{"id":149,"date":"2016-11-28T10:22:46","date_gmt":"2016-11-28T15:22:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/?p=149"},"modified":"2016-11-28T10:33:46","modified_gmt":"2016-11-28T15:33:46","slug":"movie-review-arrival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/2016\/11\/28\/movie-review-arrival\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Review: Arrival"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a big problem with this Movie! The alien visitors are not only\u00a0smart enough\u00a0to span interstellar space\u00a0and come to Earth they are smart enough to have a deeper understanding of time than we do.\u00a0And when they arrive on Earth they know that we are a divided species, they seem to know something of our physiology and technology. Yet somehow they\u00a0haven’t managed to learn English or any other Earth language, nor do they\u00a0manage to do so by the end of the movie. Seriously, at the film’s climax Amy Adams is trying to get the\u00a0big message across to them using their language!<\/em><\/p>\n

I had the same problem with Close Encounters of the Third Kind back in 1977, I know that’s almost heresy but it’s true.\u00a0In CE3K the aliens have been watching us since at least Dec1945 when they abducted\u00a0Navy flight 19 but in the next 32 years they haven’t learned English!<\/em> I’m sorry but that really ruined CE3K for me and it pretty much ruins Arrival.<\/p>\n

I remember the old 1950 Film “The Day the Earth Stood Still” where at the beginning of the movie the Alien Klaatu walks out of his flying saucer speaking perfect English. He explains this by\u00a0announcing that “they” have been listening in on our radio and TV broadcasts. Which is probably how any aliens would learn about our existence in the first place.<\/p>\n

\"arrival-poster-russia\"<\/p>\n

Arrival’s best part is in fact where Amy Adams\u00a0learns the aliens written language where every word is based on a circle (see example below). They state in the film that this makes every word a palindrome, a word that is\u00a0spelled the same backwards and forwards, but if you look at the example that’s not true, the alien symbol is different depending on whether you go around the circle clockwise or counter-clockwise.<\/p>\n

\"Alien
Example of Alien Language in Arrival<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As to the Aliens of Arrival themselves, they aren’t very interesting. They look pretty much like octopuses that have lost one tentacle and we don’t get to see a great deal of their technology. The film is really more about how we humans react to the arrival of aliens than the aliens themselves. In that case however\u00a0“Arrival” spends too much time with Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner and we only get snippets of news reports on how humanity as a whole is reacting.<\/p>\n

Serious Science Fiction movies are rare and need to be supported but I just can’t give it my wholehearted approval. It’s not bad, it’s just not very alien. The scriptwriters needed to spend more time on the aliens and\u00a0not just their language. Well, that’s my opinion, what’s yours?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a big problem with this Movie! The alien visitors are not only\u00a0smart enough\u00a0to span interstellar space\u00a0and come to Earth they are smart enough to have a deeper understanding of time than we do.\u00a0And when they arrive on Earth they know that we are a divided species, they seem to know something of our … Continue reading “Movie Review: Arrival”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[35,26],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","tag-arrival","tag-movie-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scienceandsf.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}