In 10-15 years, hopefully we can just input this script as a prompt, and get a full film in the style of David Lynch.
The same thing happened with Society of the Snow: a technically beautiful movie with nothing to say other than being more “faithful” and using native actors. All that is appreciated but Alive was a flawed but much more exciting telling of the story.
Can you expand? I've read and watched, but don't recall anything similar. I watched the movie first, could be why.
Whereas the movie, the writing was a simpler circular design with slight filaments hanging off and no mention of the encapsulated message as a whole IIRC. The movie design reminded minded me of the Lucent Technologies logo [1] (worked for them a short while, back long ago).
I really liked the story and the movie but different media formats have different aims and constraints so it's hard to compare. I wish the movie industry would tackle more original content (like Arrival) rather than endless sequels.
In order to learn to write the aliens' script, the interpreter must learn what Douglas Adams called "defocussed temporal perception". To write the language you need to be able to see into the future. Learning the script teaches her to do this.
Seeing into the future she watches her own daughter die and there's nothing she can do to stop it.
The scriptwriters didn't understand any of this so they made the aliens spray-paint stencils on glass and inserted a terrible irrelevant subplot about stopping a war.
1. It's not a book. It's just a short story. It's only 16pp long or something.
2. The central point of the story is: brilliant linguist learns to write an alien script and it teaches her to see the future. That is the core plot in a sentence. The film loses that.
Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film: i.e., brain damaged into mindlessness, but still quite pretty.
It's like a version of Hamlet in which he lives happy ever after, though. It is missing the point in the most profound possible way.
It's funny though, I do feel a bit the same way about Dune. It's a Cliffs Notes of the book, and doesn't add anything new and thought provoking. Mindless but beautiful.
Still, I wouldn't say it missed the point. Just that it wasn't really necessary.
Anyway, free to disagree.
I did say:
>> Don't get me wrong: I liked the film, as a modern SF film
I agree about Dune. If you know the book, it's a very pretty retelling. If you don't, it's a sort of weird summary with no signs of why so many people love it so much.
And yet, when I think about Dune 2021, I feel like it lacks a lot of interesting context and explanation from the novel. But I know plenty of people who didn't read it and loved the film. I suspect DV takes more care to lay out the important details than I'm able to perceive knowing the book.
It's a 16pp short story. Read it, then reply. It takes about 15min if you're a slow reader!
Watched Arrival then read it, and loved the movie.
Read Dune and then watched it. Underwhelmed by the film.
If anyone is interested in the ridiculous amount of potential that Villeneuve threw away by becoming Hollywood’s generic sci-fi director, watch Incendies.
I'm not a huge fan of Arrival but I would not have said it's empty and soulless. I do think it's a good movie though.
The short story is essentially a story about grief using time travel as a metaphor but not actually having time travel in it. The movie has the character changing the past in a critical moment which kind of undermines the whole soul of the story imo.
To be clear, i still think arrival is a great movie, just rather different from the source material in terms of meaning and "soul"
One of the few uses of ever-improving "AI" bot generation of characters, faces, blending images, etc. I can imagine is the ability for fans to remix films and TV.
For example...
* to edit together the original BBC TV Hitch hikers' Guide to the Galaxy with the better SFX of the otherwise poor film.
* to create extra episodes or installments of beloved serials where the text exists but the actors are dead
* Or, in this instance, to mix Lynch's visuals and characters with Villeneuve's less scenery-chewing version which sticks closer to the text.
One could even imagine editing Villeneuve's Arrival to stick closer to the text of Ted Chiang's sublime "the Story of your Life", where the way the aliens write is pivotal to the story but the screenwriters didn't understand.