening the movie was based on a book, but I can't remember what the book was, and I'm wondering if anyone remembers it.

There were some things that troubled me, though. The idea that a person could start seeing the future simply by learning the alien's language was rather iffy. Perhaps the part that bugged me most was how she simply seemed to accept a future in which she'd have a daughter who would die of a strange disease in her teens, without any hint that she was going to fight against this fate in some way.

jazzact13 wrote:

There were some things that troubled me, though. The idea that a person could start seeing the future simply by learning the alien's language was rather iffy. Perhaps the part that bugged me most was how she simply seemed to accept a future in which she'd have a daughter who would die of a strange disease in her teens, without any hint that she was going to fight against this fate in some way.

Yeah, it would have been good for them to somehow clarify that her experience made it undeniably clear to her that these future flashes could in no way be avoided. When time travel is handled so differently in so many stories, that's a really worthwhile "rule" to be clear about your position on for audiences to track with you the way you want them to.