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Capntastic posted:If I know in advance that this delicious King's Hawaiian roll is going to be sweet and fresh when I bite into it, that only reinforces my ability to enjoy it. It does not alter my decision even if I know, via magic, how good it is, both in quality and value, in advance. If you know how bad your shitposts are going to be why make them at all Youre a monster for forcing us to undergo this untold suffering
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Nov 14, 2016 14:34
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MiddleEastBeast posted:By the way, you guys keep butchering that one line. He says "Abbott is death process." There is no "undergoing" in there. Thank you. Thank you for this, it's the one line that stuck with me in particular due to it being one of very few lines translated onscreen (via software I presume) and was still delightfully alien and slightly 'wrong' Fantastic film. I went with my lady friend and we were still sat talking about what we'd just seen while the staff were cleaning up around us and everyone had long left the cinema. I was fairly sure I caught it all until she mentioned a couple of things which made me doubt my own thoughts. I eventually realised I was on the right track though. Olympic Mathlete fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 15:33
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Phi230 posted:If you know how bad your shitposts are going to be why make them at all "Why did Phi230 leave?" Me, mouth full of King's Hawaiian roll: "I told him something he wasn't ready to hear."
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Nov 14, 2016 16:18
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I missed the first 5 minutes and felt like I'd really missed something very important. Always be on time, friends.
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Nov 14, 2016 16:25
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I think the movie allowed you to catch up on what had passed. time jokes
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Nov 14, 2016 16:45
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Saw it yesterday night. Easily best of 2016 material for me. The thing that really resonated with me, as a film geek, is that filmmaking has its own semiotics that weave an extra layer of language and understanding into the way the big revelation about time works. The language of film is just as important in shaping what we know and don't know, and what we expect - and having more understanding of that language changes the viewing experience. For example, we are semiotically trained to identify certain shots or sequences, like flashbacks, lingering static shots of wedding bands on the hands of apparently single women, or long tracking shots down hallways with windows at the end, etc., with a certain intention on the part of the director. We remember how the jump scare in "Carrie" or "Alien" worked, so we're rewired to expect a certain semiotic meaning of jump scares in all future films. This is drat near explicitly how Sapir-Whorf works, which is directly also how the alien language works on Louise's mind with regard to time. And this movie plays with those expected meanings, reverses them, throws them into question in almost every single scene, and it's loving awesome. Also, if you were to see this movie a second time it would be completely changed in every way, including the story, the cinematography, and your interpretation of all of the above stuff I just said, because of what you already know is going to happen. Which is perfect. strangemusic fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 17:46
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#Arrival science/screenwriting chat posted just now on @HIGHzurrerquote:The Sanskrit word is "gavisti." Danvers at Berkeley says it means an argument. Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 18:34
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strangemusic posted:Saw it yesterday night. This was one of my favorite aspects of the film. When the movie opened up with shots of Louise and her daughter, and then her daughter dying, I immediately was rolling my eyes and dreading that it was going to end up as another "love is the only true constant/connection/whatever" trap that Interstellar fell into. But it didn't go that way at all. It was so refreshing to break away from the trope of having the protagonist in a sci fi movie spend half their time struggling with a failed marriage or a dead kid or something.
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Nov 14, 2016 20:42
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 This is really cool. According to Heisserer's twitter, they actually got Stephen Wolfram's son go to the trouble of creating a Heptapod translation program for them, and all the footage of it in the movie was it actually working out the translations of the made-up language in real time.
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Nov 14, 2016 21:30
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Capntastic posted:"Why did Phi230 leave?" 
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Nov 14, 2016 21:33
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Hey so just to make sure, does the camera start out being blurry (short focal length) only in the beginning of the movie, and the picture becomes clear by the end of the movie? No exceptions other than the dad's face being blurry and coming into focus at the end?
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Nov 14, 2016 21:44
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Steve Yun posted:
That's crazy 
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Nov 14, 2016 22:25
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Steve Yun posted:Hey so just to make sure, does the camera start out being blurry (short focal length) only in the beginning of the movie, and the picture becomes clear by the end of the movie? No exceptions other than the dad's face being blurry and coming into focus at the end? I'll try to look for it specifically on rewatch, but what I felt was that most of the film was shot using the colour and texture one would use to shoot a flashback, with the exception of the scenes shot inside the shell. It reinforced the idea that all times are equally real, and the feel of being within something akin to the heptapod fog.
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Nov 14, 2016 22:31
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Hand Knit posted:I'll try to look for it specifically on rewatch, but what I felt was that most of the film was shot using the colour and texture one would use to shoot a flashback, with the exception of the scenes shot inside the shell. It reinforced the idea that all times are equally real, and the feel of being within something akin to the heptapod fog. What I mean is that in the first half of the film, the camera is only able to focus a short length, to represent Louise's limited human perception of time. This is applied not only in the flashbacks but also in the present-day scenes. And as she learns heptapod, her perception of time expands and the camera is able focus on the entire scene. Louise is able to see clearly across time at the same time as the camera is able to see more clearly across distance. I just need some confirmation on whether this happens as I vaguely remember it. edit: just want to point out Magic Hate Ball noticed the camera focus first, I'm just asking if it changes over time Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 22:43
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You might be on to something. I noticed a seriously short focus on Loise when she first arrived at the army camp ("why won't you let us see any of the background?!"). Didn't notice after that.
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Nov 14, 2016 23:00
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Steve Yun posted:What I mean is that in the first half of the film, the camera is only able to focus a short length, to represent Louise's limited human perception of time. This is applied not only in the flashbacks but also in the present-day scenes. And as she learns heptapod, her perception of time expands and the camera is able focus on the entire scene. Louise is able to see clearly across time at the same time as the camera is able to see more clearly across distance. I just need some confirmation on whether this happens as I vaguely remember it. God drat, I need to rewatch for this now.
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Nov 14, 2016 23:23
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Looking back on the movie, I think the aliens knew everything. The aliens seemed to understand English right away. When Louise wrote HUMAN, the aliens wrote their word for it immediately. They probably could have communicated with us in our own language, but the point of their visit was to teach us theirs. When the C4 was planted, they knew what it was. They knew how to read the timer. They knew enough to know that Louise and Ian were not party to it. They even knew enough to know that the govt was not party to it, or else they would have been antagonized and blown us the gently caress up. They loving knew everything! And I guess if there's a point, the point is that when you know each other better, you have more reason to be cooperative and less reason to be antagonistic. They took pity on us drooling piss-our-diapers idiots knowing we had the potential to stop being stupid enough one day to help them back. Steve Yun fucked around with this message at 23:39 on Nov 14, 2016 |
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Nov 14, 2016 23:30
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Steve Yun posted:What I mean is that in the first half of the film, the camera is only able to focus a short length, to represent Louise's limited human perception of time. This is applied not only in the flashbacks but also in the present-day scenes. And as she learns heptapod, her perception of time expands and the camera is able focus on the entire scene. Louise is able to see clearly across time at the same time as the camera is able to see more clearly across distance. I just need some confirmation on whether this happens as I vaguely remember it. I think it does, we do get some nice deep shots later in the film but there are some earlier as well. Most of the present day shallow shots, from what I recall, were explicitly behind-the-head POV shots, and I think the montage towards the end was also in very shallow focus. The sense I got was the underlining of that feeling of being a sliver of life moving through a beam, with what's ahead being just visible, and it was aesthetically appropriate to not only the feeling of a memory but the feeling of being a child and having things be very close to you.
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Nov 14, 2016 23:30
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Wolfram blog post about their work on the movie: http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/
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Nov 15, 2016 00:24
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Steve Yun posted:
If Arrival was a comedy, intergalactic war would've started from one of our heroes putting down a coffee cup on a document, and it would've translated to gently caress YOUR MOTHERS WE WANT TO EAT YOUR BABIES
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Nov 15, 2016 00:35
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I really want one of these for my wall. (The plain version) So do we still have to use spoilers or
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Nov 15, 2016 01:13
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MisterBibs posted:If Arrival was a comedy, intergalactic war would've started from one of our heroes putting down a coffee cup on a document, and it would've translated to gently caress YOUR MOTHERS WE WANT TO EAT YOUR BABIES 
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Nov 15, 2016 01:23
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Also Steve Yun posted:Looking back on the movie, I think the aliens knew everything. The aliens seemed to understand English right away. When Louise wrote HUMAN, the aliens wrote their word for it immediately. They probably could have communicated with us in our own language, but the point of their visit was to teach us theirs. This is so true it hurts. strangemusic fucked around with this message at 01:35 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 01:33
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Nov 15, 2016 03:46
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lmaoooo
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Nov 15, 2016 03:48
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Okay help me polish my thoughts here. The heptapods refer to language as a weapon. The sanskrit word for war literally translates as a desire for more cows. Hannah asks Louise for a synonym for win-win, a transaction where all parties benefit. So it seems that if the point of war is to economically benefit yourself, communication is better at achieving the goals of war than war is, because everyone can benefit. Yes/no? Is this a reach?
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Nov 15, 2016 04:23
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Saw the movie today, and thought it was beautiful, but a few of the implications with regards to choice and causality didn't sit well with me. I see folks here for the most part enjoyed it, so hopefully someone can help me work these things out. First, to do with choice, I get what people said earlier about her choice to have a kid, even knowing how it would end. That's a choice that her foreknowledge makes more difficult, but not one that would necessarily be changed by that foreknowledge. I'm more confused by her choice to tell her husband about her daughter's fate. In a world bound by causality and uncertainty, that would be a hard choice. "Will this hurt him, us, his relationship with his daughter? I don't know how this will turn out, but I don't want to hide this from him. Maybe he'll understand." With that in mind you make your choice whether to tell him or not. In this semi-mystical world where a new perspective reveals the illusion of time and presents all of eternity as a memory, you reach a point where the bit of flesh your consciousness follows has to give information to your (presumably temporally bound) beloved husband. You know that saying these things will hurt him, and make him leave you, and perhaps irrecoverably gently caress with his relationship with his daughter, who already isn't going to have an especially long fulfilling life. You say those words anyway. Why? Was there nothing in that knowledge that would perhaps make her reconsider? Was her fate locked in as soon as she considered that future, or even before? If it was really a choice, if she really had some sort of agency, and she wanted that outcome, why did she bring it up then? Why not when she was older so her daughter could spend more happy time with her parents together, or sooner if the burden of keeping it from him was too much? Without being able to reconcile that point, I found it difficult to appreciate the emotional weight of the story. It left me with the impression that nothing mattered. There were some other bits I didn't understand that might have more mundane explanations: Did anyone actually figure out the alien language? It felt like Louise had some inkling, but then when she was on the clock she just used what foresight she had gained to read the book she would later write. So no one ever actually did the work of fully figuring it out. It's like, I've decided to spend me whole life building a time machine, and furthermore once I build it, I will deliver it to myself in ten seconds from now. [Time machine appears.] Boy that was an easy way to make a time machine. It's not logically inconsistent, but it's kind of unsatisfying. Why did the Chinese general give Louise his cell phone number years later? He "felt like he had to"? Is that some kind of fate? Are we supposing there is a non-causal force that affects your behavior even if you are unaware of it? I legit may have missed a detail here though, so I'm not assuming anything. And lastly, and perhaps most fundamentally... I know this was asked way back at the start of the thread, but I didn't understand the response so I have to ask again, how does learning a language let you see the future? I was totally on board with it changing your way of thinking, letting you make new connections and stuff in ways you wouldn't ordinarily... but it seems like this language actually gives us the ability to act on whole new classes of information. Or is the implication we've always been potentially aware of this stuff, we just haven't realized because of our linear language? If the answer to this one is a bit mystical, I'm okay with that. I'm not going to be a grump about something not being 100% materialist hard sci-fi, but I'd like a bit of clarity at least.
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Nov 15, 2016 04:27
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GrandpaPants posted:One visual motif that I noticed was a lot of back of the head shots, especially with the head centered on camera. Like, a lot of them. Anyone want to suggest a theory as to what they could mean? I kept thinking about it and the most I could come up with is some half assed possibility about the interaction with the language. There is a tribe in Africa whose spatial metaphor for time is that time is behind us, because we can see the past but cannot see the future. I think maybe it's something about blindness and being oriented wrong.
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Nov 15, 2016 04:30
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Arglebargle III posted:There is a tribe in Africa whose spatial metaphor for time is that time is behind us, because we can see the past but cannot see the future. This is what I thought of too, but because I read "Congo" as a kid and the super-intelligent ape wearing a PowerGlove in that book did that too.
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Nov 15, 2016 04:34
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I can't get into all of that, but the Chinese general didn't "feel compelled." He knew. By the time he met her, it was common knowledge that learning heptapod let you see through time. So he knew he had to give her his number and tell her what to say in order for her to have been able to call him and tell him what he told her to. In this version of time-travel, where closed causal loops are possible, it is not possible to change a future you've seen. Only to bring about its events. But this does not negate free will. Only that the results of your free will can be seen before you fully understand them. In your metaphor where you send a time machine back to yourself, you would then still need to learn how to construct a time machine in order to send it back. And you would. And you know you would. Because you already did it. If you tried to pull a gun out of your pocket and shoot yourself in the head to prevent it, something would stop you, and something would change your mind, because if it didn't, you never would've seen the time machine to begin with. And again, this does not mean you don't have free will. It just means you can see the results of your free will before you exercise it. But I've had this discussion so many times on this forum that I've learned that for a lot of people, closed-loop time travel just doesn't work for them. Many can't wrap their heads about there not being some unaltered "original" timeline where no time travel occurred, and many more get lost at the free will thing. It just doesn't work for a lot of people and that's fine. Myself, I'm fascinated by the idea.
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Nov 15, 2016 04:42
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Eiba posted:If the answer to this one is a bit mystical, I'm okay with that. I'm not going to be a grump about something not being 100% materialist hard sci-fi, but I'd like a bit of clarity at least. Our current understanding of time is pretty lovely. We know it exists and know how to measure it in arbitrary ways, but if you ask a room full of physicists "what is time?" you're likely to get a lot of excited talking and not a lot of clear answers. It seems plausible that there is no free will. Time seems to have a preferred direction, but it also seems to be one-dimensional. It could be that, for example, there is more than one time dimension (just like there are more than one space dimension) and we are bound to a one-dimensional time with a single order of events, preordained since the beginning of the universe. It seems equally plausible that the universe is exactly as random as it seems, and that quantum-scale indeterminacy rules so that not even a perfect knowledge of every particle in the universe could predict the next nanosecond. I dunno even from a really super hard science perspective it seems clear that general relativity doesn't work. Even if it's the best theory of the universe anyone has ever come up with and it works extremely well for medium and large stuff. It doesn't predict what we see in galaxy scale interaction and above, it predicted inflation but got the magnitude really wrong, and on small scales it just doesn't work. While our modern concept of spacetime is a powerful tool it seems clear that in its current formulation it does not describe the universe accurately enough to put limits on alien technology. Quantum mechanics likewise; until space can be shown to be quantized it will spit out garbage on the macro scale forever. tl;dr while advances in physics have been very exciting over the last 200 years we're still short of understanding some really basic things about our universe
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Nov 15, 2016 05:01
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Steve Yun posted:Okay help me polish my thoughts here. No. I think you're dropping a point or two between a desire for more and then sharing. The goal of War is to take away from someone or gain control of something that is usually a limited resource. If I simply communicate a desire to have something of yours and you give me some of it because you're friendly, that just means there's still the rest of it out there for the taking, especially once I use up what was given to me. Communication is the desire of the defender, not the aggressor. The aggressor will usually only enter into communication if the cost of war is higher than an arbitrary limit of theirs. Theoretical scientifically, I suppose, science for science's sake, you increase the knowledge by sharing with everybody.
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Nov 15, 2016 05:11
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All of human game theory is predicated on not knowing what the other players will do. I think with a holistic perspective on time the aliens have a very different concept of conflict than we do. The aliens may consider zero-sum games to be a purely theoretical concept.
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 05:20
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Steve Yun posted:Looking back on the movie, I think the aliens knew everything. Yes, Abbott and Costello think in heptapod, and subsequently have memories of the future. There is no urgency from them because they know how it all turns out. They are just waiting for one human to learn heptapod. How tall are the Heptapods? When separated by the glass, they seemed 12-15 feet tall, but then Lois Lane was floating in white fog Costello seemed like 75 feet tall. 
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Nov 15, 2016 06:51
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LividLiquid posted:But I've had this discussion so many times on this forum that I've learned that for a lot of people, closed-loop time travel just doesn't work for them. Many can't wrap their heads about there not being some unaltered "original" timeline where no time travel occurred, and many more get lost at the free will thing. It just doesn't work for a lot of people and that's fine. Myself, I'm fascinated by the idea. So if I get your point, what you're saying is that the only possible time loops are ones that wouldn't undercut themselves. Like if I'm a lazy kind of person who, if I had a time machine materialize in front of me, would just call it a day and have adventures in my time machine without building it... then for some reason it wouldn't happen? What if I was the type of person who would be fine cutting corners, but also happened to be motivated enough to build a time machine in the first place? Like, if time travel is possible what's to stop that? Or would it be the same as trying to kill myself in the past? It's a bit beyond the scope of this movie, but I'm kind of curious as to what you think about that. The Chinese general just being coy makes enough sense, but then I don't get why she was confused about it. "Wha...? I don't have your number?" Do you not remember calling it? That was a pretty memorable moment. It saved the world. And actually, while I'm on that, who or what figured out what the most perfect thing to say would be? The general's wife's dying words were perfect, but who chose them? Who knew they would work? The information that they would be effective seems to have been generated by a closed time loop. How does that work? Arglebargle III posted:tl;dr while advances in physics have been very exciting over the last 200 years we're still short of understanding some really basic things about our universe I'm not too worried about "free will" itself... though the story verges on being narratively unsatisfying depending on what it's actual take on it is. There could only be one inevitability, but as long as we don't know what it is, it's functionally the same as free will. Once we know what it is, it begins to matter if it's mutable or immutable. And if it's immutable... then it doesn't matter. There's nothing that the information adds to the decision making process. It can't be acted on. Or rather it could never not be acted on. I guess I still don't fully understand the concept of meaningful choices that have already been set in stone thanks to non-linear time that people were talking about earlier. Also, I would add, that the one pretty drat clear and kind of axiomatically certain thing about time, to my understanding, is that it is directional. It only goes one way, or at the very least it is utterly devoid of symmetry. Any direction you move in space is all the same, but time has a pretty heavy bias (if not absolute certainty). Or is there in fact some scientific doubt about that?
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Nov 15, 2016 08:07
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it's a story about giant space hands who give us a magical language
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Nov 15, 2016 08:19
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Magic Hate Ball posted:it's a story about giant space hands who give us a magical language Well, I mean, technically they're more like squids than hands.
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Nov 15, 2016 08:30
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Why does your dream movie have two of the most milquetoast, boring white leads in Hollywood OP?
Four Score fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Nov 15, 2016 |
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Nov 15, 2016 08:48
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Drifter posted:Well, I mean, technically they're more like squids than hands. hand squids with squid hands
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Nov 15, 2016 08:58
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Eiba posted:The Chinese general just being coy makes enough sense, but then I don't get why she was confused about it. "Wha...? I don't have your number?" Do you not remember calling it? That was a pretty memorable moment. It saved the world. During that scene it feels like she is behaving the opposite of how you'd think she would act. In the tent (present/past) she seems to be perfectly aware of what she is doing, what she is supposed to do. At the party (future) she seems confused on what is going on and is almost awaiting instructions. It is almost like her consciousness has been swapped around. I think it helps illustrate that she is finally aware of the effect of the language, because every previous glimpse into time seemed to end with her being confused while in the present/past.
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Nov 15, 2016 10:00
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