“None of this is actually happening. There is a man. At a typewriter. This is all his twisted imagination.”
I think that Arrival is sufficiently different than a shoot-em-up action movie (guy flick) or a period romantic drama (chick flick) that it’s pretty reductive to apply that sort of language to facets of this movie. But I get what you’re saying. Certainly movies about women’s relationships with each other are more likely to appeal to women, and movies about the military’s interactions with aliens are more likely to appeal to men.
The thing that confused me was that you said “Clearly from some of the comments here, though, the “male” science fiction fan finds…”
There were only a few posters who had commented at that point, and only one of them had a user name that implied a particular gender. So it seemed to me that you were drawing inferences from not much.
Chuckle. Fair enough. I have some of the habits expressed by Count Almasy in the movie version of the English Patient. He apologizes to a woman for some Mars/Venus communications misdemeanor by noting that his thinking habits come from his vocation as an archeologist, from “having to draw useable information from so little” (paraphrase).
Determinism vs. Free Will is the biggest one.
Smaller ideas:
How do you communicate with a completely alien culture? Especially one that doesn’t think the same way we do?
How do you handle knowing the future? How can that knowledge effect others around you?
In defense of the movie, the premise is NOT that she can see into the future. The premise is that there isn’t a “future.” The heptapods are not psychics who can predict the future; their perceive and experience time in a different fashion, whereby it flows in both directions to her. Louise begins to experience time such that all experiences in what she would previously have called “the future” seem to her to be as real and experienced as those in “the past,” and vice versa.
This isn’t a small, obscure point, it’s a central premise that is both explicitly stated and shown symbolically and in a number of clever little ways.
No, it’s not. It’s wildly different way to experience life, but Ted Chiang doesn’t suggest it robs her of joy, and he doesn’t even really say it takes away free will. It is a different form of perception, one where your understanding of the universe is teleological. Louise questions not her free will, but what free will is.
Interesting explanation, RickJay. This is one of the best threads I’ve started; good stuff.
I just finished the story. Louise does not make a decision to get married and have a child in the story, she more accepts the future. She seems to realize what she is doing in the movie more. Plus, her daughter’s death in the movie is more tragic.
This is one of the few movies I know better than the story.