re: "Arrival" - did I miss something or was that just a chick flic?

Was a very deep movie that related to our current situation in the world. Good message

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movie about "visitors" from wherever is not science fiction.

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The movie isn't about the "visitors" though. It's about Amy Adams' character. It is about her development.

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And international relations theory

The whole bit on language was very intriguing to me

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Yes, the linguistic and communication aspect had me very interested throughout. Anyone who has interacted with people from different regions of the world I'm sure found this subject matter intriguing.

I loved it

Independence Day is probably more your speed

Seriously overrated.

I thought it was a great movie.

I have no idea why people are saying it not Sci-Fiction?

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Yeah, I get all of that, but you still have cause and effect.

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But the cause and effect are not linearly related. That's the point.

******Spoilers******

That's why they made a point of having the Deus ex machina with her going to speak to the Chinese general and him telling her the answer to stopping global war.

End spoilers.

There's cause and effect, but it isn't the same linear relation you think of because you're thinking of time as a river, not a circle.

That this film is not getting the love it deserves is not shocking. It is stellar filmmaking that turns a lot of people off.


SPOILERS


The plot structure in itself is incredibly well done. Like Fight Club or, perhaps more apropos, Memento, the story unfolds non-linearly with the audience seeing glimpses of time that only afterward come into context.

The story can be difficult to overcome. It's about language. And more than that, it's about language as a weapon/tool for manipulating reality (which, in truth, is precisely what language is, the movie just takes it to an illustrative extreme). But ultimately, this is unappealing to the large mass of America. Moreover, most people (at least a goodly portion of the people in this thread) think it's stupid that language can cause you perceive reality differently. In truth, language is precisely that powerful. It forms and firms our perception of the world around us and the way things are ordered and structured. Cause and effect are the intellectual equivalent of subject verb agreement.

So it is, at heart, an intellectual story, but it is also (and this is why it is such damn good filmmaking) a story of a woman who experiences love and loss. It is as emotionally distressing that she appears to have lost a child in the first fifteen minutes of the movie as it is to learn that she experiences that moment at any given moment in time at the end of the movie because she no longer perceives time linearly. She experiences time all at once. She can see her child die at any moment, but chooses that experience and the experience of divorce because she wants to live fully, irrespective of her perception of reality. The film is as moving as it is intellectually stimulating.

Add to that Johann Johannson's score and Villeneuve's utter command of the camera and the pace and set, and you have a movie that is better than Interstellar in what it actually achieves, if not in what it sets out to do.


END SPOILERS



I didn't see all the best film nominees, but it was better than both Moonlight (which was great) and Manchester By the Sea (which was also amazing).

I weep for those who don't see this movie for what it is: a masterwork of a genius who is steadily becoming one of the best directors currently working.

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It was just some chick with what we thought were flashbacks to help save the world.

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If this is how you would sum it up, you definitely missed something

It sucked