Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related:

In a conversation with a producer and a screenwriter after my first film consulting contract, I quickly learned how much more attractive realistic scripts can be to potential directors. The fact that the film industry is actively embracing subject matter experts not only for establishing overarching themes and very central elements to plots but also to accurately represent even the most minor details is a fascinating turn in the last twenty years of filmmaking.

Minor details in the case of this film might be things like deciphering written sentence structure and realistically assembling new sentences. Minor details in the case of e.g. the matrix might be the use of SSHNuke. It's just nice to see.

•••

As for Arrival, it was easily one of my favorites this year, if not one of my personal favorite film of the last five. You should see it it you haven't. It's easily one of the most emotionally complex films we've had in quite a while.

While Arrival is emotionally complex, it's also not very original or "sensical" with cliches and the overblown importance of Amy Adams' character - a couple other countries arrive at the same conversational point first with their linguists and the whole mahjong thread is both wrongly simplified (it's a game of win/lose) and impractical. The immersion in a language giving you superpowers? The reuse of the final shot of (the movie) Enemy midway in the film? The purpose of the other ships (oh, earth distraction?). The implication you can have the concept of weapon without the concept of tool...it's fundamentally broken storytelling. The attempt at realism (a la Close Encounters) but with a demonization of the military and mischaracterization of breaking quarantine rules (taking off the suit initially would have gotten her removed, obviously and limiting a word list wouldn't be a concern and is forgotten quickly as the herring it is). Just a sloppy movie that's a vehicle for an M Night Shyamalan trick. It might as well all have been a dream sequence and it's the exact same movie.

Can you please mark your comment as containing spoilers?

> weapon without the concept of tool...it's fundamentally broken storytelling.

You're actually objectively† wrong, at least about why it is broken storytelling (which I don't think it is).

For example, you're complaining about: the fact that there was a protagonist, the plausibility of the sci-fi premise, some minor self-plagiarism, a political slant you don't agree with, a misremembered plot point about why there were several ships, a debatable concern about medical protocol in an unprecedented situation, and other sundry things.

These things are all essentially irrelevant to well-crafted storytelling.

If the movie didn't work for you, the things you were noticing are more like symptoms of the problem. Which by the sound of it was that you were just bored by the aesthetic choices the movie made.

I mean, I was totally transfixed and fascinated for almost the entire duration of the film. It might be that the contemplative mood, haunting music, deliberate editing, subtle acting, subdued lighting, etc. all provoked a kind of melancholic trance in me that made me insensitive to any story-telling deficiencies, it's hard to tell, but also, I don't care and the point is you're wrong.

† I justify the word objectively by claiming that the ensemble of extant human brains responds pretty predictably to these cultural artifacts we call stories. And there are people whose profession it is to understand how stories work and how to tell them. And I've grown up around several such people, and paid attention to what they have to say. And yeah I have the gall to think your post is just unbearably wrong.

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