Arrival

Liam Hall

Liam Hall

Veteran
Just seen Denis Villeneuve's new film, Arrival.

Not without merit and generally enjoyable but overall I felt it flattered to deceive. It wasn't as clever or deep as it thought it was and lacked both tension and drama. The overuse of shallow DoF and short primes shooting tight shots was annoying too.

The acting was okay, but there wasn't much for anyone to really exploit in a meaningful way.

Maybe they spent all the budget on Amy Adams and didn't have anything left for plot development.

With a woman immediately behind me munching through a family sized bag of crisps throughout the course of the film I came to the conclusion that the best thing about Arrival was the departure.
 
Liam Hall said:
Just seen Denis Villeneuve's new film, Arrival.

Not without merit and generally enjoyable but overall I felt it flattered to deceive. It wasn't as clever or deep as it thought it was and lacked both tension and drama. The overuse of shallow DoF and short primes shooting tight shots was annoying too.

The acting was okay, but there wasn't much for anyone to really exploit in a meaningful way.

Maybe they spent all the budget on Amy Adams and didn't have anything left for plot development.

With a woman immediately behind me munching through a family sized bag of crisps throughout the course of the film I came to the conclusion that the best thing about Arrival was the departure.
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https://soundcloud.com/cinematl/november-2016-arrival-and-cinematography

https://soundcloud.com/cinematl/november-2016-arrival-and-cinematography

Two of the reviewers tend to agree with your assesment.

We discuss it in detail in our latest podcast.

-M
 
All crafts involved were top notch but the direction was rather 'meh'.

It screens like a mashup-up of Christopher Nolan meets M. Night Shyamalan meets Michelle Ghondry, specifically: "Interstellar" meets "The Sixth Sense" meets "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", yet each of those directors would have made a much more interesting film (and have).

I liked the use of Zeiss Super Speeds and UP's. I had a chance to attend a weekend seminar with Bradford Young at GCI recently, and this film exemplifies his minimalist lighting style.
I give it a weak three stars, but only because it looks and sounds good. Story is rather flimsy, I thought. And they really beat you over the head at the end trying to invoke some kind of emotion, but it didn't work...at all. I felt nothing, and I enjoy shedding a tear at the movies. This one just lacks any kind of subtlety or nuance.

Just my .02c
 
Liam Hall said:
Two of you were right... ...Interesting you mention Interstellar, I had the same thought.

In fairness, my wife loved it, she thinks it's cinematic poetry and I'm a philistine for not liking it.
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Thanks for checking it out.

Yeah, we kinda feel bad not to like it seeing how earnest an attempt and like we mentioned certainly a well made movie.

Our guest agrees with your wife and really dug it.

-M
 
Pretty much agree with everything you guys said about the direction. The presentation of time was moderately interesting but overall felt pretty phoned in. It was refreshing because it was a nominally intelligent scifi but only impressive on account of the general dirth of intelligent scifi this century. I went and saw it with a linguistics professor and a group of enthusiasts which gave my viewing a different spin as to what I might over have focused on. Also in the Australian theatre every single person cringed with a simultaneous intake of breath when Whittaker uttered the very poorly written line that the Aborigines were wiped out by 'a superior race' (wrong on all counts). I imagine Mandarin speakers will have been subjected to similar cultural missteps too. At least she corrected the urban myth that kangaroo means i don't understand what you are saying (it means something like 'animal that jumps').

I wasn't sure if the projector at the cinema was particularly dark or whether everything was deliberately underexposed in 90% of the movie. Talking to friends who saw it elsewhere leads me to think it was a deliberate choice and not a projection room fail. Did you guys find it really dark too? In some scenes it worked, in others not so much. While liking the look I found it quite tiring to watch for the whole thing but I'll definitely be getting it on bluray to check this out more because I thought a lot of these 'wrong' choices worked really well with the mood and scene.
 
Egg Born Son said:
Pretty much agree with everything you guys said about the direction.
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Well, I don't agree. How can any member of a film making community like DVXUser not like this film? True, it's not in any way aimed at 14 year old boys. But it makes no claim to be a popcorn summer blockbuster. At least there is an explosion, and a little bloodshed. :cheesy:

Arrival is aimed at an intelligent thinking adult audience. It tells its story its way, not per most people's pre-conceived notions of how a film should work. It has a great script, and nearly flawless direction that shows that script to full advantage.

But if you think The Matrix is the pinnacle of Science Fiction, then I can see why you wouldn't like this. After all, the special effects in Arrival actually serve the story. This film uses special effects, but it's not at all about special effects. Which brings us back to The Matrix.
 
My issues with the direction (and the direction specifically) wasn't that it was targeted at adults rather than 14 year old boys (I hate Marvel/DC and what they've done to movies - GotG is the only one I like). It was more that it wasn't intelligent enough. More that it sacrificed a lot to achieve an unnecessary twist that wasn't in the source material (because scifi has to have a twist or something something something). Not quite as on the nose as an M.Night but still obvious, unnecessary and a distraction from an actual interesting idea. I felt the general dirth of intelligent scifi raises this noble effort just a little more than it deserves. And I didn't say didn't like it, I loved it. I want more of this. But I want future scifi not to hold back and dumb down like this one did. I saw it with a linguist and they completely skipped the highly interesting part between her first insight into how the language worked and her entirely understanding it. Incidentally the Sapir-Whorf that they reference in the film is largely discredited but that's okay, it makes for an excellent scifi premise. I found the cinematography to be especially interesting and served the film very well. In fact everyone did their jobs well but my minor complaints were all things were the buck stops with the director, I felt the direction seemed very hands off, phoning it in. I also felt this about his other films which I also love but am troubled by a lingering sense of 'sooo close' afterwards. But that's just my opinion. 4 stars
 
Visually great, sonically really great, writing was mixed. Some great stuff and some weak stuff. I was really wanting to cheer for this movie every step of the way since from the outset you could tell that it wasn't going to do things like other sci-fi movies. Ultimately, though, it left me emotionally fairly unaffected as well. So did Interstellar.

It's tricky with these movies that go for the slam dunk big message at the end in giant neon lights. If it doesn't hit, it really doesn't hit because of the setup. I wish there was more subtlety and more left to the imagination.

Dealing with great mysteries and the deepest of possible emotions, but ultimately being told exactly what to feel and such.

I actually liked the ultra shallow depth of field since it always coincided with her visions of other times, in other words her immediate reality and surroundings were no longer actually her reality. That supports a bit of what Bruce was saying above. There was nothing gratuitous about the effects and the use of imagery and sound.
 
Bruce Watson said:
Well, I don't agree. How can any member of a film making community like DVXUser not like this film? True, it's not in any way aimed at 14 year old boys. But it makes no claim to be a popcorn summer blockbuster. At least there is an explosion, and a little bloodshed. :cheesy:

Arrival is aimed at an intelligent thinking adult audience. It tells its story its way, not per most people's pre-conceived notions of how a film should work. It has a great script, and nearly flawless direction that shows that script to full advantage.

But if you think The Matrix is the pinnacle of Science Fiction, then I can see why you wouldn't like this. After all, the special effects in Arrival actually serve the story. This film uses special effects, but it's not at all about special effects. Which brings us back to The Matrix.
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Well.

It just didn't connect with me and my co-host. Our guest did enjoy it.

We grant that it's a well made movie.

-M
 
I didn't mind that the film restructures the source material to create a reveal at the end. It is narrative cinema, and there has to be some drama. I enjoyed the style of the direction, editing, sound design and cinematography. I did find the pacing overall to be too languid. I know that the idea is that we don't know what's going on for much of the time just as she doesn't, but that all could have been handled a bit faster. This is 2016, and we're all familiar with so many of the tropes of such stories. We don't need pointless plot filler and I appreciated the resistance to the Hollywood urge to show lots of guns-ho footage of troops mustering and fancy light shows. Much of this was simply indicated just enough to move the story along, and then it was back to the central concerns. But I could see the film being tightened up by 20 minutes and being more enjoyable, or there could be some additional depth to the linguistics discoveries that would have made her work more satisfying. When the film went to a montage and her voiceover to skip past that part of the story, I felt it was an essential failure of writing, direction, or both.

As an interesting comparison, I really enjoyed Contact up until the ending, which felt a bit of a cheat considering the build to get us there. It's kinda the reverse with Arrival, where I felt the ending more satisfying than the journey.

Overall I did enjoy the film, but I also wanted them to step up the pace a bit and then get deeper down into what they were doing.

I was also whispering in my 10-year old son's ear to explain some crucial points in the last 20 minutes and he totally loved it, so there's always that. But he's never seen Close Encounters, The Abyss, Contact or any of the other various first contact movies.
 
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Bruce Watson said:
Well, I don't agree. How can any member of a film making community like DVXUser not like this film? True, it's not in any way aimed at 14 year old boys. But it makes no claim to be a popcorn summer blockbuster. At least there is an explosion, and a little bloodshed. :cheesy:

Arrival is aimed at an intelligent thinking adult audience. It tells its story its way, not per most people's pre-conceived notions of how a film should work. It has a great script, and nearly flawless direction that shows that script to full advantage.

But if you think The Matrix is the pinnacle of Science Fiction, then I can see why you wouldn't like this. After all, the special effects in Arrival actually serve the story. This film uses special effects, but it's not at all about special effects. Which brings us back to The Matrix.
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I went in there hoping for an intelligent, thought-provoking film, not a popcorn flick, but felt this was a combination of faux intellect and various clichés. As I said earlier, my wife liked it, and like you, I feel, she was had.
 
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bill totolo said:
All crafts involved were top notch but the direction was rather 'meh'.

It screens like a mashup-up of Christopher Nolan meets M. Night Shyamalan meets Michelle Ghondry, specifically: "Interstellar" meets "The Sixth Sense" meets "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", yet each of those directors would have made a much more interesting film (and have).

I liked the use of Zeiss Super Speeds and UP's. I had a chance to attend a weekend seminar with Bradford Young at GCI recently, and this film exemplifies his minimalist lighting style.
I give it a weak three stars, but only because it looks and sounds good. Story is rather flimsy, I thought. And they really beat you over the head at the end trying to invoke some kind of emotion, but it didn't work...at all. I felt nothing, and I enjoy shedding a tear at the movies. This one just lacks any kind of subtlety or nuance.

Just my .02c
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Maybe it's because I was severely underslept and had a 3 week old daughter when I saw it, but the movie succeeded in a way that few have in evoking emotion from me.... definitely shed some tears!

Overall I liked the film as well, although I too thought it a bit dark, which worked sometimes and sometimes not.
 
@LiamHall - "combination of faux intellect and various clichés" I got this feeling too,
not familiar with the source material but saw the ending coming from a mile away,
looked and sounded great, started well but started to drag and left me cold by the end.
 
I would like to talk about three things: the camerawork, the acting, and the script.

The camerawork. The director, Denis Villeneuve, is the only person I know of who shoots quite like Denis Villeneuve. And it is refreshing. His camerawork is calm, smooth, utterly under control. In contrast to the cutty, shaky, close-up camerawork of some of his peers, he tries hard to be clear, to establish where everything is, and to achieve balance in his compositions. As an example, as Amy Adams flies to the base in the helicopter, there is a long take that moves high above the ground, showing: here is the land, here is the spaceship, here is the base some distance in front of it. I am pretty sure he admires Stanley Kubrick --- although he doesn't mimic him slavishly. Amy Adams' visions are the opposite: shallow focus, close up, oblique. This is on purpose, to resemble memories and dreams. Sicario, which has no such sequences, is much more relentlessly clear in its camerawork.

The acting. I don't like the acting in Denis Villeneuve's movies. It's like he says to them all: "How 'bout you play this scene as if you have given up on life?" Once I pulled myself out of the movie to listen to the lines and imagine myself reading them in the script for the first time, and I think there is more potential. There is some playfulness, some irony, some more variation; less of dead-on, dead-hearted delivery that Villeneuve seems to insist his actors give. It's like someone repeating a joke that they don't get.

The script. The script is the worst thing about this movie. It is irritatingly flawed at the overall level: its structure is broken, its backbone is missing many vertebrae. And it is irritatingly flawed at the microscopic level: in its details, in the particular things that its characters say.

The structure. The structure does one thing really well, it hooks you. For me it told me that it's very important near the beginning to make the audience ask a very specific question, and then leave it unanswered until the end. For this movie, it was "Why are the aliens here?" I'm wondering if all the movies that lose me in the middle do so because they fail to define the overarching question, that I simply don't know what the movie is getting at. There may be lots of action, but it's just wandering around, and the hero doesn't have a firm goal until 3/4 of the way through. Arrival does not do this, and that's why it kept me watching.

I kept watching, but I was very uncomfortable, because there's not enough that happens in the movie. It's like an old man who tells a story that normally could be told in half an hour, but he stretches it to two hours by taking very long pauses between his sentences.

When I say that there's not much happening, someone might say, well the characters are always doing something, aren't they? I guess I mean that there aren't a lot of turning points. I don't even mean big turning points like major act reversals. I mean there's just not a lot of dramatic information, which is conveyed by the characters trying one thing, then another, then making another decision, and so on. There's a whole lot of the characters pursuing a given course of action in a straight line, and it carries on for a very long time, and there is tension as we wait for the outcome, but there's very little actually happening during most of the movie. It's just a lot of waiting.


The details. Forrest Whitaker meets with Amy Adams for the first time and plays a few seconds of alien gibberish, and then asks her what it means, but no linguist could figure that out, no matter how smart they are. Learning a language just takes a ton of exposure and a ton of examples.

Later, Forrest Whitaker is very impatient with their progress, after they just get started. His reaction is unrealistic even for the densest, most impatient, no-nonsense person I can think of. It's manufactured conflict. A character acts unrealistically just so that there can be some conflict. It's a problem in many movies, but this movie seems to live on it.

The whole movie turns on a discredited theory in linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In fact it takes the most extreme interpretation possible. The mildest take would be: "Your language influences your thoughts." The stronger take is, "Your language controls your thoughts." The movie's version is, "A language can give you superpowers."

On one hand, I am lenient because it is just a movie and has its own reality. So in Arrival a language can give you superpowers, like how in Star Wars if you simply surrender to the Force then you can fight perfectly. On the other hand, I am a long-time student of linguistics, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is one of my pet peeves. Steven Pinker argues fairly well against it in his book The Language Instinct, in the chapter called "Mentalese." The book is a joy to read, and I recommend it to anyone interested in linguistics.
 
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