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Comment by lproven | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.

One of the few uses of ever-improving "AI" bot generation of characters, faces, blending images, etc. I can imagine is the ability for fans to remix films and TV.

For example...

* to edit together the original BBC TV Hitch hikers' Guide to the Galaxy with the better SFX of the otherwise poor film.

* to create extra episodes or installments of beloved serials where the text exists but the actors are dead

* Or, in this instance, to mix Lynch's visuals and characters with Villeneuve's less scenery-chewing version which sticks closer to the text.

One could even imagine editing Villeneuve's Arrival to stick closer to the text of Ted Chiang's sublime "the Story of your Life", where the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand.

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What I immediately thought was "seasons 8 to 100 of deep space 9"

Strange what we can learn about ourselves through association

> the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand

Can you expand? I've read and watched, but don't recall anything similar. I watched the movie first, could be why.

If I remember correctly (can't find the book), the novel describes the aliens writing as a intricate multi-level rectilinear ideogram where in order to start drawing the design, you needed to know the exact ending of the entire message. Each ideogram was an entire complex reply. This implied that the aliens had a different sense of time.

Whereas the movie, the writing was a simpler circular design with slight filaments hanging off and no mention of the encapsulated message as a whole IIRC. The movie design reminded minded me of the Lucent Technologies logo [1] (worked for them a short while, back long ago).

I really liked the story and the movie but different media formats have different aims and constraints so it's hard to compare. I wish the movie industry would tackle more original content (like Arrival) rather than endless sequels.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucent

Just one data-point, but I have only seen the _Arrival_ movie and perfectly understood that element of the aliens' writing system, and why it was important to their experience of time. I suspect that the circular design was chosen to be a better visual depiction (time as a closed loop, maybe?) of that idea.

This is correct.

In order to learn to write the aliens' script, the interpreter must learn what Douglas Adams called "defocussed temporal perception". To write the language you need to be able to see into the future. Learning the script teaches her to do this.

Seeing into the future she watches her own daughter die and there's nothing she can do to stop it.

The scriptwriters didn't understand any of this so they made the aliens spray-paint stencils on glass and inserted a terrible irrelevant subplot about stopping a war.

I have not read the novel, but I felt from the film that it was crystal clear that learning the alien writing system was what gave Amy Adams' character the knowledge her daughter would die.

And yet, when I think about Dune 2021, I feel like it lacks a lot of interesting context and explanation from the novel. But I know plenty of people who didn't read it and loved the film. I suspect DV takes more care to lay out the important details than I'm able to perceive knowing the book.

It's not a novel.

It's a 16pp short story. Read it, then reply. It takes about 15min if you're a slow reader!

I feel the same way.

Watched Arrival then read it, and loved the movie.

Read Dune and then watched it. Underwhelmed by the film.

I don't think it's that they didn't understand. They movie just focuses on something different from the book. Where the book is highly conceptual and philosophical, the movie applies this in a very personal way. I walked away thinking about how every story ends in sadness and despair. Even though we can't see the future in this much detail, we all know how every human story ends. And yet, we engage with hope, and I think life is still worth living.

> They movie just focuses on something different from the book.

1. It's not a book. It's just a short story. It's only 16pp long or something.

2. The central point of the story is: brilliant linguist learns to write an alien script and it teaches her to see the future. That is the core plot in a sentence. The film loses that.

Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film: i.e., brain damaged into mindlessness, but still quite pretty.

It's like a version of Hamlet in which he lives happy ever after, though. It is missing the point in the most profound possible way.

I just completely disagree with you. Watched the film and read the short story. The central premise absolutely comes through. I watched the film first, and understood it well. Love all of Ted Chiang's stuff, too.

It's funny though, I do feel a bit the same way about Dune. It's a Cliffs Notes of the book, and doesn't add anything new and thought provoking. Mindless but beautiful.

Still, I wouldn't say it missed the point. Just that it wasn't really necessary.

Anyway, free to disagree.

Fair enough! De gustibus non est disputandum after all.

I did say:

>> Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film

I agree about Dune. If you know the book, it's a very pretty retelling. If you don't, it's a sort of weird summary with no signs of why so many people love it so much.

It’s already being used to upscale Star Trek and Babylon 5.

In 10-15 years, hopefully we can just input this script as a prompt, and get a full film in the style of David Lynch.

If we keep on praising uninteresting, soulless movies like Villeneuve’s Dune while shooting down more artistic (but weirder) views such as Lynch’s one, then I think we might end up with the opposite: human crews making films based GPT’s scripts.

The same thing happened with Society of the Snow: a technically beautiful movie with nothing to say other than being more “faithful” and using native actors. All that is appreciated but Alive was a flawed but much more exciting telling of the story.

Well what I mean is that maybe a decade or so from now any one of us can create such a thing on our home computers.

About Arrival, another one of the soulless, empty outings by Villeneuve, it has 7.9 on IMDb and 94% on rotten tomatoes. Obviously, nobody really cares about the details (unfortunately).

If anyone is interested in the ridiculous amount of potential that Villeneuve threw away by becoming Hollywood’s generic sci-fi director, watch Incendies.

Couldn't it be possible that you just have a different taste?

I'm not a huge fan of Arrival but I would not have said it's empty and soulless. I do think it's a good movie though.

I really like the movie, but i think it did lose some of the soul of the short story.

The short story is essentially a story about grief using time travel as a metaphor but not actually having time travel in it. The movie has the character changing the past in a critical moment which kind of undermines the whole soul of the story imo.

To be clear, i still think arrival is a great movie, just rather different from the source material in terms of meaning and "soul"

There's no actual time travel or changing the past in Arrival.

The phone call scene with the general is heavily implied to rely on prescient knowledge of the future

Absolutely; all my expressed opinions are my own.

I loved the movie Arrival and can't agree it is soulless. Don't get so focused on what it lacks from the short story that you don't see what it does have that the short story does not.

I haven't read the original text, I just couldn't find anything interesting about it. I understand that there is a plot twist which I should've become interested in, and apparently some of the characters are supposed to have some kind of emotional depth, but it just totally missed me.

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