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psocopteraOverall very pleased with this adaptation! The film team obviously understood the story and added movie-appropriate spectacle/drama/closure in mostly satisfying ways. More about which behind this cut.
- I'm not sure when the last time we got a serious first-contact movie even was. I thought they did a great job with the fear/awe balance, the enormity of it; they honestly managed to hit some of the same resonance for me as, like, the organ scene in Close Encounters, which is pretty much the gold standard. (I guess that's somewhat less fear and more delight, by that point, but it's still got the holy shit wow. The pseudopod scene in Abyss is goofier and always makes me think about the special effects instead of what it means in-story. "I'm okay to go" is probably the other one.)
- Can't begrudge them either "in 3000 years humans help heptapods" or "I will now give you the information you had that you used to convince me to get things to the point where I will give you this information", like, you've got nonlinear time, yeah let's integrate that into the plot at multiple levels. I don't think it breaks the story for alien or human actions to have motivations even if they're also in fact just the things that happen.
- Do begrudge the switch from her daughter dying at 25 in a rock-climbing accident to dying in her teens from cancer. I think it makes her choice ("choice") to have a child feel different, that there's now this huge element of suffering experienced by the child that there wasn't before? And also, with the motif of exposure/contamination throughout the movie, there's this implication that the kid's death is perhaps also her fault, from her choice to risk exposure? I don't know, it's probably an even harder-hitting story this way, my writer brain is like "OF COURSE THEY SHOULD GO FOR THE KILL" but my audience brain could have done without it, thanks.
- I had a hell of a time understanding a lot of the dialogue due to constant soundtrack noise (like, in the beginning, they're going to go recruit someone else, and there's something about her background? Farsi? couldn't catch most of that. And then she's like "ask about the Sanskrit word for war", and then they come back in a helicopter and recruit her after all, and I basically could not understand anything anyone said while the helicopter was around, but probably somebody in there explains why they came back to her instead of this other person? And she's got some dialogue with the physicist dude later that I basically couldn't make out either, which, like, did we need that for relationship development? hope not! And a few other points). Anyways, this was in one sense very appropriate for a movie about how much work it takes to understand each other and contributed to the overall feeling of struggling to connect, and in another sense it's like someone went to the trouble of writing that dialogue, maybe I would have gotten something out of hearing it?
- I'm not sure when the last time we got a serious first-contact movie even was. I thought they did a great job with the fear/awe balance, the enormity of it; they honestly managed to hit some of the same resonance for me as, like, the organ scene in Close Encounters, which is pretty much the gold standard. (I guess that's somewhat less fear and more delight, by that point, but it's still got the holy shit wow. The pseudopod scene in Abyss is goofier and always makes me think about the special effects instead of what it means in-story. "I'm okay to go" is probably the other one.)
- Can't begrudge them either "in 3000 years humans help heptapods" or "I will now give you the information you had that you used to convince me to get things to the point where I will give you this information", like, you've got nonlinear time, yeah let's integrate that into the plot at multiple levels. I don't think it breaks the story for alien or human actions to have motivations even if they're also in fact just the things that happen.
- Do begrudge the switch from her daughter dying at 25 in a rock-climbing accident to dying in her teens from cancer. I think it makes her choice ("choice") to have a child feel different, that there's now this huge element of suffering experienced by the child that there wasn't before? And also, with the motif of exposure/contamination throughout the movie, there's this implication that the kid's death is perhaps also her fault, from her choice to risk exposure? I don't know, it's probably an even harder-hitting story this way, my writer brain is like "OF COURSE THEY SHOULD GO FOR THE KILL" but my audience brain could have done without it, thanks.
- I had a hell of a time understanding a lot of the dialogue due to constant soundtrack noise (like, in the beginning, they're going to go recruit someone else, and there's something about her background? Farsi? couldn't catch most of that. And then she's like "ask about the Sanskrit word for war", and then they come back in a helicopter and recruit her after all, and I basically could not understand anything anyone said while the helicopter was around, but probably somebody in there explains why they came back to her instead of this other person? And she's got some dialogue with the physicist dude later that I basically couldn't make out either, which, like, did we need that for relationship development? hope not! And a few other points). Anyways, this was in one sense very appropriate for a movie about how much work it takes to understand each other and contributed to the overall feeling of struggling to connect, and in another sense it's like someone went to the trouble of writing that dialogue, maybe I would have gotten something out of hearing it?
