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Comment by stoneman24 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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.

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