"Arrival" directed by Denis Villeneuve
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I love Amy Adams and she did well in the film but felt pretty displeased by the misdirection (and initially didn't even understand it very well). That the whole point of the communication/travel/plot, what the aliens were giving, was just communication (and the overall resolution would take place thousands of years later and the aliens knew how it would end) also felt underwhelming.
I'm a merciless critic but it sounds like you're virtually impossible to please. I thought Her was great, for instance. How would you have done it differently? Joaquin Phoenix's character wouldn't have worked if he was this cheery charismatic guy. He had to be a sad sack who was dragging himself through life. And aren't all the films on your list pretentiously directed (including Arrival, BTW)? Pretentious means the film has something to say. What's wrong with that?
Keep in mind that the portion you quoted was a passage specifically about the weaknesses of those films. I was not giving a comprehensive review of any one or saying that I hated them all; I was merely making a list focusing specifically on their weaknesses because that was the point I was addressing at that moment. If my goal had been to talk about their strengths, I would have spoken only of their strengths. If I had mentioned them in the context of a discussion about music, I would have spoken only of their music.
That is not at all what "pretentious" means.http://www.dictionary.com/browse/pretentious?s=t
It is from the same root as "pretend" and "pretense," after all. A pretentious film is one that pretends to say more than it does or to have more sophistication or intelligence that it has. Don't get me wrong, I think the writing in Her was excellent and had plenty of value to say, but the directing got in the way of it with all the flashy, arty, showoffy stuff that felt like "Look how clever a director I am" rather than serving the story.
And my problem was not with Phoenix's character, it was with the actor. A different actor playing the exact same character could probably have worked for me. As I said, my problem was not at all with the writing or the concepts, which were excellent. But I found the lead's personality and the director's style to get in the way of the story rather than benefitting it. I would love to see the exact same script remade by a different star and director.
I mean, look at Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina. His character there is thoroughly repulsive, but Isaac is brilliant and compelling in the role. The way a character is written and the quality of how the character is played are two entirely different questions. Oscar Isaac was very much the right person to play that character. I don't think Joaquin Phoenix was the right person to play the lead character in Her.
I read on Wikipedia that they actually did originally have an ending where the gift was an actual weapon, but I actually prefer what we got here. It was much more interesting than just a weapon.
Am I the only one amused that he listed the dictionary definition of pretentious in that response?
I did think the ending of Arrival felt a little pretentious, but maybe I just disliked the whole theme and the ending exemplified it, to give a grandiose triumphant treatment to Adams and Renner deciding to get together and have a child even though we know it will end at least less-than-triumphantly if not pretty badly (and the film just choosing to ignore that Renner will hate it, he's less important and/or his attitude isn't the enlightened one).
It very much feels like Adams's character made a choice, probably that having the child was worth it both for the time together and so that the future experiences would allow her to save the day in the present/past.
It very much feels like Adams's character made a choice, probably that having the child was worth it both for the time together and so that the future experiences would allow her to save the day in the present/past.
There was no choice. This wasn't the kind of time travel story where you can change the future. This was just gaining the ability to perceive "The Story of Your Life" (as the original short story was called) in non-linear order, like reading ahead in a book. You can peek at the ending and see how the story turns out, but that doesn't let you alter the contents of the book. The idea of being able to change future events is based on a conventional perception of cause and effect. The holistic perception of time that the aliens had went beyond cause and effect, seeing all causes and all effects as part of a single unified tapestry, a story that could be experienced all at once. But it's still a single, unified story, not a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
As implausible as I find the idea of gaining this perception just through language, there is a physical basis for the idea. Einstein said that the difference between past, present, and future is an illusion, though a persistent one. Some physicists think that time doesn't really flow, that all moments essentially coexist at once, and that our perception of time as moving is an artifact of the way we change from one "frame" of time to the next, like the images in a strip of film. The premise of the story and the movie is essentially that this is true and the aliens are able to perceive time as it really is, while we're still stuck in a misguided perception of time as linear because of the way our language frames our thoughts. This knowledge of events in what we call the future does allow causality to flow both ways, so your actions can be influenced by that future knowledge, but it doesn't allow "changing" future events, because those events still only happen once. The interaction between past and future is not added to a story that originally lacked it, it's an integral part of the story all along. (Think The Monster at the End of This Book, sort of.)
In my experience, there's so much in life that feels inevitable anyway, even with free will and without any future knowledge. Our daily lives shape our experiences into a pattern, even if it's a very complex one.
Well free will is about the ability to make decisions, right? So... imagine a timeline exactly identical to ours. There is a person, exactly identical to you. They're faced with a decision. Given their genes, their environment, their brain chemistry, their history, all being identical to yours, what are the odds that they would make precisely the same decision that you would make, faced with an identical choice? If the answer to this is 100%, then there isn't 'free will', there is just 'what we'd do in circumstance X' and all circumstance is wound together in an impossibly complicated but basically set timeline.
You're entitled to your opinion, but one person's showoffy stuff is actually, ya know, meaningful cinematography.
I think it was a very conscious choice to use the guy. Not that long before he had pulled a self-destructive performance-art prank that almost destroyed his career. That awkward and disheveled quality of Phoenix's semi-fictional persona filtered into the character in Her. That's why I think it worked as well as it did.
Again, it's simply a matter of opinion. Isaac's character was presented in an ambiguous way at first, but the problem is he's given no back-story. You never understand why he may have become a misogynist. He is a misogynist because the film's mission is to demonize misogyny and therefore Isaac must become a cardboard heavy rather than a fully realized character. The subtext and subtleties of Isaac's performance helps to humanize him, but I wanted more. I left the theater feeling that the work was that of an up and coming filmmaker who still has some growing to do.
This may in fact be how the universe actually works and it would explain things like ESP.
Note that Star Trek was not afraid to delve into the metaphysical, with mind-reading, consciousness transfers (implying the presence of souls), resurrection, etc... If you are a cold hard rationalist/empiricist there has to be a lot of Star Trek that rubs you the wrong way.
BTW, there is a lot of exciting research on retrocausality going on right now. We live in interesting times.
Free will doesn't mean randomness. Our decisions are always shaped by our circumstances, needs, and histories. Free will means you get to decide among the available options, but usually there will be a specific reason for picking one option. And if there is no obvious reason for favoring one over another, there may be subtler factors unconsciously nudging you in a certain direction. The flip of a coin is never really random -- it's determined by the force you exert when you toss it, the currents in the air, etc. It's unpredictable in advance because we can't know those specific variables in advance, not because they aren't present. Similarly, what feels like an arbitrary decision in your mind may be shaped by factors you don't consciously recognize.
Anyway, free will is never absolute; its extent is dependent on the context. If you're standing in an open field, you have freedom of choice to move anywhere in two dimensions, but not so much in the third. If you then fall off a cliff, you suddenly gain access to that third dimension of movement, but your freedom to choose your direction of movement in any dimension becomes rigidly constrained.
But what we're talking about here, again, isn't about time travel or alternate realities. It's just an altered perception of your passage through time. From that perspective, a decision isn't a discrete, separate event, it's just one part of the unified pattern that is your life.
I knew nothing whatsoever about that. All I knew was that I found him unpleasant in the film.
Again, I am not talking about how the characters were written, only about how they were performed. As I said, I thought the writing in Her was terrific. I have no issue whatsoever with the concepts or characterizations in the film. My problem was that I felt the acting and directing worked against those things rather than complementing them. Isaac's casting in Ex Machina, on the other hand, served what was written extremely well.
And come on, is it really necessary to explain why a powerful, arrogant man is a misogynist and abuser? It's not exactly a rare condition, unfortunately. For that matter, I wouldn't say he was specifically a misogynist, just a general bully who loved to dominate others. That included misogyny but was not limited to it.
If there were any such thing as ESP to explain, then its existence would have been demonstrated by reputable and repeatable experiments by now, and there would be a working theory for how it functions. Instead, the only experiments that have purported to demonstrate it have been shown to be fraudulent, poorly designed, or unrepeatable, and I've never heard anyone offer a theoretical explanation for the mechanism behind it.
Stephen Hawking says that the reason we remember the past and not the future is because storing information in the brain does work and increases entropy. So we can only access information from a lower-entropy state of our brains, and therefore our memory only goes in one direction, which we call the past. This is the basis for the illusion Einstein talked about. Even if the passage of time from past to future is not the way the universe actually works, it is the only way our brains can perceive it -- not because of linguistics, but because of thermodynamics.
Star Trek is a work of make-believe. It was a moderately budgeted TV show that used a lot of psi powers because they can be depicted cheaply through performances and pantomime rather than elaborate visual effects. Just as it used the improbabilities of humanoid aliens and Earth-parallel cultures because it was necessary to make the show affordable to produce. I accept and excuse these as necessary compromises. Besides, there are plenty of fictional universes out there with far more blatantly fanciful elements -- Star Wars, Marvel, DC, almost any other SFTV show that isn't Star Trek, etc. If I demanded that every fictional universe live up to the same standards of plausibility, I'd be vastly more constrained in my viewing habits. What I do instead is accept each fictional universe as following its own rules, and strive to keep my own original SF writing as plausible as I want it. That's part of why I became a writer in the first place -- so I could make an SF universe that lived up to my standards where so many others did not.
