"Arrival" full of emotion and speculation is definitely the best hard sci-fi movie in my mind in the past two decades. It can overwhelm "Interstellar", which also perfectly combines hard sci-fi content and characters' emotions, and "Prometheus", which proposes bold suspense on the origin of species. In the same way of speculating and exploring a sci-fi idea, the depth of sci-fi writers is different. In the recently released "Space Passenger", the screenwriter actually already has a wonderful idea worthy of a book, but compared with the depth of "Arrival", um, it is the in-depth comparison between film and television screenwriters and writers. (It’s not that screenwriting is underestimated, there are specializations in the art industry.) I have always believed that a good science fiction work is not just about imagining an alien world, imagining a grand scene or extreme situation. This belongs to the shallow level, such as Star Wars, such as some early works of Da Liu, etc. A real science fiction masterpiece is a subversion of our world, our society or our spiritual world. This kind of imagination is the true meaning of science fiction to human beings. Let some people who have the ability to think can jump out of the inherent cognition, whether it is about the world or our own, and think about assumptions from a new perspective. The meaning of this kind of science fiction works is like teaching three-dimensional us how to understand four-dimensional space. Such works, just like the saying in the film "language is a weapon and a tool", are full of power. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, Clark's Electric Sheep, Da Liu's Law of the Dark Forest and his imagination of changing the laws of physics are the places where their works go beyond ordinary science fiction. From creating spectacles, entering into speculation, reshaping your inherent cognition of things. Ted Jiang's "Story of Your Life" can be said to be a rather extreme representative of science fiction. In fact, there is almost no description of the big scene and the spectacle in the original work. The real core of a story is to reshape our entire way of thinking. Let's jump from a linear, causal way of thinking and language structure to imagine the heptapod's way of thinking that is diametrically opposed to ours, and then come up with a way of thinking that affects your perception of time. For human beings, there is no doubt that time flows forward like a river. How different ways of perceiving time affect our behavior and our life. This is "Story of Your Life" Open doors for us. And this is also the reason why such sci-fi works are proud of the world.
When it comes to the movie itself, this is a reminder that this is not a sci-fi blockbuster. Don't watch this movie with action scenes and special effects scenes. Don't look at it from the perspective of superman's girlfriend or eagle-eyed star chaser, it's a waste of your movie ticket money, it's unnecessary. As a movie full of affection, it is not suitable for watching with a group of friends and girlfriends. The film's original novel itself is a very personal work. Director New Valen's stern style and extremely prominent personal color are very suitable for adapting this novel. This film ignores some necessary big scenes, almost like a stylized independent film work, with a lot of hand-held, Impressive shots have the advantage of allowing the audience to get closer to the characters in the play, but the disadvantage is that for impatient people who want to watch blockbusters, it is estimated that they will leave the stage halfway through. Well, this is also a filter.
There are spoilers from here, please be careful! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
After reading the original work, I have always been worried about the videoization of this work, and of course I am looking forward to how Hollywood will do it. For "Story of Your Life", its play meat: a mother's memory (preview) of her daughter is actually easier to visualize. What is difficult is how to express the change of alien language to the female protagonist's way of thinking and time perception. At the same time, the original book has almost no third act in the sense of film and television, that is, the aliens just left, and what is left is the personal change of the heroine and the impact on her emotions, so I say this is very personal. story narrative. But if it is to be turned into a movie, it is necessary to supplement the original story, to answer the question of why the aliens came to earth, to build the third act required for a film and television, and this third act has to be related to the whole work. spirit of perfect unity. How to solve all this unconventionally at the height of the original? It can be said that the screenwriter handed over this answer sheet almost perfectly this time, and the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay is bound to be nominated.
There are a lot of detail shots added to the whole film. I refer to the foreshadowing shots used for film and television performance, such as the children’s paintings of parents and caged birds that appear several times. I don’t plan to analyze them one by one here, but they have a very important role. , is to visually become the hook of the two timelines, planting an impression in your mind.
The main thing I want to discuss about the adaptation is this third act. There is almost no third act in the original book, the aliens just left, and no one knows why they came to earth. But as a movie, especially in the first two scenes, there has been a lot of global tension, and it will definitely not work without an adaptation. But if you insist on adding an action scene or a climax, as I said in the review of "Space Passenger", it is a Hollywood cliché that is added for the sake of addition. If it cannot be unified with the spiritual core of the film, it will be forced to join. I think Arrival does it very cleverly, beyond imagination. The first is to answer the question of why the aliens came to earth. In fact, this question belongs to the question of how to answer it, and the original work adopts the method of avoidance. It doesn’t matter if the novel has the heroine’s emotional story in front. As readers, they will have a better perception of the heroine’s story without seeing the visual scene, so not explaining this issue will not have much impact . But as a movie, it can't be done. There was so much tension in the past, it is impossible not to give an answer. This is the difference between different artistic expressions. But how to answer this difficult question? In fact, the film is still blank, leaving room for imagination, but it is a genius to use the core of the work: nonlinear perception of time. Because heptapods perceive time non-linearly, they foresee the crisis of their own civilization after a thousand years, thereby helping the progress of human civilization. After a thousand years, the advanced human beings will help them in turn. As for what kind of civilizational crisis they encountered, there is no explanation at all, but such an answer perfectly answers the urgent questions raised by the military and the human world in the film, and at the same time is closely related to the core of the film. Even better, this answer perfectly corresponds to the secondary crisis of the work, which is the division of human society and the distrust between countries. The first layer is the human distrust of aliens, and the second layer is the country's distrust of foreign countries. The heroine used the time perception ability she got from the heptapod to reach a consensus with the Chinese, and it is clear that the Chinese general Shang also more or less recognized the non-linear time perception of the heptapod. Ability, only with the heroine. At that reception, General Shang did not come to see him in person because the heroine had called him before, but he had foreseen this meeting. Thus, a reconciliation between the different nations of mankind was achieved. This third act not only solves the main problem of the film, but also makes the core of the work: the way of thinking changes the perception of time, which is perfectly combined in the process of solving.
In addition, I have to say that this ability to foresee is definitely not the kind of people who complain. If you can see the future, you can't see lottery numbers and the like. First of all, don't lower the work to the market level. The significance of this work is to let you imagine a non-causal world, or a non-linear perception of time. It is a broadening of the way of cognition of the world. On the other hand, even predictions about the future are fragmentary and emotionally perceptive. Just like our memories, our memories are not like those Sherlock Holmes movies where you can travel through that past scene and retrieve a certain line of data from your newspaper. Our memories are more of a kind of emotional fragments, just like those paragraphs in this film, you can use the way of memory to imagine the scenes that foresee the future, and you will understand.
The last thing I want to say is the heart of this tragic story. The story is very sad, and the emotional questions it raises are equally speculative: If you knew the outcome of the tragedy, would you choose to go through the happy process? So the film begins with the famous OnTheNatureOfDaylight tones. After the montage at the beginning, I was actually a little dissatisfied with the adaptation, because it adapted the death of the heroine's daughter from an accident in climbing to an illness. I have always felt that a sudden accident has a greater impact on the characters. That feeling is like a long river suddenly cut off, and all the things we have experienced before are suddenly dissipated in that moment. When I was reading the novel, the impact was very big and very sentimental. But after watching the film, I still understand why the screenwriter made such an adaptation. The first is the writing of the third act, which shows the changes to the real predicament after foreseeing the future. From the point of view of the original work, in fact, this is not a causal relationship, and it is not a problem of egg succession. So in the original book, even if the heroine knew that her daughter would never be able to come back to her because she went to that mountain in the future, she could not change the future. This story is not about time travel. But it is difficult for ordinary audiences to understand this concept, let alone those who are prone to complain. So it is actually very ironic, in order to make it easier for the audience who can only understand the causal theory to understand, and not to cause complaints, the cause of her daughter's death was changed from an accident to an unavoidable disease, blocking the place that may cause controversy.
"The cause is the effect, the effect is the cause", but it is not fatalism, the story of your life is unfolded in front of you, you have made all the choices, you have seen all the results, you still made those choose. This is what we are used to because it is difficult for us to understand, think about it again.
One more thing, I didn't expect to see a completely uncut version on the big screen in China. In the film, China, the People's Liberation Army, and the General Shang have always appeared as villains and troublemakers, although the final theme of the film is Trust fusion all over the world, but it's really surprising to see this on the big screen.
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